Content warning: This article contains detailed descriptions of an act of physical harm.
On Sunday, February 25, 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, dressed in his military uniform, stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, and announced his intention to “engage in an extreme act of protest” for Palestine to a livestream on Twitch, which was later taken down. Bushnell set himself on fire to protest the US government’s involvement in Israel’s war on Palestine, becoming the second person to do so since October 7.
The reported death toll of more than 30,000 people killed by Israel’s military since October 7, which may be an undercount, includes whole family lineages. As protests continue against US participation in what has been called a genocide against Palestine, demonstrators have organized in Bushnell’s name, his image on protest signs from Gaza to Yemen, Kuala Lumpur to London, Paris to New York City.
Here’s what we know about Bushnell’s final act of protest.
What happened on February 25?
Bushnell’s final words were not widely reported by mainstream media initially, but were later read on CNN: “I am an active-duty member of the US Air Force," he began, "and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
In footage of his protest, preserved by the independent journalist Talia Jane, Bushnell can be heard saying. “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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
As he burned, Bushnell yelled, “Free Palestine!” Images of police pointing a gun at Bushnell as he burned circulated later on social media. Someone else can reportedly be heard on the now-deleted Twitch stream responding, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!” The flames were finally extinguished by Secret Service officers. Bushnell died of his injuries later that night.
According to Jane, the independent journalist who preserved the Twitch stream, Bushnell had tipped off reporters to his plans via email. This led to “intense collective efforts to locate him and intervene, unsuccessfully,” on the part of researchers and reporters, Jane wrote in Rolling Stone.
Since October 7, Bushnell is the second individual to protest the violence in Palestine via self-immolation: A woman who self-immolated with a Palestinian flag in December, who has not been identified, remains hospitalized in stable condition, according to The New York Times.
In advance of his protest, Bushnell sent his will to a friend, leaving his savings to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, his cat to his neighbor, and the friend a “fridge full of root beer.”
Who was Aaron Bushnell?
Bushnell was raised in a reclusive, conservative Christian sect — which multiple people called a “cult” — on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Those who have since left the group have described it as “controlling” and “traumatic” (accusations the group disputes).
While Bushnell was a part of that community, he went on a trip to Israel and the West Bank in the summer of 2016, after he had graduated high school, reported The New York Times. By the fall of 2019, Bushnell had left that sect, and, by May 2020, began active duty as a cyberdefense operations specialist in the US Air Force, moving to San Antonio, Texas.
Reporter Ken Klippenstein described Bushnell’s role as “one of countless young tech support people who now staff the national security community, similar to what Edward Snowden was.”
While living in San Antonio, Bushnell joined local socialist and anarchist organizing efforts to fight homelessness and support the unhoused, making friends and finding community along the way. “In recent years, according to those who knew him," The New York Times reported, "Mr. Bushnell had grown increasingly distant from both his conservative upbringing and his career in the military, throwing himself into leftist and anarchist activism, talking often about alleviating poverty and opposing capitalism.”
“He was outraged, and he knew that no one who is in charge is listening to the protesters out there every week,” friend Lupe Barboza, who knew Bushnell from community organizing, told The Washington Post. “He knows that he has privilege as a white man and a member of the military.”
In January, Bushnell left San Antonio for Ohio, where he was enrolling in a course to leave the military before the end of his enlistment this spring. As a part of that process, Bushnell was also enrolled in online courses at Southern New Hampshire University, a program partner.
Levi Pierpont, a friend of Bushnell’s who met him at basic training and went on to become a conscientious objector, has told the media that due to the approach of Bushnell’s end of service, he had decided against beginning the year-plus process of becoming a conscientious objector. Members of the US military are banned from participating in political protest.
Pierpont told Democracy Now!, “Over the years, both of us shifted, of course, in our beliefs regarding war, largely because of what we saw in the military, largely because of the things that we learned because we were a part of it. And I know that he and I both were encouraged by people on YouTube that were writing video essays about social justice movements in the United States.”
Pierpont also noted the 2020 killing of George Floyd as a radicalizing point for Bushnell on “all state-sanctioned violence,” per the Washington Post.
Air Force officials have declined to comment on whether Bushnell’s decision is indicative of wider unrest within the Air Force, which author and veteran Lyle Jeremy Rubin wrote for The Nation “has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting.”
The Washington Post reported that “[though] no one else in uniform has stepped out against the war in Gaza as stridently as Bushnell, some service members do have misgivings about it and frustration that critics of the war blame US military support for Israeli military actions.”
At a vigil for Bushnell in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, a group of US veterans (identified as such in the social media post of the footage) burned their uniforms in his memory. And on March 4, an open letter from an anonymous group of active-duty service members across multiple US Armed Forces branches condemned US support for Israel’s war campaign: “It is undeniably evident that the Israeli Defense Forces are repeatedly and systemically committing war crimes in Gaza.”
Since Bushnell's death, people have poured over his social media posts to try to understand his decision. His Facebook posts showed his support for Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), reported The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, and illustrates his political unrest after months of witnessing deaths in Palestine.
Bushnell’s last Facebook post, which linked to the Twitch stream and has since been removed, read: “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.”
What is the fallout?
In the wake of Bushnell’s self-immolation, critics have raised a number of questions about his form of protest. Some attempted to attribute his choice to a matter of “mental health”; others suggested that to report on Bushnell’s self-immolation was akin to promoting it or would cause others to copy him.
Self-immolation is a long-existent form of political protest dating back at least a thousand years, though it is obviously a serious action — and “by no means a common one,” as Gessen wrote in The New Yorker. Dozens of Buddhist monks have engaged in the practice, noted Gessen, and in 2013, after repeatedly being asked to condemn self-immolation as protest, the Dalai Lama called it “a form of nonviolence.”
In the US and Vietnam, at least 100 people self-immolated to protest the Vietnam War, “cement[ing] a new association in American culture between the tactic and antiwar activism,” wrote Erik Baker for n+1. Notable examples include Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who, in 1963, sat in a Saigon street and set himself on fire, and Norman Morrison, a Quaker who died from self-immolation in protest at the Pentagon in 1965. Gessen followed the action to the Soviet bloc in the late 1960s and on.
Since the 1990s, there have been multiple US self-immolation deaths in protest of war. The 2011 Arab Spring was in part set off by the self-immolation of a Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi. More recently, two men — lawyer David Buckel and climate activist Wynn Bruce — self-immolated to raise awareness of climate catastrophe and died in 2018 and 2022, respectively.
“The long history of self-immolation as dissent doesn’t mean those who set themselves on fire are unaffected by acute mental distress or mental illness,” argued MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem. “But it is glib and ahistorical to ascribe self-immolation to abject madness, and to claim that a specifically chosen act with a specific history doesn’t count as ‘legitimate’ protest.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, there is help available. You can call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, where a trained counselor can talk to you and connect you with further resources. You can also reach out to a trusted friend or adult if you're experiencing suicidal thoughts, or, if you're not in immediate danger, taking a walk or making a list of things you're excited for in the future might help redirect your thoughts. Find out more about what to do if you're experiencing suicidal thoughts here.
Editor's note: This piece was updated to remove a mention of the means of Bushnell's death.
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