Before self-immolating to protest a genocide you no longer accepted being complicit of as part of the US Air Force, you told me to remember your name as Aaron Bushnell, and on social media, you asked me:
“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.
Well, Aaron, i’m posting.
While you were burning, cops aimed a gun at you, and you died a martyr shouting “Free Palestine”.
Me, i’m just posting. That’s less ambitious.
Right now i’m writing a short blog post. My post will have about 1500 words and a readership of 50 or 100 people who already agree with me, maybe up to 5000 or 10000 readers if someone really popular shares my post online.
I’m also refusing to shop at Carrefour, won’t buy Siemens products, and i only buy avocados if they come from Mexico or Peru.
To be honest, i was already buying my groceries from LIDL and Aldi, because Carrefour isn’t cheap, and neither are avocados, so participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement takes no sincere effort of my part.
Even when i was a little kid, before the Internet taught me English and gave me access to people beyond my borders, before i had better sources than mainstream media, it was already entirely obvious Palestinians were the oppressed party.
Recently, i educated myself better about Palestine. It didn’t change my opinions, it merely clarified the depravity of the situation. Reading Decolonize Palestine taught me a lot about Palestinian history, Israeli talking points, and cleared up misconceptions i had.
The more i learned, the more damning the story was.
I post a lot on the Fediverse, the social network with Mastodon. There’s a lot of transgender people there, and among ourselves, we remember that Bushnell was also known as Lilly: to grapple with your own transgender identity often spurs you to understand the need for solidarity beyond your own axis of oppression. In the same spirit, we often see Black communities in Western countries feeling a sense of a shared struggle with Palestinians.
Bushnell chose martyrdom as Aaron: it keeps the story simple for journalists, so i use that name, but i embrace the full complexity of Bushnell’s transgender path cut short.
Maybe i shouldn’t focus so much on a single white person from the USA. But tragically, this is the pragmatic way to go about advocacy. When the death toll had already climbed over 30,000 Palestinians genocided, the death of 7 aid workers from the World Central Kitchen, mostly white people, spurred indignation from many people who had yet to say a word about Arabs. USians care they must grapple with protests in their own universities, when fewer cared that no university remains in Gaza.
Yet genocide in the age of social networks makes it easy to talk to the people being genocided, not just to talk about them. We all learned the same language, so we can communicate in English. And how can we talk directly to those folks, and still deem them a foreign abstraction worthy of eradication?
I particularly remember the posts of a young man, showing only his determined eyes behind his keffiyeh. He prayed for a ceasefire every day of the month of Ramadan, one in which Muslims should get to fast in religious celebration, rather than starve to death in man-made famine.
What kind of person is he? One who lives in hunger and in terror of being bombed. One who might just stop posting one day, and there will be only one possible explanation why he stopped. One who asks us to keep talking about Palestine. That’s all he has the heart to talk about. He is not afforded the luxury of fancier passions than his people’s survival. In a better world, we’d be talking about Arab music and French food and videogames, rather than the singular topic whether he will be killed tomorrow.
It’s personal. I demand a world where we will talk of better things.
People love to ask, as if it somehow were a big gotcha, “do you condemn Hamas?”
But there is no gotcha whatsoever.
I have just told you I’m here to condemn Israel for the genocide of a civilian population, why are you asking me to weigh in about your flimsy pretext to genocide?
I’m not here to lecture colonized people about the ethics of the impossible predicament the colonizers have forced them into. I’m here to condemn colonizers leading lives just as comfortable as mine.
And there’s much to condemn. We have footage of Israeli officials cheering on the death of children, on the bombing of hospitals and universities. We have footage of drones gunning down civilians. We have thinkpieces masturbating at the prospect of colonizing all of Gaza, with eyes on Lebanon next. We have the words of Joe Biden endorsing the genocide by preventing a ceasefire repeatedly, and paying for the guns and bombs that maim civilians. We have the many selfies of the genociders posing with the belongings they pillaged from Palestinian homes. We can see more mangled corpses than anyone should ever see. We saw the scars of a Star of David carved into the back of a Palestinian man, making a perverse mockery of Jewish values.
We have eyes, we have ears, and Palestinians have phones to reach them.
It is not natural to deliberately witness. What is happening to Palestine is clear as day: what is there to deliberately witness, when we can all see it? I do not witness that the sun rises in the East, that the noon sky is blue, that the stars shine at night. I do not write prose of such things.
Yet we must deliberately witness against propaganda aiming to substitute reality with narratives disconnected from the self-evident truth. We have to prevent the terraforming of a consensus reality crafted by the genociders out of fiction. With enough hate in your heart, your eyes and ears no longer perceive the world.
We can see the criminal complicity of journalists in what they elect not to report. We can see all our ugly Islamophobic and Antisemitic prejudices preyed upon from all sides, with troubling success. We can see the malicious conflation of Judaism and Zionism, making uninvolved Jews the world over the target of misguided hate. We can see too many people trying to demand out of you an absurd “neutrality” that entails perceiving the genociders and the genocided as equal in guilt, in means, and in agency.
We have to say the reality we observe out loud, so it is not replaced by what the empire asks us to pretend happened.
I have to reassert our own reality to the 50 or 100 of you reading this, so you will not be bullied into letting it slip away.
We are currently watching the genocide of a civilian population. This is our reality.
At the same time, there is another war we gentiles must involve ourselves with, but that we cannot actually fight: a battle for the meaning of Judaism.
Antizionist Jews feel alone: we must be worthy friends. We must prove to the Diaspora that whatever their birthplace might be, it is a fine country to call theirs.
We cannot liberate a people by allowing another to be harmed.
I can’t do much more than post.
Will a post change the world? No.
I am going against a propaganda machine spending a fortune to alter our perception of reality.
One that is trying to convince me that talking about Palestine is useless.
That talking about Palestine is just cringe white savior complex to make me feel better.
That talking about Palestine is cynical clout chasing for cosplay leftists talking over oppressed people.
That my witnessing from the great comfort of a quiet white bourgeois town in France is so flawed it can only harm the cause.
But Palestinians have told me, without any room for ambiguity: keep talking about Palestine. If posting was useless, Palestinians wouldn’t tell me to do it, and propaganda wouldn’t try to persuade me to shut up.
So can i at least bleed the state of Israel of 50 or 100 Euros in wasted propaganda budget simply by saying incredibly obvious things about the nature of reality?
Because we will all agree a monstrous genocide of civilians took place, a deliberate massacre executed by Israel with the full and enthusiastic support of the United States of America and the rest of the West.
I’ll make damn sure of that. I am fully qualified to testify about something this obvious, about something this unambiguous.
Palestinians took photos of their children murdered by Israeli soldiers so they could ask me to testify. I will continue to do what they asked me to do when all my hair has turned gray.