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aaron bushnell
A Mourner's Prayer for Gaza
I rage. I grieve. But my grief is nothing next to those who find their spouses or their children wrapped in bloody shrouds and left among the dead.
Dec 28, 2024
Strange now to think of you while I read the words of a Jewish poet long gone on his boat of metaphors and flowers for the constant beat of time and all it brings forth. I think of you and how once you flourished there beside the sea despite the ever-tightening constraints placed upon you by the hateful gods of Zion. They tried to make you yield to oppression. They took away your freedom. They took away your land, parcel by parcel. They torched your olive trees, burned your crops, bulldozed your homes, sexually assaulted your men and women, killed your children, invaded your towns and villages, while the world looked on and looked away and excused crimes against you, your wanton destruction as the necessary acts of a persecuted people fighting back against the terrorists in their midst—you, the people of Gaza.
They said your children are destined to become terrorists, so even newborns are legitimate targets. So too are the mothers who have brought them into the world and will turn them into killers and haters of Israeli Jews, decreed the gods of Zion. But you will never be gone no matter how many martyrs they make, no matter how many loved ones they take from you while their people cheer the killing, salute the killers, treat them as heroes, bring their children to watch you dying, teach them to see you as vermin, animals, sub-humans not worth a single shekel of mercy. There are days when I can understand how Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force servicemember, could light himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. The genocide was more than he could bear. And his fiery exit from our world was an expression of his principled opposition to this genocide.
Who can doubt his death by self-immolation was also a cry from the heart for the suffering of your people, Gaza. The flames that engulfed Aaron are the same flames rising among families in Gaza, families sheltering in tents or huddling in whatever homes have not yet been bombed, shelled, hit with a Hellfire missile. Like Aaron, like so many others, I grieve. Am filled with rage for what could only happen with the full approval and backing of my own government, a willing accomplice to genocide.
I can imagine that within their suffering, there must be a much greater force, one that draws its power from the land and the culture that has shaped them. And it is this force, this fire that must not be extinguished for it is the thing that gives hope to marginalized, dispossessed people.
While an entire people is being inexorably exterminated, I go about my life feeling powerless to make any significant difference in the lives of Palestinians stripped of dignity, herded into enclaves where the killers can more easily and comfortably complete their tasks with no limit on the amount of suffering they can inflict. I can rail against the murderers and their overlords and those who cheer them on from Washington to Tel Aviv. But what good does railing do when so many are starving, bleeding out on hospital floors, caught in the gunsights of snipers and quadcopter drones, torn to pieces or incinerated in the flames from a missile attack while lying asleep in some thin tissue of a tent.
It is the children who weigh most heavily on my heart. Your children, Gaza. Not even their tender, untested lives are safe from the bullet's wrath, the bomb's fiery breath, the hatred that pours from the very souls of those people we claim are only defending themselves. Children. Like the children I see every day in the town where I live. I watch them in the local bakery whooping with delight at displays of beautifully crafted pastries. Some of them come straight from their dancing class still dressed in slippers and tights and skirts trimmed with sparkling costume jewels. And the parents, credit cards at the ready, are quick to indulge their children's sweetest tooth.
There are almost no bakeries left in your towns and villages, Gaza, where children can pick out their favorite sweet or pastry and hold it in their hands as the children do here knowing after it's gone, there will always be another. Those bakeries that have not been destroyed have had to close their doors because of flour and fuel shortages caused by Israel's blockade. In the north, there was one bakery where families could find bread. And then the Israelis bombed the warehouse where the flour was kept. In March, they gunned down men and women waiting for a convoy of trucks to deliver priceless bags of flour and other forms of aid. How can I not think of you, Gaza, each time I cut into a loaf of bread or lift a sweet roll to my lips. I see your children holding out empty bowls and pots as they clamor around a charity kitchen and push for a helping of the day's fare. But the day may come when there will no more such kitchens and no more cauldrons of soup or vegetable stew. Already a famine is spreading from one end of your land to the other, and starvation, the weapon of choice by Zion's holy warriors, may very well "finish the job." And should that happen, clean-up crews from the Promised Land will scrub the stones till no trace of blood remains. Tons of rubble will give rise to lofty towers and luxury apartments. On holidays, settler families will take their kids down to the sea and let them scour the beach for trinkets—a doll, a bracelet, a shiny ring. Things from a time when other children, long gone from Gaza, played in the waves and flew their kites on ocean breezes as signs of their presence and the angels who loved them. While the ghosts of all the martyrs, scooped from their graves, will haunt the wind with a long lament for the life they lost when the killers came.
Have I arrived at the place where Aaron Bushnell came to, the place where he knew he could no longer accept the deliberate immolation of families by America's closest ally and the refusal of the world's greatest power to lift a finger in defense of Palestinian life? No. I walk on, yet ashamed to be a citizen of this place, my country. As I was ashamed at 25 and traveling overseas with a freshly printed passport while my country was at war in Vietnam, a war the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 found met the definition of genocide. And again, 25 years later, in Iraq's public hospitals, the same shame followed me as I visited the pediatric wards. The wards were strangely, unnaturally silent. Mothers and grandmothers could do nothing but hold the hands of their loved ones or wipe their brows with a damp cloth because no medicine would be coming, and it was only a matter of time before the children would all be dead. That time, in Iraq, it wasn't Israel withholding aid but America, and as in Gaza, it was the young, the elderly, the sick, the poor who were the first to suffer and to die.
I walk on, knowing there is no justification for what Israel has done, is doing to your children, Gaza. From afar, I see men searching for survivors of another attack. One of the men finds a child by a pile of rubble. As he lifts her up, her arms collapse at her side. Her head falls back. Her eyes, once glistening with life and the light of childhood, stare up at the heavens where no gods reside and the only inhabitants are stone-cold killers throwing down whatever will deprive your people, Gaza, of the will to live... of life itself.
So, yes, I rage. I grieve. But my grief is nothing next to those who find their spouses or their children wrapped in bloody shrouds and left among the dead. My grief is nothing beside the mother whose child is withering away, his body a mere outline of bones, his heart a tattered flag soon to be set free, his arms too weak to even lift his voice beyond a whispered cry. But she has no food to give him. It has all been taken away as part of a glorious plan to which Yahweh has given His seal of approval, or so the story has been told and the generals of Zion agree. What would I do if I were sheltering in a school among dozens of families hoping to survive another night under relentless bombardment? And should the school be hit, and men, women, and children ripped apart, decapitated, how then would I grieve in the midst of this carnage? For that matter, if the people I most dearly love were among the dead in whatever is left of this shelter, would I have the strength to carry on or would my grief, like a bird of prey, sink its talons into me and not let go till it drops me into a pit of my own oblivion?
Here, in this sun-filled room, I have no fear of winter. No matter how cold it gets, I can simply adjust the thermostat in my home or put another blanket on the bed. But for you, Gaza, there are no thermostats and no cozy, indoor gatherings of families and friends, sharing glasses of steaming hot tea and slices of crunchy, sugary knafeh. Ninety percent of your people are displaced and facing another winter of harsh rains and falling temperatures without adequate shelter, warm blankets, sources of heat, and enough food to prevent malnutrition. Families in tent encampments along the coast have no defense against rising tides that can flood the tents and wash away clothing and bedding, and even pull little children out to sea. No matter how immiserated the people of Gaza become, no matter how violently they shiver night after winter night in leaky, patched up tents, their suffering is never too much for the armed forces of Zion. The bombs continue to fall, the missiles continue to find their mark, and extended families continue to be blown apart in the name of fighting Hamas—that elusive, shape-shifting entity whose command centers can magically assume the form of a school or hospital, and just as easily shape shift into an outdoor market or apartment building where extended families may be sheltering.
I saw footage of a field trip in which students came to the Israeli town of Sderot to "watch the genocide" from an observation deck. Using coin-operated binoculars, the students searched for signs of the suffering taking place in northern Gaza in which thousands of Palestinians are trapped and being deliberately starved to death. But the horror wasn't visible, and the students came away disappointed. They would need a different set of eyes to see what you're going through, Gaza. And even then, they might not understand or be moved.
Fourteen months of war have left behind an estimated 46 million tons of rubble. That much can be seen with the naked eye. What can't be seen are the estimated 10,000 victims—from the very young to the very old—buried under concrete slabs, twisted metal rods, tin roofs, asbestos, and other contaminants. The amount of debris is so great, if it could be bulldozed into one enormous heap, there would be enough material to fill Egypt's largest pyramid 11 times. The bodies of the men, women, and children entombed within that ravaged land may never be recovered or given a proper burial.
To paraphrase a line from the poet Wallace Stevens, there is the rubble we can see and the rubble we can't. I am many, many times removed from the extreme suffering your people face each day of their lives, Gaza. I can only imagine that in their hearts, that other kind of rubble exists—a great expanse of smoldering fires, heaps of shattered dreams, jagged shards of trauma and loss, bloody pieces of a life that once was whole. And no place safe to go, not even in the furthest depths of one's very soul. There are no machines that can clear away this sort of rubble or convert it into new, life-giving, life-supportive structures where hopes and aspirations can once again take root and flourish. But there is compassion and mercy, the promise of peace and the path to restorative justice.
Should a time ever come when Netanyahu, his generals, and his accomplices in Berlin and Washington D.C. are called to account for their crimes, a god worthy of the name would need to look very deeply into the hearts of those who have destroyed Gaza. Would she find within her otherworldly being the capacity to forgive the Israeli soldiers who murdered children in cold blood, stormed the hospitals, ordered the evacuation of patients, including those who could barely walk or were desperately ill? Would she forgive the pilots flying drones or actual aircraft who deliberately bombed civilian targets, whether a school, a hospital, even tents sheltering families who had nowhere else to go but a designated "safe zone"—in effect, a kill zone? Would she forgive the military masterminds who drew up the battle plans, the members of the Knesset who sanctioned genocide and called it self-defense? Would she forgive Joe Biden and other Western leaders who continued to arm Israel even as it committed war crimes and crimes against humanity? And what of the Israeli citizens for whom the daily massacres of your people, Gaza, were occasions to celebrate, to rejoice in the power and glory of the IDF and the blessed patrimony handed down from God to the chosen people, according to the Torah and other sacred Jewish texts?
I raise these questions but have no answer. Nor can I proclaim the greatness of God as I would if I were a religious Jew reciting the Kaddish for someone who has died. I can, however, proclaim the greatness of the Palestinian people, their strong ties to the land of their ancestors, and their refusal to submit to occupation and oppression. I praise the families of Gaza who have endured hunger, illness, displacement, trauma, and the cruelty of Israel's assault that spares no one, not even the newborn child, or the old man or woman forced to evacuate whatever shelter has become their home. I cannot even begin to fathom the depth of the suffering of these families or the reserves of courage and faith that must sustain them. But I can imagine that within their suffering, there must be a much greater force, one that draws its power from the land and the culture that has shaped them. And it is this force, this fire that must not be extinguished for it is the thing that gives hope to marginalized, dispossessed people.
I praise the many Palestinian doctors, nurses, medics, first responders who risk their lives every day that others may live. I praise the teachers in Gaza who continue to set up makeshift classrooms so children can continue their education even while schools have been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military. I praise the Palestinian journalists who do not let the murder of their colleagues keep them from reporting the truth about Israel's reign of terror. I praise Fadel Nabhani, a young man in Gaza. Besides caring for his family, he is doing all he can to provide food for cats and other animals that would otherwise die from hunger. Fadel also tries to take care of sick cats even though medicine, like food, is increasingly unavailable.
I praise Luay and Najah, adult siblings who are lifelong farmers. Originally from north Gaza, they have been displaced four times with their respective families. One day, while searching for firewood in the southern city of Rafah, it occurred to Najah that she and her brother could continue doing what had always given their lives purpose and meaning—farming. With seeds they had brought with them from Beit Lahiya in the north, they planted radishes, wild garlic, Swiss chard, beans, tomatoes, and herbs, including mint and thyme. Najah has said that each time she places a seed in the soil she prays to God to feed their families and also the birds. Despite the constant threat from Israeli missiles, their hard work yielded an abundant harvest—enough to sustain themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors. That mattered more to them than selling their crop in the market.
The fourth time they were displaced, Najah, Luay, and their families ended up living in tents on barren land mostly consisting of sand. They could have given up and relied on whatever food supplies made it through the Israeli checkpoints. Instead, they got to work, reciting a prayer for each seed they planted. Once again, their devotion to the land, their love of farming, and their desire to provide for as many people as they could... bore fruit.
This too exemplifies the spirit of resistance that is up against the tanks, bombs, missiles, and bottomless cruelty of the Israeli state, its violation of international human rights law, and its ongoing program of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I stand with those who recognize this gross disparity, support the right of Palestinians to resist the annexation of their land and the destruction of their society, and oppose the U.S. role in arming the perpetrator of genocide.
Amen.
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'We Are All Culpable': Matt Nelson Self-Immolates to Protest Israel's Gaza Onslaught
In a video, Nelson said he would set himself ablaze "to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians" and "to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza."
Sep 13, 2024
For the third time since Israel launched a war on Gaza for which it is currently on trial for genocide at the World Court, a person in the United States has set themself on fire to protest Israel's killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians and U.S. complicity in the slaughter.
In an incident all but completely ignored by the U.S. corporate media, a man identified as Matt Nelson set himself alight near the Israeli Consulate in Boston at around 8:15 pm local time on Wednesday, September 11.
"My name is Matt Nelson and I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest," he said in a video first uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. "We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza."
"We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care," Nelson continued. "The protest I'm about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the [International Criminal Court] indictment of [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government."
"A democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interests of the wealthy," he added. "Take the power back. Free Palestine."
According to NBC Boston, first responders confirmed a man suffered serious burn injuries. Nelson's current condition has not been reported.
NBC Boston and other local media took flak from critics on social media, who noted that the outlets chose to report the incident's location as "outside the Four Seasons Hotel" instead of by the Israeli Consulate.
Nelson is the third person known to have self-immolated in Gaza-related protests in the United States since October.
On December 1, a woman—whose identity remains unknown—carrying a Palestinian flag was hospitalized in critical condition after setting herself alight outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. Police called it an "act of extreme political protest." Israeli Consul-General Anat Sultan-Dadon called it an act of "hate and incitement toward Israel."
Then, in an incident that gained worldwide attention, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty U.S. airman, doused himself in an unknown accelerant, donned his service cap, and set himself ablaze in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25.
Bushnell repeatedly screamed "Free Palestine" as he burned. Secret Service officers quickly rushed to the scene, with at least one of them drawing his pistol and pointing it at the burning man while ordering him to "get on the ground, you fucker."
As he screamed and writhed in agony, Bushnell managed one final, garbled, yet unmistakable "free Palestine" as his body was engulfed in flames. He died later that day.
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The Response to Aaron Bushnell and Campus Gaza Protests Misses the Signal for the Noise
Arguments over language and tactics are often a way to avoid arguments we’d prefer not to have, even if working through those very arguments could produce the resolutions we want to reach.
Jul 17, 2024
It began with Aaron Bushnell and a visceral response of mine: Why would anyone do such a thing?
Bushnell was the 25-year-old active-duty airman who set himself ablaze on February 25 in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest that country’s brutal war in Gaza. The first question was tough enough, but his dramatic and deadly action also brought to mind other questions that have occupied my thinking, research, and writing in these last several years: What spurs someone to such an unyielding, ultimate commitment to a cause? What kind of political action is actually effective?
When the campus protests over the bloodbath in Gaza exploded shortly after Bushnell’s act, those questions came to seem even more pressing to me.
When a dissident’s striking (even, in Bushnell’s case, ultimate) political act is reduced to a set of personal maladies, his or her message can be all too easily massaged away.
And not only was I not alone in my interest in Bushnell’s act, he wasn’t even the first American to self-immolate over the fate of the Palestinians. Last December, an unidentified woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, apparently in a similar protest. She survived, just barely. (In April, a man who self-immolated across from the courthouse in Manhattan where Donald Trump was on trial for illegally trying to influence the 2016 election seemed aggrieved about other things.)
Three incidents, of course, do not an epidemic make, but they do attract attention. So, the phenomenon of self-immolation stayed in the news for a while.
Bushnell live streamed his action, which was quickly posted on the social media platform Twitch (though that video was soon taken down there). As of this writing, however, it’s still up at Reddit. It opens on the early afternoon of a clear February day, with Bushnell in combat fatigues walking resolutely toward the Israeli embassy. He had emailed some independent news outlets about his protest and, as he walks, he says, “I am an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, and 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 colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
He then props up his cell phone on the pavement, pours some flammable liquid over his head, pulls his cap down, and flicks a lighter on around his ankles. When his uniform doesn’t ignite, he lights the pool of liquid surrounding him. It erupts into flames, which climb his body. Yelling “Free Palestine,” he bucks and moans in what must be unbearable pain before collapsing on the ground. Police and Secret Service agents rush over with fire extinguishers. One points a gun at the crumpled, still-flaming body and yells at him to get on the ground. Off-camera, another responds, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!” After the video ends, Bushnell will be loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, where he will soon die. In its only response, it seems, the Israeli embassy will report that none of its staff were injured.
In the following weeks, third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein will express solidarity with Bushnell; vigils honoring him will be held in several American cities, including Portland, Oregon, where members of the anti-war veterans group About Face will burn their uniforms in his memory; the Palestinian town of Jericho will name a street after him; another active-duty airman will be inspired to stage a hunger strike in front of the White House and, when he’s ordered back to his base in Spain, two fellow members of Veterans For Peace will begin a hunger strike in his stead.
Admirable? Unhinged?
The initial media coverage of Bushnell’s action was straightforward enough, though often giving as much space to the history of self-immolation as to the politics of his protest. A notable exception was a Washington Post column by Shadi Hamid, who considered Bushnell’s position on the U.S. government’s support for Israel and concluded that while his act might have been unreasonable, his sense of powerlessness was not.
It didn’t take long, however, for the focus to shift to the psychology of self-immolation, then to Bushnell’s background and the implication that he was distinctly damaged. About six weeks after the event, The Boston Globe ran a feature on the Community of Jesus, a monastic community on Cape Cod, where the young Bushnell was raised and home-schooled. The story relied heavily on disgruntled former members—one characterized it as a cult—who recalled harsh, group-enforced discipline, practices meant to undermine family bonds, humiliations, and verbal assaults. The article did include a disclaimer toward the end—“It’s unclear what, if any, connection Bushnell’s upbringing had on his final protest.”—but all too clear was a striking skepticism about his psychological stability.
The need to understand and explain (or explain away) such an extreme, self-abnegating act is anything but unusual, nor is the linking of self-immolation to mental disturbance. Bushnell was explicit about his distress over the situation in Gaza, and it sounded as if he was also dealing with a sense of moral injury, a malady of the heart as much as the head, but none of that was proof of derangement. Setting yourself on fire for whatever reason is inarguably an act of suicide, yet the mental state of someone at that moment is ultimately unknowable since such suicides almost invariably take their secrets to the grave. When it comes to self-immolation, I’m inclined to take people at their word. Apparently, that puts me in the minority.
“I won’t speculate on the dead man’s mental health,” wrote Graeme Wood in a snotty op-ed for The Atlantic. “He grew up in a cult, described himself as an anarchist, and generally eschewed what Buddhists might call ‘the middle way,’ a life of mindful moderation, in favor of extreme spiritual and political practice.” Fanaticism, he suggested, was Bushnell’s “default setting.”
It wasn’t just those who were unsympathetic to Bushnell’s act for whom the state of his psyche took precedence over the purpose of the protest. It may, in fact, be a particular genius of American democracy that it can absorb dissent and, in that way, blunt revolt, but that seemingly benign tolerance can push activists to ever more radical acts in a bid to focus attention on their cause. Sadly enough, though, when a dissident’s striking (even, in Bushnell’s case, ultimate) political act is reduced to a set of personal maladies, his or her message can be all too easily massaged away.
Probably More Than You Want to Know About Self-Immolation
Self-immolation is a low-cost, low-tech, readily documentable act that’s easy to do without significant planning, assistance, or much forethought. Of course, “easy” might be the wrong word for it, and self-immolation is an exceedingly rare, singular, and extreme form of political protest. Unlike marches or strikes, it involves only one person. Unlike suicide missions, the harm is intended to be inflicted only on yourself. Unlike the slow, wasting away of a hunger strike, it’s seldom reversible and usually fatal. Unlike most public protest, it doesn’t rely on an authority’s response to have an effect. And while most people wouldn’t consider it an option, to those who would set themselves aflame, sooner or later it becomes the only option.
Self-immolation is also heart-stoppingly dramatic, capturing the public’s attention, emotions, and imagination despite, or maybe because of its inherent contradictions. It is at once an act of despair and of defiance, of purity and of bravado. Above all, it defies any idea of acceptable risk. Moreover, as a form of nonviolent protest, it’s shockingly violent, and though our normal urge as humans is to look away from such suffering, the image remains irrepressible.
As it happens, self-immolation as protest has an ancient history. It appears in Hindu tales, Greco-Roman myths, the early Christian era, fourth-century China, and 17th-century Russia. It’s happened in protests against America’s war in Vietnam; against the Soviet, Indian, and Sri Lankan governments, as well as Chinese policies in Tibet; and recently in the U.S. over climate change.
According to Michael Biggs, a sociologist who conducted an extensive study of the subject, the motivations and rationales of self-immolators range from the selfless and strategic to the psychological and egocentric. Such an array of reasons is on display in The Self-Immolators, testimony compiled from protesters around the world who set themselves on fire between 1963 and 2013. It makes for sad reading: so many lives, so much anguish, so little effect.
Historically, the effectiveness of such awe-inspiring protest is, at best, unclear. There were certainly cases that did gain widespread attention and so influenced events and policies. As a threesome, consider Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk in the iconic photograph, who self-immolated to protest his government’s mistreatment of Buddhists; Norman Morrison, the American Quaker who self-immolated under then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon window to protest America’s war in Vietnam (McNamara was reportedly “horrified,” while President John F. Kennedy exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”); and Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor in Tunisia, whose self-immolation protesting corruption was considered a catalyst for the Arab Spring uprising.
Sadly, however, Bushnell’s action, far more typically, didn’t make a dent in Israel’s belligerence or limit the weaponry and intelligence his country still sends Israel. And the shock of the act, of the image of him burning to death seemed, if anything, to blot out the purpose. Maybe witnessing someone dying in flames, even online, is simply too disturbing to let witnesses easily absorb its intended message. Or maybe the intensity of Bushnell’s moral obligation shamed those who agreed with him and did nothing for those who didn’t.
Too Bad for Words
While it’s hardly burning yourself to death, all those students who camped out last spring, erecting tents on university lawns, defying administrators, and dominating the news narrative for weeks, also faced risks. Though no student protesters died, by demanding institutional responses to Israel’s war in Gaza, some were barred from graduating, denied job offers, summarily kicked out of their housing, physically attacked, and arrested.
And then, as with Aaron Bushnell, we changed the subject. The issue wasn’t this country’s, or any individual university’s role in the war in Gaza—so insisted school authorities, opportunistic politicians, and an obliging media—but free speech and the function of higher education.
In contrast to self-immolation, which is always about the image, language was all-important in those campus protests and became a minefield. The hotly debated meaning of terms and slogans, the name-calling that stopped discussion, the debate over who controlled the debate, the mutual misunderstandings, and the alarming tolerance of intolerance were all exacerbated in the self-enclosed, pressure-cooker communities that college campuses generally are.
Protest that doesn’t challenge our norms, or at least get people to think about other possibilities, is just spectacle.
Quickly, the “sides” were slotted into pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian categories, flattening any nuance among the protesters, even though a range of sentiments, perspectives, demands, and goals were apparent. That reduction also undermined the prospect for critical analysis, any true exchange of views, or the possibility of minds being changed—everything, in other words, that’s supposed to underpin a liberal education. And whatever happened to the idea of being pro-peace? I don’t remember that label ever being applied to the protests, although the one area most protesters agreed on was the need for a cease-fire in Gaza.
In his keynote speech at MIT’s graduation, entrepreneur Noubar Afeyan acknowledged the students’ pain over the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rued his own lack of answers on the subject, concluding, “But I do know this: Having conviction should not be confused with having all the answers.”
I have a certain sympathy for that sentiment, though I doubt I did when I was a student with my own set of demands over a different tragic conflict, which leaves me sympathetic to the student activists, too. After all, you don’t need answers to pinpoint a problem accurately or to believe peace is a precondition for finding such answers. Protest isn’t supposed to be nice. Dissent courts the heterodox. The point of a political action is to get in people’s faces, disturb complacency, and command a response. Protest that doesn’t challenge our norms, or at least get people to think about other possibilities, is just spectacle.
Of course, dissent also threatens authority, and the kneejerk reaction of authorities fearing that they’re losing control is to try to take ever more control. Insisting that the students and their organizations were being punished not for their speech but for breaking the rules, university administrators suspended anti-Zionist groups, breached principles of academic freedom, opened the way for violence by ushering the police onto campus, and caved to financial pressure from donors and alumni. And what to make of the suggestion of a Harvard dean, who, “look[ing] forward to calmer times on campus,” argued that the solution was for faculty members to just shut up?
You’d think such beleaguered university administrators would learn. Clampdowns usually backfire, and severe punishments hardly make for calmer campuses. The repression, in fact, succeeded mainly in turning the conversation from core issues like war and human rights to an assessment of free speech and the very nature of academia—not to mention good old American anti-intellectualism. Educational leaders were called before Congress to confess; university presidents were fired; hate speech codes, mostly moribund in this century, got renewed attention; and the crisis became focused on campuses riven by incivility and bad words.
Dissension at educational institutions over what kinds of expression are acceptable, no less desirable, has a long history and merits periodic revisiting. I suspect, though, that there’s another reason what we say has bested what we do as the issue du jour: that is, a lot of Americans find it easier to champion the idea of free speech than to demand that Israel get out of Gaza or that the Biden administration rethink its military aid policies.
About 20 years ago, when I wrote a book about free expression controversies, I saw repeatedly how words make convenient scapegoats. Arguments over language are often a way to avoid arguments we’d prefer not to have, even if working through those very arguments could produce the resolutions we want to reach. As paramount as free speech is to me in the pantheon of human rights, I wish in this case—and in Aaron Bushnell’s memory—we hadn’t relegated war to just a background hum but had assessed the validity of the protesters’ demands and dealt with them, as fraught and frightening, involved and painful as that process would inevitably have been.
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