Human Sacrifice: Remembering Aaron Bushnell

Lest we forget. On 25 February last year Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year-old active duty US serviceman, self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. His last words on this Earth, as the fire consumed him, were: “Free Palestine!”

Earlier that day, Aaron posed on X what I am sure will become a historic question re-posed for generations to come:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

I will never forget the photos of the smiling, obviously sweet young man I looked at, in contrast to the same young man, in the combat dress of a US serviceman, dousing himself in fuel and setting himself ablaze. How do I contrast that level of commitment with the yawning indifference to genocide I have witnessed so often over the course of the past 16 months? How do I contrast that commitment with politicians calling for more defence force funding without calling for a rupture in our military engagement with Israel or the total diplomatic and economic isolation of the racist, genocidal State of Israel?

When I was a child, 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz became the first person to self-immolate in the US to protest America’s crimes against the Vietnamese people. She appealed to people to “awake”. As she set herself on fire she said she was protesting “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.” We should remember Alice Herz – and her message.

As he calmly walked up to the perimeter fence of the Israeli Embassy one year ago, Aaron Bushnell said:

“I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine."

Human sacrifice, the suicidal kind, has been around for a long time. You don’t have to approve of it to be deeply moved by the altruism it represents. Given the chance, I would have done everything in my power to deflect Aaron from the course of action he chose.

I commend groups like CodePink in the US who are holding vigils to honour Aaron. CodePink is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism, led by human rights activists including Medea Benjamin.

“Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice for peace,” CodePink told me in reply to a request for comment. “His final act against our forced complicity in genocide serves as a poignant reminder of the collective trauma being inflicted on humanity each day we allow this genocide to continue. Make no mistake, the blood of Aaron Bushnell is on the hands of U.S. elected officials who fund and support the genocide in Gaza. Let us honor Aaron Bushnell's memory as a catalyst for peace and justice.”

This weekend I participated in the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa conference in Wellington which was addressed by a variety of speakers. Keynote addresses included the Palestinian author Samah Sabawi (who just released Cactus Pear For My Beloved - a Family Story from Gaza, Penguin). She told us, “The popular chant in protests ‘We are all Palestinians!’ is more true than most people realise. All of us are changed by the genocide because Israel has lowered our expectations, normalised in our culture behaviour that is criminal.”

The veteran antiracism campaigner John Minto reminded us that we are not here to bear witness to genocide but to stop it.

None of us should feel we have to make the kind of sacrifice that Aaron Bushnell made but all of us need to do that little bit more - if nothing else, than to save our own humanity from vanishing into the sea of indifference that Western culture is drowning in.

On the wall of my office is a photo of my grandfather, Dermot O’Brien. My family is from Cork and members of it were active in the struggle to drive the British out of Ireland. My grandfather suffered destruction of his home, imprisonment, years on the run, a traumatised family, and other hardships which drove him to an early grave. But his comrade in the struggle, Terence MacSwiney, paid a greater price. It was not a match or lighter fuel that killed him but his hunger strike. Terence MacSwiney was the Lord Mayor of Cork, and like Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, like Aaron Bushnell, like Alice Herz and like so many Palestinian people, he just could no longer tolerate the injustice being inflicted by the powerful of this world. He died in a prison in England in 1920. At the end he said:

“It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

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