Image from a vigil for Aaron Bushnell at the Israeli Embassy, Washington DC, 26 February, by Elvert Barnes
Level best: Tony D’Souza remembers Aaron Bushnell
‘I have been haunted by these events.’
Aaron Bushnell was a normal person like you and me – until he wasn’t. He then became the best in all of us.
February 25 was a bright Sunday in Washington DC. The parks were packed with the colourful promise of spring. Aaron put on military fatigues and went into the city. When he reached the Israeli embassy, he placed his phone on the ground to livestream what was about to take place. He walked towards the embassy and said: ‘I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am 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.’
Aaron then walked over to the iron security gate and stood in front of it. He doused himself with a clear liquid from a large water bottle. He fumbled with a cigarette lighter. And then he burst into flames.
He shouted ‘Free Palestine!’ a few times as the flames took hold. A Secret Service officer approached, and, aiming a gun at him, shouted at him to get on the ground. He needn’t have bothered. Aaron collapsed moments later. A police officer yelled ‘I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!’
Earlier that morning, Aaron had sent a message to media outlets: ‘Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.’ A few hours later, he was pronounced dead. He was twenty-five years old.
I have been haunted by these events. What can drive a young man, fit and healthy, to set himself on fire like that? Then I look at the TV and see the scenes we have all been watching for months. Buildings levelled to the ground, people buried underneath. An old man, hobbling through the rubble away from a hospital that has been bombed. And the children – scorched into my memory – dying of starvation because somebody decided they should not receive enough food to remain alive.
Most of all, I remember a doctor in Gaza, a middle-aged UN doctor, with no political affiliation, speaking about a girl in his care. She was six years old, with burns to her face so severe that the bones of her skull were exposed. He said he could not save her. He said she would be in extreme agony until she died because he had no drugs to give her.
Before his self-immolation, Aaron posted a message on Facebook. It said: ‘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.’
