The Ultimate Protest

Self-Destruction as an Act of Nonviolence in a Violent World

I apologize to my readers for the above image, but on February 25, 2024, a U.S. airman died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.  “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, on active duty at the San Antonio-Lackland base in Texas since 2020, said in a video. “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 colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”

Self-immolation is an ancient form of protest better known to non-Western cultures, where desperation reaches such levels that one must engage in an act of ultimate self-sacrifice.  It is considered a selfless act, often speaking on behalf of a community that is voiceless and oppressed and feels helpless to change anything.

It was practiced in Tunisia in 2011, when a street vendor self-immolated in a protest against political repression, which led to the Arab Spring.  In 2009, a Tibetan monk self-immolated in protest against Chinese rule, which sparked mass protests across Western China.  One of the best-known acts of self-immolation was conducted in 1963 by Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức during the Vietnam War, in protest against the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.  Shortly thereafter, a Quaker named Norman Morrison set himself on fire outside the Pentagon in protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

More recently and rather astonishingly, climate activists have used the method in urgent protest against global warming.  A climate scientist friend of one of the activists stated on Twitter: “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to [the] climate crisis.”

And Bushnell would not be the first to self-immolate in urgent protest against the massacre of the Palestinians.  In December 2023, another unidentified person self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia.

The extreme, urgent need expressed in the drastic act of self-immolation speaks to a very uncomfortable fact: that what lies ahead for Palestine, as well as for Israel, can only be ominous, should we continue in our current course.  When tragedies such as October 7 or September 11 strike, as is well-known in terrorism scholarship, the worst thing we can do is to legitimize the work of a group of gangsters by returning their act of terrorism, or committing even worse.  The long, deliberate, and grotesque violence against the people of Gaza and the complicity and lack of response on the part of the West, especially after an International Court of Justice ruling, will ultimately be what sinks into the world’s consciousness—not the initial insult.

Human Rights Watch reported:

Citing warnings about “catastrophic conditions” in Gaza, the court ordered Israel on January 26, 2024, to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid.”

One month later,… Israel continues to obstruct the provision of basic services and the entry and distribution within Gaza of fuel and lifesaving aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war….

“The Israeli government … has simply ignored the court’s ruling, and in some ways even intensified its repression, including further blocking lifesaving aid,” [said the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.]

According to data published by OCHA and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the daily average number of trucks entering Gaza with food, aid, and medicine dropped by more than a third in the weeks following the ICJ ruling….

In late December, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a multi-partner initiative that regularly publishes information on the scale and severity of food insecurity and malnutrition globally, concluded that over 90 percent of Gaza’s population is at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse….  “This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country,” the group said.

On February 19, The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that 90 percent of children under age 2 and 95 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty, [and] all 1.1 million children in Gaza facing starvation.”

[Israel blatantly disregarded] measures “to protect the rights claimed by South Africa that the Court has found to be plausible,” including “the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.”

As many know, I am not politically partisan.  The arguments and challenges at the political level do not make sense to me, as my concerns as a physician are more basic: of life or death, of health or disease, and of thriving or diminishing.  A proclivity for catastrophic destruction of life, no matter the excuse, and indifference to this destruction is how we have arrived at our “Death Spiral.”  It is a phenomenon I have also described as our “collective suicidal tendency” in my textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.

This is why, like the climate activists or those protesting extreme oppression, a military man close to the situation saw no choice for himself than an act of extreme self-sacrifice, with the hope of saving humankind.

From my perspective, the blatant disregard for the rule of law is part and parcel of unfitness for a position of power.  It is not difficult to decipher that the leadership of Israel is using Hamas as an excuse to carry out its long-desired destruction of Gaza and not the other way around.  This is no different than the U.S. government exploiting the World Trade Center attack to carry out its Project for the New American Century, a plan to expand “American global leadership” that would go as far as to fabricate fictitious “weapons of mass destruction” in order to invade Iraq.  As we now know, 8 trillion dollars and more than 900,000 deaths (without counting the more than 30,000 suicides by U.S. military veterans) later, we can see that nothing has so diminished American stature in the world than such foolhardy ventures.  When unfit “leaders”, be they domestic or foreign, exploit a population’s grievances and ride on its weaknesses to raise themselves to power, we should focus on stopping them, not supporting them.