An acquaintance of mine called Z., who lives in the United States of America but was adopted by a white couple at birth and is ethnically South Korean, chose to promote the decision by Aaron Bushnell, who had been on active duty in the Air Force of the USA, to murder himself by self-immolation in order to protest what he deemed the “genocide” of Palestinians being perpetrated by the Israeli government and military in Gaza in the wake of the attacks of 10/7/2023. Mr. Bushnell killed himself on 2/25/2024. Z. agrees with him that what’s happening is a genocide, and they took umbrage to the choice by a Jewish friend of theirs to reject the language of “genocide” and “colonization” as it pertains to Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians, claiming that this Jewish friend was allowing a narrow focus on the threat to Jewish well-being from Palestinian terrorism to prohibit them from the full understanding of the catastrophe taking place that the situation calls for. Here’s what I had to say in the wake of the kerfuffle that unspooled between the two of them on Facebook.
“CONTENT NOTE on this comment for political views that I’d like to think are nuanced but that actually seem more likely to piss large numbers of Jews, Muslims, Zionists, and anti-Zionists off.
I’m an ethnic Jew – a convert to the Bahá’í Faith as of 2003, but still a Jew by heritage and a lifelong left-wing Zionist who wants a just “Two states for two peoples!” peace with Palestine and rejects both Jewish and Muslim fascism and supremacism. I want to politely disagree with your friend B., who misinterpreted both what Mr. Bushnell was trying to accomplish by committing suicide, and, if I’m understanding you correctly, what you seem to be saying by amplifying his message and proclaiming that what he did was ultimately righteous.
I agree that to die in the service of the cause of an oppressed people is ultimately noble – I don’t have to agree with every single aspect of the way anti-Zionists frame the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians to recognize that what Netanyahu and his allies are doing in Gaza right now is an appalling human rights catastrophe, and I think it’s only natural that large numbers of people who are neither Jewish nor Muslim will be sympathetic towards the Palestinians, because, irrespective of the long history of crimes committed by partisans on both sides against one another, resulting in millions of dead Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze civilians (even if you only start the clock sometime around the year 1850, when the first Zionists bought land in what later became Israel), it still follows that the Palestinians are suffering more right now and that the Israeli war machine has slaughtered many thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including many thousands of innocent Palestinian civilian children.
In that context, a suicide to draw attention to the catastrophic slaughter of Palestinian civilians becomes something I can recognize as a moral act, and it doesn’t matter very much whether the person doing it views Israel in the light that I would describe as exactly ideal. What matters is that the wild, indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli government and military needs to stop.
I speak as someone who hates Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and all of their allied groups and wants them to be completely destroyed; I hate these groups as much as it’s humanly possible for anyone to hate anything, and I’m also a persistent and angry critic of Muslim extremism and supremacism and the ways in which it has been causing non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims of all kinds to suffer in various ways for 1, 400 years, from various groups of Christians to the Dharmic peoples (primarily Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs) to Zoroastrians to the Amazigh of North Africa to the Kalasha indigenous people of Pakistan to Black, non-Arab Sudanese to the four indigenous ethnoreligious groups of Mesopotamia (the Yazidis, the Yarsanis, the Mandaeans, and the Shabaks) to my people, the Bahá’ís, not to mention heterodox Muslim groups such as the Ahmadis, Alevis, Qur’ániyoon, Nizari Ismailis, and Bektashis, among others. I think criticism of Muslim extremism and the cruel interpretations of the Qur’án and Sunnah which inspire it are absolutely just and moral – I can cite Qur’ánic and sharí’ah jurisprudential chapter and verse on this, and I think this kind of critique should be normative anti-fascism and is utterly necessary to an accurate and reasonable understanding of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I say all this to say that I have very different foreign policy views from most of the other people who are calling for a ceasefire in this war, and I think it’s necessary to be honest about where I’m coming from, which is why I haven’t held back from saying these things. But EVEN GIVEN ALL THAT, I still think it’s reasonable to raise holy hell about the charnel-house into which Netanyahu and his Jewish fascist allies have turned Gaza. The innocent Israeli civilians who were slaughtered on 10/7/2023 (among whom were Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Druze as well as Jews) didn’t deserve it, but the Israeli response has been so wildly inhumane that it’s perfectly right that there’s been a mass movement rising up against it, and I’m willing to put up with the occasional crappy and contemptible “Zionism is evil!” take and a little bit of ill-advised Jew-hatred if it means we are able to move the needle and stop this wickedness from taking place.
In that context, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to signal-boost Bushnell‘s message, even though I don’t personally use terms like “colonialism”, “apartheid”, or “genocide” to describe what the Israelis are doing in Palestine, and I think I have good reasons not to. I still want to link arms with people who want to stop this war. Innocent Palestinian civilian life matters to me, and that’s all it comes down to in the end.”