Existential Anguish, Moral Retching, and the Pornography of Atrocities Befalling Palestinians
Part III in a series exploring the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation in protest of the war on Gaza
The following is the third part of a series examining the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in protest of the war in Gaza. The reader will not encounter photographs of Bushnell’s self-immolation or graphic images of human suffering.
The Israeli military’s real-time denigration and destruction of thousands of Palestinian civilians has confronted the world with moral horrors many believed—perhaps naively—were unique to the twentieth century.
A doctor working at an Israeli field hospital reports detained Palestinians are subjected to “routine” amputations due to handcuff injuries and forced to defecate in diapers. Human Rights Watch concludes that Israeli forces killed 106 civilians including 54 children when it intentionally struck a six-story apartment building in Gaza, October 31, 2023. The human rights’ organization’s investigation yielded “no evidence of a military target in the vicinity of the building at the time of the Israeli attack, making the strike unlawfully indiscriminate under the laws of war.”
Israeli investigative journalists reveal that their country's army has relied upon an artificial intelligence-based program called “Lavender” to determine its bombing targets with little to no verification of the program's determinations. Targeted men were intentionally assassinated at night when they were at home with their families. In fact, an additional automated system the Israelis dubbed “Where's Daddy?” was specifically used to “track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family's residences.” Offering context for the October 31 strike, military and intelligence personnel involved in the programs reveal they were authorized to kill as many as 20 civilians in any single attempted assassination of a junior Hamas figure and as many as 100 civilians when targeting a commander.
At least 17,000 Palestinian children are unaccompanied or separated from their caregivers, many orphaned, in Gaza, according to UNICEF. Children in Gaza are so frequently injured and orphaned that medical workers use the acronym “WCNSF,” meaning “wounded child with no surviving family,” to efficiently communicate their condition.
More than 100 are killed and 700 injured while attempting to receive food and other aid during the February 29, 2024 “Flour Massacre.” CNN's independent investigation determines that the Israeli military initiated gunfire “before the IDF said the convoy had started crossing through the checkpoint” and that the military “fired within close range of crowds that had gathered for food.”
A record number of aid workers are being killed. So far 203 aid workers were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and April 2024, according to Humanitarian Outcomes, an independent London organization monitoring aid worker attacks. By contrast, a total of 20 aid workers were unacceptably killed in Ukraine between 2022 and April 2024. Aid workers in Gaza constitute 63% of the global aid worker deaths between January 2023 and April 2024 despite the fact the Israeli onslaught on Gaza began 10 months into 2023.
Horrifically exemplifying threats to aid workers operating in Gaza, we learn the Israeli military sequentially targeted not one, not two, but three World Central Kitchen vehicles. Israeli forces stalked the hunger relief convoy over a one stretch of roadway, killing seven people. After the survivors of the first strike attempted to move to a second vehicle, Israeli forces fired upon and destroyed the second vehicle. When survivors of the second strike attempted to flee the scene in a third vehicle, the military fired upon and destroyed the final vehicle. The attack occurred despite the fact the World Central Kitchen had coordinated their movements with the Israeli military and the group’s logo was emblazoned on the rooftop and windshield of one or more vehicles.
How are we to reconcile our impartial love of humanity, and our commitment to truth, justice, aliveness, and wholeness with feelings of helplessness as our government perpetuates a pornography of atrocities in Gaza by providing the Israeli government “dumb” bombs, intelligence assistance, and diplomatic cover?
How do we comprehend and give genuine meaning to the fact that, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) March 18 report, “one in three children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or ‘wasted’ and half of Gaza's population—1.1 million people—“have completely exhausted their food supplies and coping capacities and are struggling with catastrophic hunger (IPC Phase 5) and starvation”? How are we to respond when our government defunds the most important aid organization in Gaza, UNRWA—over allegations that may have resulted from torture—at the same time the IPC says it has never recorded a higher number of people facing catastrophic hunger?
Award-winning journalist and aid organizer, Arwa Damon said that during her recent trip to Gaza Palestinian mothers were “shoving these emaciated babies at you… begging for proper formula, begging for proper care.” Damon was in Gaza as a member of the medical and mental health organization she co-founded, International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance (INARA). “They’re begging for medicine for children who are epileptic,” she explained. “You walk into a tent, and with each step your foot takes, a cloud of mosquitoes and flies just swarms up. I mean, it’s inexplicable.”
How are we to respond—as human beings and not mere political tacticians—when our government, funded by our taxes, ignores or diminishes detailed reports like the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese’s March 24, 2024 report? The report, submitted to to the United Nations Human Rights council, explains that “the patterns of violence and Israel's policies in its onslaught on Gaza” indicate that the threshold for the commission of genocide has been met. “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.”
When asked about the report, U.S. State Department spokesperson, Matt Miller, personally attacked the report’s author and insisted, without engaging her analysis, that “allegations of genocide are unfounded.” Meanwhile, just four days after the report’s publication, Al Jazeera published video footage of Israeli soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinians, one of whom appears to waive a white fabric so as to signal they are not a threat. The soldiers then scoop up their bodies with bulldozers and profanely plow them into dirt and rubble.
The publication of the video was followed by a report by Haaretz, on March 31, 2024, in which Israeli soldiers describe the establishment of “kill zones” in Gaza. One soldier explained they were commanded “to shoot and kill” people as soon as they entered designated areas, “even if that person is unarmed.” An Israeli commander told Haaretz that some of those killed were likely seeking food from areas they believed the military had left the area since the Israeli forces hid themselves within abandoned houses.
Echoes of this policy of indiscriminate killing may have been expressed by an Israeli military spokesman featured in the Washington Post’s April 1, 2024 story on Israel’s decimation of Al-Shifa hospital. As the military escorted the journalists away from the bombed out hospital they encountered a Palestinian family of four—a mother, father, and two children. The journalist was told that the father would be questioned and that it was good the family was stopped and turned around. Had they proceeded in a no-go zone, the military spokesman explained, the IDF soldiers “could have shot them.”
Indeed, entire families have been found dead in homes surrounding Al-Shifa hospital while healthcare workers including the plastic surgeon, Ahmad al-Maqadmeh, his mother, Yusra al-Maqadmeh, a general practitioner have been found dead a short walk from the hospital. Each of the doctors bodies were “found riddled with bullets.” Ahmad previously earned a Humanitarian Innovation Fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
That such conduct is flagrantly immoral is plain for anyone with a conscience and love of human dignity. This is no longer the question.1 Those too committed to integrity to rationalize or simply ignore the relentless killing, starving, and suffering of innocent Palestinians are left with serious questions that are not easily answered: What am I to do in this moment? What is my responsibility? Can I do more than I am doing? Is my feeling of powerlessness a reflection of reality or the preference not to endure personal risk—risk of losing friends, employment, status, or cherished but mistaken beliefs?
Are these not the same questions faced by those who were compassionate and rational enough to recognize the wrongs of European colonialism, monarchal rule, the enslavement of human beings, the denial of women’s basic rights, segregation, the exploitation of children in factories, and the denial of workers’ dignity? This is the essence of U.S. Airman, Aaron Bushnell’s challenge to us just before his February 25, 2024 self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.: to recognize that we are doing now what we likely would have done then, had we lived during those historic injustices. And if such logical implications leave us morally ashamed, then we ought to do better.
A Call to Live Forward, into an Unknown Future
Aaron Bushnell made his radical decision to self-immolate in ethical and existential context that defies simple, easy answers. “I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this,” he wrote in his final written will. In the next line he replied to himself with a Socratic self-awareness many of his detractors lack: “Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn't be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.”
I would never advise anyone to follow in Bushnell’s footsteps. I personally shutter at the thought of any human being enduring such incomprehensible suffering and forever shutting out the light of their unique existence.2 But I am also unwilling to deprive Bushnell of the respect he deserves for conscientiously confronting the ethical conundrum of how to live with integrity during a time of inexplicable injustice and its unforetold rectification. Life is often unfair, as Bushnell wrote. We are required to make difficult choices based on incomplete knowledge and our best though inevitably imperfect judgment. And we owe it to ourselves and others to honestly recognize that the path forward—the path to rectifying the present injustice—is not predestined or fated, but determined by us as we accept the responsibility to live fully human lives, which is to say to live courageously, creatively, and autonomously.
Today, we find ourselves in an inescapable state of uncertainty and angst. One potently described by existentialist psychologist, Rollo May. “We are called upon to do something new,” wrote May, in his book, The Courage to Create, “to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness.”
This nothingness is the two-sided coin of our freedom to shape the world. On the one hand we are indeed free to act upon our own determinations—to make decisions, however impetuous or well thought out. By the same token, however, we are condemned to live without the reassurances of fate or destiny. (“It’s not a question of who are we really,” sings Hayley Williams of Paramore in “Escape Route,” “it's who we want to be.”) As the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explained, “man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Erich Fromm makes much the same point when he highlights the inherent insecurity and uncertainty of the human condition. In The Sane Society, he wrote:
“Life, in its mental and spiritual aspects, is by necessity insecure and uncertain. There is certainty only about the fact that we are born and that we shall die; there is complete security only in an equally complete submission to powers which are supposed to be strong and enduring, and which relieve man from the necessity of making decisions, taking risks, and having responsibilities.”
But no one who retains their humanity simply submits themselves to such external authorities, be they deities or demagogues, bureaucrats or those crowned as experts. As Fromm put it, “Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.” Though we must consider credible advice, evidence, and argument, a self-determining person cannot escape the inherent insecurity and uncertainty of being a thinking, free being. Nor can we escape ultimate responsibility for our lives.
This is why our recourse to the beloved script of excuses constitutes what Sartre called “bad faith,” a denial of our condition as self-conscious, choosing beings responsible for the choices we make. If our lives belong to us—be it because God granted us freedom of will, because we exist in a godless world of liberation, or because mother nature has endowed us with minds granting a god-like capacity for self-determination—then our very identities are quilted from the fabric of our choices. And whatever threads these choices may be sewn from, be it dogma, tradition, power opinion, or reasoned, principled judgment, they are ours. Thus, Sartre wrote, in “The Humanism of Existentialism” (1946):
“Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”
Recognizing we are nothing more than our lives and the totality of our choices, we are again faced with the question of how to proceed in the face of insecurity and uncertainty, or more specific to our current condition: how to address our nation’s contribution to the unyielding injustice and violation of human dignity in Gaza. Even our inclination to look backward for guidance has limited value. As the Danish existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, put it in an 1843 journal entry:
“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forwards…. life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance: backwards.”
Human beings, as conscious beings responsible for making their own choices, are deprived of the benefits of hindsight at the moment of choice. We are condemned, by the very conditions of our freedom, to an inescapable incompleteness of information upon which to make our decisions. Yet, as the change agents of the past have proven, we are freer than those in positions of authority would have us believe. Even those who would deny the existence of free will eventually find themselves in the awkward position of having to halt the inevitably incomplete effort of trying to locate the causal impetus and explanation for the decision they are about to effectuate; in a word, they have to decide what to do without the benefit of a comprehensive causal picture. This is our situation, presently.
The Problems that Make us Human
Aaron Bushnell’s self-critical commentary—that if he was “truly sorry” for deciding to self-immolate that he wouldn’t carry out his plans and that though committed to his plan it felt unfair—reveals an existential reality too often ignored by pop psychology commentators: that human existence entails inescapable problems; problems that cannot be remedied by a “life-hack,” a 12-step plan, the guidance of a self-help guru, or reading a great book of wisdom. “It hurts to be human,” as the pop singer Pink put it in a song named after those very lyrics.
A person who has no problems has lost their humanity. In a 1972 interview3 Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explained that a man with no problems “is an idiot.” “The greatness of man,” Heschel explained, “is that he faces problems. I would judge a person by how many deep problems he's concerned with.”
“Even God has problems. This is a deep ingredient of existence: problems. And the tragedy of our education today is we are giving such easy solutions: be complacent, have peace of mind, everything is fine. No. Wrestling is the issue. Facing the challenge is the issue.”
Judged by such criteria we have evidence that Aaron Bushnell lived a life of profound meaning and depth.
Many of our elected office holders, by contrast, appear incapable of acknowledging and honestly confronting the real problems presented before us, today, by the starvation and killing of so many thousands in Gaza. Some have become so fearful of problems that they forcefully push away all genuine ethical concern regarding the killing of Palestinian civilians by recommending that Israel use nuclear weapons or indiscriminate killing to achieve their goals in Gaza.
In March 2024, Michigan congressman, Tim Walberg told his constituents that he objected to providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” he explained. “Get it over quick.” In February 2024, Tennessee U.S. representative, Andy Ogles, was confronted by a concerned citizen who told him, “I've seen footage of shredded children's bodies, and that's my taxpayer dollars going to bomb those kids.” In direct response Ogles said, “I think we should kill them all, if that makes you feel better. Everybody in Hamas.” That same month Florida U.S. representative, Brian Mast, responded to activist concerns about Palestinian deaths by saying he supported the destruction of more infrastructure in Gaza, recommending that the “half a million people starving to death” ought to choose a better government, and said those being harmed by Israel’s bombardment “are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”
In November 2023, Democratic Florida state representative, Angie Nixon advanced a ceasefire resolution, expressing, “We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?” Responding to the rhetorical question, Republican state representative, Michelle Salzman called out, “All of them.” All but two lawmakers voted against Nixon's resolution.
In each of these instances, the elected figure dismissed the very real and significant problem of innocent people being deprived of their dignity and right to life. Each “avoided” a humanistic problem with simplistic thinking; thinking likely underwritten by dehumanizing stereotypes of the Palestinian “other,” as “terrorist,” or as inherently “uncivilized” and therefore acceptable for killing in pursuit of a purportedly “higher good.” (A higher good absurdly described as defending innocent life.)
The flippant endorsement of mass killing exhibited by Salzman, Mast, Ogles, and Walberg likely indicates a lack of moral fortitude to take on the deep and challenging range of emotions that come with the real problems of being human. They lack the courage necessary to even begin fathoming what it's like for a Palestinian mother to ask an aid worker for help with her seven-year-old son who “screams at the top of his lungs” and goes into convulsions each night before bed because he can't stop thinking of the time an Israeli airstrike decapitated his sister. These politicians prefer to play tactical and ideological games of ephemeral significance; games that are easier to conceive of and control, games that give them a greater sense of security and control. Yet these games come at the high cost of their humanity.
To live as a self-aware person, sensitive to not only our own condition as living beings but also that of others, means accepting the difficulties inherent to living a life of principle and meaning. As Abraham Maslow explained, in Toward A Psychology of Being,
“Self-actualization does not mean a transcendence of all human problems. Conflict, anxiety, frustration, sadness, hurt, and guilt can all be found in healthy human beings.”
The person moving toward fuller human development doesn’t overcome problems. Rather they trade superficial problems or those born of irrational concerns and conditioning for “the real, unavoidable, existential problems” intrinsic to the human condition. The self-actualizing person also experiences guilt, but not guilt generated by socially dictated expectations; not guilt born of shame for failing to dismember their authentic self. The guilt of the self-actualizing person is born of authentic, humanistic conscience, an aliveness to reality, justice, and wholeness; of deep emersion in what Maslow called “B-values,” universally prized human experiences and capacities which alert us to the incongruence, limitations, and hard choices of life.4
Those rooted in the humanity-sustaining soil of compassion and sensitivity to suffering cannot help but feel some sense of guilt; guilt as we pay taxes that fund the provision of armaments used for the destruction of so tens of thousands of innocent human beings. How are we not to feel guilt knowing full well that our pets eat with more regularity than Palestinian children? That our children are alleviated of headache pain while Palestinian children are deprived of anesthesia during amputations. That malnourished women are birthing new life in unhygienic, chaotic environments; and doctors, journalists, and aid workers are subjected to killing?
Some are so overwhelmed by these painful feelings that they turn away, shut down, and embrace willful apathy. But those of us who care—those of us committed to honoring our own humanity as well as others—refuse to turn our backs on those suffering, even as we shutter, retch, and register our dissent, however feebly. We register our dissent in protests, acts of civil disobedience, family conversations, signing petitions, social media posts, calls to elected officials, voting “uncommitted” in the 2024 primaries, supporting independent or third party presidential candidates opposed to the war, writing letters, singing songs, or wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. We refuse to allow the deaths, dismemberment, and dehumanization of children, healthcare workers, mothers and fathers, young men and young women, the disabled, doctors and nurses, humanitarians, or any other precious human being to go without witness or protest.
Still, we will find ourselves asking: What good will our efforts do? What difference will they make? How can we possibly birth a future that defies such a clear and dictatorial past, one so forcefully opposed to the humanity we wish to honor? What source can we possibly turn to for moral sustenance as hope cries out in hunger, resounding the pleas for food of starving Palestinian children?
Here the dominant culture will not come to our aid. Power bombards us with the idea that life is nothing but a preconceived set of highways upon which we are destined to traverse. All that is left for us is enlightened resignation to the direction devised by a class of trustworthy leaders. But the humanities and the insights of great humanistic thinkers and creators of the past provide us with a very different vision for living and relating to the present and future. One that challenges us to confront cynicism and fatalism with courage, conviction, compassion and creative vision; in a word, with our fullest humanity.
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Imagine that while attempting to evade capture, a well-known terrorist takes refuge in a residential home. The police arrive on the scene and discover that the terrorist has taken five innocent hostages, three children and two adults. During the standoff the head of the police unit determines that the terrorist might be able to get away if his forces don’t take immediate action and so orders his officers to open fire on the house with all available weaponry. The results are that the terrorist is killed and so too is the family of five. Upon learning of this outcome, the relatives of the killed family condemn the police and demand accountability. In response the police commander declares that he and his subordinates have no responsibility for the deaths, and that the only responsible party was the terrorist. Just as no rational person would find such a defense compelling, neither should we find the claims that Hamas bares sole responsibility for the innocent killed during Israel’s military bombardment. While it is certainly true that the terrorist in our scenario has placed the family in harm’s way, those responsible for actually killing the family are the people who fired bullets into their bodies. Even if the terrorist had quite literally used another person—an innocent person—as a shield, the police officer, assuming they knew what the terrorist was doing, would not be absolved of responsibility for shooting through the “human shield” to kill the terrorist. Others’ wrongdoing does not alleviate us of our moral responsibility. One party’s dehumanizing use of an innocent person—namely as a means to the end of protecting themselves during a conflict with another party—does not authorize or entitle a second party to compound that injustice by further dehumanizing the innocent person—namely by failing to prioritize their right to live while pursuing the goal of killing the initial wrongdoer. Such behavior places the second party on the same moral terrain as the first: both have violated the dignity and fundamental right to life of the innocent person. If we are sincere that the use of innocent people by the terrorist is immoral, then we will not join the terrorist in disregarding the rights of the innocent as we seek to bring the terrorist to justice. If our motive is really the “defense of human dignity”—the protection of the right of individuals to their lives—then killing the innocent to stop a murderer would be a literal absurdity.
Speaking candidly, I think I am partly motivated to write on this topic because I am so horrified by it that I wish to contribute toward making a world where a reasonable, loving human being would never fathom such a form of protest.
I want to thank
for bringing this interview to my attention. Those interested in insightful and eclectic works and ideas would do well to follow him on Substack and/or subscribe to his newsletter.In Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow lists what he calls “B” values in the chapter titled “Cognition of Being in the Peak-Experiences.” They include wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, and self-sufficiency.
That was really insightful. Thank you.
Just a slightly different take on the present Middle Eastern situation.
"The Israel attachment to this land goes back to a legend where God bequeathed to Abraham and his descendants the Promised Land. And yet at the time this land was already occupied. Admittedly there was no international law. This is a myth and yet it has become so deeply engrained in the Israeli psyche, whether religious or not.
Can such a theology myth be logically equated to a factual claim on the ground today? Should a myth justify the claim of exclusive ownership and alienation and ethnic cleansing we are witnessing?"