I spent most of the week thinking about Aaron Bushnell. His death last Sunday came as a shock; so much so that I was at a loss for words. I am at a loss for words now. Bushnell could well have been one of my students; full of promise, ideals, and pain – both for the world, and that private pain that burdens so many young people. And all I could think of was that pain, and the agony of the flames consuming his body and reducing it to ash. It is perhaps a personal failing that I cannot see the heroism that others see in Bushnell’s self-immolation through all of the pain that I know he endured.

I was left shaking my head at the tragic waste of a young life, the loss of a young man whose passion and commitment could have been a driving force for the battle for humanity, decency, and the rights of oppressed people, and not only Palestinians, well into the future. But he has no future, and I had to ask what he had accomplished.

To be blunt, I was not prepared for the response from many of my social media friends and followers who denounced me for my heretical thoughts. He was, I was told, a martyr to be celebrated, not a victim to be mourned – but I didn’t see it. One interlocutor replied to one of my posts chiding me to “lighten up a bit,” as if the agonizing death of a young man, for whatever reason, is something that we should take lightly. I am clearly not suited to social media, and insufficiently committed to or conscious of the Palestinian struggle, and I let my humanity and my empathy get in the way of my politics.

All I can think about is the pain, and how Bushnell’s physical and psychic pain, combined with the emotional suffering of those who loved him, and piled on top of the agonies of Gaza has just multiplied and amplified all the pain. And I wonder how many Gazan lives he saved, and how sooner his unimaginable physical torment might have brought an end to the war.

I have had to step back for a while from social media in order to reflect on all the pain without having to stop and justify myself to my interlocutors. I might well return, since I do believe that we all do good work by being unafraid to voice our heresies and speak truth to power. I will continue to keep this journal, and to share it in social media every week. But, after Aaron Bushnell, I need some time to think, and to meditate on all the pain without interruption.

***

I know that the idea of martyrdom resonates deeply in Christian culture – the culture those of us in Euro-America inhabit, even if we are not Christian believers. The idea that seeking one’s death, and particularly a very horrible, painful, and public death, is itself a transformative political act has deep roots in Christian belief and myth. After all, how better to emulate Jesus Christ, who suffered agony and death on the cross for the redemption of humanity (or, at least for his followers) than to die in agony? This is the foundation of the myth of the Christian martyrs walking happily to their deaths in the arena, or on the cross, or wherever. To be a Christian is to actively seek the opportunity of martyrdom. This, in fact, is a central point of Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You. And I have no doubt that Aaron Bushnell, who was raised in a Christian commune and was, by all reports, highly motivated by his faith, believed.

I am not a Christian (I am sure that this will surprise you). I do not believe the Christian myths, nor do I believe that the tales of the Christian savior are any kind of a model for my life. I guess I have a commitment to the idea of pikuach nefesh, that all life is sacred, and that one must do everything one’s power to preserve it. Famously in his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides wrote that, when faced with a choice between forced conversion (to Islam or Christianity) and death, one is morally obligated to choose conversion.

There are, of course, many ways in which one might die while observing pikuash nefesh: dying while protecting or rescuing others, treating the sick, giving your food to feed your family, etc. But these are not examples of seeking an agonizing death for its own sake, they are selfless acts of which death might be a consequence. And they are a far cry from setting oneself on fire to “raise awareness” of the suffering in Gaza. How much awareness do you think Bushnell raised? How many Gazan lives did he save today?

Seeking martyrdom does not sanctify life, it defiles it. It adds just another meaningless death to the mountains of meaningless deaths that preceded it and will follow. For whatever reason that Bushnell chose to torture himself to death, it will do nothing to stop the killing in Gaza, unless you believe that Benjamin Netanyahu will be moved by this act, that President Biden will have a Road-to-Damascus conversion and turn off the supply of weapons, or that those of us committed to peace and Palestinian human rights will suddenly be extra-committed because of it.

I don’t. And I don’t believe in martyrs. Redemption comes through hard work and suffering, but never through death. I mourn for Aaron Bushnell because I believe that he was a sad, troubled young man who suffered unimaginably for nothing but a mural and few headlines. This is not how I believe we sanctify life… But then, I am no Christian.

***

If we claim that all people have complete bodily autonomy, then it follows that we must accept suicide as the absolute expression of that autonomy. But we can, as always, interrogate the motivations: Why this act, and not some other? Why did Aaron Bushnell choose to inflict unimaginable agony on himself and end his life? Characterizing his self-immolation solely as a political act (and a “heroic” one!) misses the point. There were many ways that Bushnell could have protested the War on Gaza, and then continued to protest again and again, that would have been as effective and less final. Yet, he chose this.

I have little patience with the idea of martyrdom – it is a notion utterly foreign to how I think about the world and life – and all that that I can think of is that the political statement was secondary to Bushnell’s choice of self-torment and death. He is a tragic figure to me; not a tragic hero, but a tragic victim. I mourn his death and the pain that he endured in seeking it.

***

I have been a committed pacifist for much of my adult life. Two years ago, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, above all, some of the commentary on it from other people who identified as pacifists and from pacifist organizations, made me really interrogate my pacifism and to ask if I still regarded myself as a pacifist. I read, and especially reread some of the important works of pacifist theory and history, from Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi to Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Jenny Teichman, and many others, including historians and theorists like Martin Ceadal and Michael Howard. I incorporated a unit in my 20th Century World History course on pacifism, which incorporates some of these readings, starting in 2022. I also looked to the Tanakh and the moral philosophy of my people, which led me to the work of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares. It has been a lot of reading, research, and reflection and, of course, it continues. But I have answered the question about whether I am still committed to pacifism, and I am. The question is to what kind of pacifism am I committed? At this moment, I cannot really provide an answer, except to say that it is not a pacifism that demands or approves of blood sacrifice and martyrdom.

***

“Kant was right when he said that a state of peace had to be ‘established.’ What perhaps even he did not discern was that this is a task which has to be tackled afresh every day of our lives; and that no formula, no organization, and no political or social revolution can ever free mankind from this inexorable duty.” – Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (1997)

***

“It’s not my fault,” I can almost hear the State of Israel saying in the adenoidal voice of a ten-year-old caught in an act of mischief. “They made me do it!” It probably isn’t fair to equate Israelis collectively with a snot-nosed pre-pubescent brat, and it certainly seems to trivialize the real – and horrific – violence that the State of Israel has been committing, is committing, and will doubtless continue to commit for the foreseeable future, but there is something pathetically and infuriatingly infantile about its inability to take responsibility for… well, for anything.

Perversely, that thought, and that voice, came to mind when I read about the massacre of more than 100 Palestinians Thursday as they were waiting for aid in the in Gaza City. All indications are that Israeli troops opened fire on the crowd as they “swarmed” around aid trucks. Israeli officials claim that “the bulk of the deaths” were the result of a “stampede.” Gaza health officials have reported however, that a great number of fatalities were the result of gunshot wounds.

Note, however, that the IDF does not deny shooting on the unarmed crowd and even if the “bulk of the deaths” were caused by Israeli gunfire then, implicitly, Israeli soldiers killed at least some of the Palestinian civilians. The excuse was that the soldiers felt threatened by a swarm of starving civilians… And you really have to think about that. After all, if the civilians were so desperate with hunger that they would trample each other merely to get a scoop of flour, and the soldiers regarded their desperation as so alarming and menacing that they felt they had to open fire (on unarmed civilians), we really have to ask who put the Gazans in that position in the first place.

And that, after all, is the State of Israel’s whole moral position here: it’s everyone else’s fault. Hungry Gazans are scary because someone had bombed them ruthlessly for the last five months, slaughtered their families and destroyed their homes. They are starving because someone has restricted aid and food shipments. It is someone else’s fault!

This, of course, is entirely consistent with the State of Israel’s inability to comprehend history and causality. Nothing that happens, in the Israeli worldview, has a cause or context apart from, “they hate us,” (notably without questioning why “they hate us”). So, Hamas’s 7 October attack occurred in a causal vacuum, and Hamas exist for no other reason than “they hate us.” To interrogate cause and context would demand that Israelis look to the settlements, to 1967, and to 1948 and the Nakba, and that might reveal that it isn’t always someone else’s fault.

29 Feb 2024

***

Diaspora Zionists and the State of Israel make a big show of their concern for antisemitism. On Friday, Fox News, which seems to have become the champion of American Zionism (which is why I have been reading it lately, even if I don’t have the stomach to watch it on television) reported in its “Antisemitism Exposed” newsletter on an Anti-Defamation League report on antisemitism in the United States.

Fox News was aghast (at least as aghast as it can be in text) that the report found that “27% of Americans would consider it ‘at least somewhat acceptable’ for a close family member to support the Hamas terror group.” More worrying, Fox News reported, is that “In total, more than 42% of Americans either have friends/family who dislike Jews or find it socially acceptable for a close family member to support Hamas.”

That does seem to be alarming until you start to actually unpack the numbers and the vagaries of the survey questions. The ADL is somewhat notorious for front-loading its surveys to get the results that it wants, and the survey is replete with examples of this. Moreover, the methodology section of the report failed to unpack the 42% of Americans who either have friends or family who dislike Jews or find it acceptable to support Hamas. Is it, as I suspect from the wording, that this 42% includes the 27% who find it acceptable to support Hamas, leaving only the 15% who either have friends or family who dislike Jews? And what does “support” for Hamas actually entail?

To be honest, I suspect that the ADL underreports antisemitism in this study because (a) it probably doesn’t want to alienate its friends on the political right, where most antisemitism, and the most violent antisemitism resides, and (b) it might be forced to concede that its equation of antisemitism with any criticism of the State of Israel.

Indeed, one of the shibboleths of Zionist and pro-Zionist groups like the ADL is that antisemitism is exists solely in acts and not in structures and ideology.* This is a variation on the cherished Gentile myth that antisemitism is merely bad taste. As George Orwell – hardly a paragon himself of respect for diversity – noted, that it was often “regarded simply as a disgraceful aberration, almost a crime, anyone literate enough to have heard the word will naturally claim to be immune from it.”

The ADL regards antisemitism as an aberration, and not one of the building-blocks of Euro-American culture which is, after all, the heir of something called Christendom. The only reason why it can find only 15% of Americans who either have friends or family who dislike Jews – and thus, maybe 5-10% who dislike Jews themselves (the ADL did not say) – is because it wasn’t actually looking at or for antisemitism as it exists in America’s collective Id, and which make things like Jewish Space Lasers and other casual libels seem almost anodyne.

Yet, the ADL is never shy to accuse anyone who might say things like “Israelis shouldn’t kill Palestinian civilians” or “I don’t believe that the State of Israel is, or should be, the Jewish homeland” of being antisemites, so I take its findings with a grain of salt. Besides, by promoting the Zionist party line, the ADL only deflects attention from real antisemitism – the ideology that motivated the Tree of Life and Poway shooters, and which animates the Christian nationalist and white nationalist right which, after all, are mostly enthusiastic Zionists (and thus, not antisemitic?). The ADL does its masters’ job and leaves the rest of us, you know, actual Jews, vulnerable.

But that, after all, is the point of Zionism, n’est-ce pas?

1 March 2024

***

Yes. There have been some troubling anti-Israel, and often antisemitic incidents in recent weeks, like when the UC Santa Barbara Student Center was plastered with signs reading “You can run but you can’t hide, Tessa Veksler supports genocide,” which targeted the Jewish student body president. That was just the kind of stupid-ass bigotry that has been seeping out in the left these days. And yes, there are a good number of anti-Zionist blowhards in social media promoting vile antisemitic tropes, narratives, and fantasies. I know, I have unfriended a bunch in recent weeks.

But that doesn’t mean that the State of Israel and Zionists are the victims here, or if the noxious antisemitism that Jews like me have experienced somehow outweighs the suffering of the people of Gaza, or somehow justifies the State of Israel’s brutal war. Yes, antisemitism is alive and well, and thriving, and we have to confront it wherever we find it. But that does not mean that we abandon our commitment to humanity, peace, and Palestinian lives.

The bottom line is that people hate Jews. They always have, and they always will. But right now, we have bigger fish to fry.

***

* The ADL notes on its website: “ADL works to support a secure, Jewish and democratic State of Israel, living in peace and security with its neighbors. We work to educate and engage on the challenges and complexities Israel faces at home and around the globe.” See https://www.adl.org/about/adl-israel.