Ex-Catholics in Rome reconnect with roots, spirituality in paganism

As Romans search for alternatives to Catholicism, some have turned to Jupiter, Minerva and Juno.

Luca Fizzarotti, center, pours water on hands during a ritual with the Communitas Populi Romani, Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. 

(RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

February 21, 2024
By Claire Giangravé

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Disillusioned by their experiences in Catholicism, some Romans are turning to paganism and finding a connection to their roots through worshipping the gods of antiquity, whom they see as more welcoming than the church.

“Rome is pagan,” Pope Francis told members of the Roman clergy during a closed-door meeting Jan. 14, when he urged them to consider the city a mission territory. Asked about the pope’s surprising words a few weeks later, the head of the department for catechesis of the Diocese of Rome, the Rev. Andrea Camillini, admitted: “Rome is at the same time pagan and the city of the pope: It’s a paradoxical city.”

The number of practicing Catholics in Italy has plummeted after the COVID-19 lockdowns to an all-time low. The Italian National Institute of Statistics found that only 19% of Italians were practicing Catholics in 2022, compared with 36% in the previous 10 years. The number of people who “never practice” their faith has doubled to 31% in the historically Catholic country.

While the church grapples with the causes behind the emptying pews, some who have left their Catholic faith behind are searching for other spiritual outlets. An eclectic group of Romans who gathered near the ancient Forum on a windy morning on Feb. 10 have turned to Juno, Jupiter and Apollo to find answers.

“I was a practicing Christian Catholic for many years. I was a catechist,” Luca Fizzarotti, who recently started attending the ancient Roman rituals, told Religion News Service. “Then I had a spiritual crisis when I moved in with my wife. I had a very bad experience and had to leave my church,” he said.

A computer programmer, Fizzarotti fell in love with a woman who believes in Kemetic Orthodoxy, based on the ancient Egyptian religious faith. “In the beginning I could not really understand this, then as I slowly learned about the pagan community, I found a way to live out my spirituality,” he said.

Incense burns during a ritual with the Communitas Populi Romani, Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

Paganism — though sometimes used as a derogatory shorthand for anyone who does not worship the Abrahamic god of Judaism, Islam and Christianity — is an umbrella term that encompasses a number of religious traditions, many of them polytheistic. Ancient Romans worshipped a pantheon of gods, mainly Jupiter, Juno, Apollo and Minerva, through rituals and observations with activities than included animal sacrifice and temple worship.

Fizzarotti was among a dozen people who gathered for the early February ritual, organized by the Communitas Populi Romani, a community started in 2013 by a group of young enthusiasts of Roman history, culture and religion.

In the beginning, the group focused on reenactments and history, but it slowly shifted toward becoming an officially recognized religious group. There are 20 or so members, said Donatella Ertola, who joined the group in 2015 and now organizes meetings three or four times a month in the places that are closest to the original temples spread across Rome.

“We all believe in the gods, we make rituals at home, we have devotion temples at home, we have our priests and officiants,” she told RNS, adding that this is a “niche community that has been growing recently.”

Communitas is hardly the only Roman religion organization in Rome or Italy. Groups like Pietas in Rome have larger memberships and even their own temples. According to a 2017 study by the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin, the number of neopagans in Italy has grown to more than 230,000 people, a 143% increase over 10 years. In the United States there are 1.5 million pagans, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, a significant increase compared with 134,000 in 2001.

The draw of the Roman religion is clear for many modern-day Italians, who view it as a way to reconnect with their ancient roots. Fascination with ancient Rome has also become a worldwide phenomenon. A social media trend last year found a staggering and surprising number of people — especially men — think about the ancient Roman Empire at least once a day.

“I was looking for something that monotheism didn’t give me,” said Antony Meloni, an airport construction worker. “I found in polytheism a new strength,” he added.

There is no religious text in the Roman religion, meaning faithful today must rely on what was written by people of the time. Communitas attempts to re-create the ancient rituals, without any human or animal sacrifice, of course, using ancient texts.

The group gathered that day to celebrate Juno Sospita, or Juno the Savior, whose temple once stood a few steps away, where the Church of St. Nickolas in Chains is located today. The original columns are still visible. She is usually shown as a warrior, lance in hand, and covered with goat skins and historically celebrated in February, considered a month of purification by the Romans, as winter turned to spring.

Communitas Populi Romani members use incense during a ritual on Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

They follow the description of a ritual offered by Cato the Elder in the “De Agricultura.” It starts off with an offering to the local “genus,” or spirit, followed by ablutions with water and incense. During the central part of the ceremony, the “Favete Linguis,” faithful are asked to “hold their tongues” and quiet their minds.

Amid the chaos of Roman traffic and the occasional bark of their mascot — the dog Poldo, who has two different-colored eyes — the group shouted prayers in Latin. Two nuns, dressed in black, looked over suspiciously. Wearing a white veil, the officiant May Rega, scoffed with annoyance.

Rega was an active member of her church in Naples and sang in the choir, but she also drifted away from Catholicism due to ruptures with the church and its congregants. As an archaeologist, she loves how specific and detailed Roman religion is, forcing one to check sources, follow the ritual precisely, with no mistakes and with the appropriate citations.

She had carefully put together the flowers, scones and almond milk — because she could not find goat’s milk — for the ceremony and was annoyed when her boyfriend and concelebrant, Daniele Pieri, interrupted the ritual, forcing them to start over.

“When I met her, she said, ‘I am pagan and vegan,’ and I thought ‘Great! I am celiac!’” said Pieri, who works as a sound technician. Pieri left the Catholic Church after the parish priest insisted he could not be harmed by receiving Communion despite being celiac. He said he still has an admiration for Jesus: “If Jesus had prayed to Jupiter, he would have been even cooler.”

For Pieri, Roman religion is a question of identity. “I love this city. I was born in this city, and I want to die in this city,” he said. “When I began to study Roman history and these cults, I found my roots. This is where I come from. This is who I am.”

May Rega, center, speaks during a Communitas Populi Romani gathering on Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome.

 (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

Taking turns, the members of the Communitas made their personal offering to the goddess. Unlike other pagan communities in Rome, the group doesn’t have any initiation rite, and everyone is welcome to join. “The Roman religion is not about saying these are my gods, and there are no others,” Pieri explained.

Chiara Aliboni is a student of history, anthropology and religions from a “very Catholic family” in Perugia was also attending the ceremony. She said she had her conversion to Orthodox Kemetism when she learned about the ancient Egyptians. “I thought, if I am to follow any religion, it’s this one,” she said. While hesitant at first, she found in the Communitas a welcoming home for her beliefs.

Fizzarotti was also pleasantly surprised by the openness of this religion compared with his experiences in the Catholic Church. “I am drawing closer to this community. I am finding many answers that I have been searching for for years,” he said after the rite was completed, and the group reveled in wine and an improvised banquet.

“I am feeling emotional. I deeply felt today’s ritual. It was truly beautiful,” he added.

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The group members gathered their things, leaving nothing behind but the lingering scent of incense. They spoke of plans for creating a temple one day just outside Rome and of upcoming gatherings with other pagan groups. Their faith, believed to have been long lost, is still very much alive, they said.

For Camillini, as the number of Catholics dwindles in the Eternal City, he has had to face reality. “It’s time to give up the delusion of omnipotence, of evangelizing Rome, and abandon the idea of making Rome into a Christian city. It’s no longer our objective and it never was,” he said.

As a rabbi, philosopher and physician, Maimonides wrestled with religion and reason – the book he wrote to reconcile them, ‘Guide to the Perplexed,’ has sparked debate ever since

Faith and reason are often treated as opposites. But some philosophers believe they can only strengthen each other, including the Jewish sage Maimonides, who wrote the famous ‘Guide to the Perplexed.’

February 20, 2024
By  Randy L. Friedman

(The Conversation) — I teach a philosophy of religion seminar titled “Faith and Reason.” Most students who register arrive with a mistaken assumption: that the course explores the differences between the two.

“Faith” is often defined as belief in a supernatural God that transcends reason – and belief that science can only go so far to explain the fundamental mysteries of life. Reason, meanwhile, means inquiry that draws on logic and deductive reasoning.

It seems like a stark choice, an either-or – until we read Maimonides. For Maimonides, a 12th century theologian, philosopher, rabbi and physician, there is no true faith without reason.

Maimonides’ full name was Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, and he is often referred to by the abbreviation “Rambam.” His writings spurred centuries of conflict and were even banned in some Jewish communities. Yet he also penned one of the most famous guides to Jewish law and still stands as one of the most influential rabbis to have ever lived.

It is surprising for many students to learn that Maimonides, who lived in present-day Spain, Morocco and Egypt, embraced reason as the only way to make sense of faith. In this rabbi’s view, the idea of a battle between faith and reason sets boundaries where none need exist.

Faith must be grounded in reason, lest it become superstition. This synthesis is at the heart of Maimonides’ most famous philosophical work, “The Guide for the Perplexed.”
Jerusalem and Athens

Treating faith and reason as if they are at odds is nothing new. Some philosophers have described them as two different cities, as when University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss wrote of “Jerusalem and Athens.”

Both cities love wisdom, Strauss wrote, but attribute it to different things. In “Jerusalem,” where life is grounded by faith in God, “the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord,” Strauss wrote in 1967, quoting the biblical books of Proverbs and Job. In “Athens,” on the other hand, symbolized by the ancient Greek philosophers, “the beginning of wisdom is wonder” – the wonder of inquiry and reason.

Almost 800 years before, however, Maimonides was arguing that true religion, true wisdom, requires both.


A statue of Maimonides in Cordoba, Spain.
Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Rambam was deeply steeped in Jewish learning. As a doctor, astronomer and philosopher, however, he was just as knowledgeable about the science of his day. He ostensibly wrote “The Guide to the Perplexed” to help his student Joseph Ibn Aknin navigate between the truths of philosophy, natural science and revelation.

Maimonides’ understanding of God and the universe mostly agreed with Aristotle’s . In Part II of his “Guide,” Maimonides credits Aristotle with helping to prove three key principles about God: God is incorporeal, without a physical body; God is one; and God transcends the material world. Yet God created the world and set it in motion, Maimonides asserts, and everything in it depends on God for its existence.
Science and scripture

Throughout these chapters, the rabbi does not turn to scripture to prove or disprove philosophical propositions, although he notes that Aristotle’s opinion may be “in accordance with the words of our prophets and our theologians or Sages.”

This does not mean that Maimonides does not care about sacred texts – far from it. Rather, he argues that the truths of science and philosophy must inform how people interpret the Bible.

Many people of faith have read the Book of Genesis’ story of creation literally. For them, God’s creation of humanity “in our image and likeness” means both that God must have a body and that humanity shares much in common with God.

For Maimonides, however, language like these passages in Genesis was allegorical. If reason teaches that God is incorporeal, this means that God has no body; God does not physically see, nor do people see God. God does not speak, sit on a throne, stretch out an arm, rest or become angry. Reading these passages literally misunderstands the nature of God.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this claim. In Maimonides’ view, saying that God has a body is not just incorrect but blasphemous and idolatrous. He sees God as unique and transcendent, irreducible to anything human or material. And if God does not literally speak, then the Bible cannot be the literal word of God.

A letter Maimonides wrote around 1172, discovered in the late 1800s.
Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Maimonides insists that the Bible be appreciated as an esoteric text. Any part of the revealed text that does not fit with a true understanding of God and the universe must be read allegorically.

Reason does not eliminate his faith in God, or the power of scripture. Instead, reason protects people from believing something incorrect about God’s nature. Maimonides insists that we have faith in reason and that reason ground our faith.

The palace of God

Maimonides’ philosophical writing is filled with debate and disagreement between him, fellow rabbis, Jewish philosophers and the Kalam, a medieval tradition of Islamic theology. Reason was the tool needed to make sense of sacred texts, and philosophical inquiry was the process needed to get it right. The goal was truth, not mere obedience.

Toward the end of his “Guide for the Perplexed,” Maimonides lays out what he believes are different levels of enlightenment. The allegory centers on a king’s palace: Only a select few, those who pursue truest wisdom grounded in philosophy and science, will reach the room where the king – God – resides. People guided by faith alone, who accept scripture literally and unquestioningly, and believe that faith transcends reason, on the other hand, “have their backs turned toward the king’s palace,” moving further and further away from God.

Maimonides is considered one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of all time. And his resolution to the debate between faith and reason could not have been clearer: There should be no true conflict. Both reason and revelation are our guides.

(Randy L. Friedman, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Part-Time for All

A Care Manifesto

Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson

Heretical Thought

Description


An innovative view of how everyone doing part-time work and part-time caregiving would promote flourishing families, free time, equality, and the true value of care.

The way that Western countries approach work and care for others is fundamentally dysfunctional. The amount of time spent at work places unsustainable stress on families, particularly in the face of rising inequality, while those who perform care are underpaid and their labor undervalued.

In Part-Time for All, Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson propose a plan to radically restructure both work and care. As such, they offer a solution to four pressing problems: the inequality of caregivers; family stress from competing demands of work and care; chronic time scarcity; and policymakers who are ignorant about the care that life requires--the care/policy divide. Nedelsky and Malleson argue that no capable adult should do paid work for more than 30 hours per week, so that they can contribute substantial amounts of time to unpaid care for family, friends, or other "communities of care." While the authors focus primarily on human-to-human care, they also include care for the earth as a vital part of this shift. All of the elements of Nedelsky and Malleson's proposal already exist piecemeal in various countries. What is needed is to integrate the key reforms and scale them up. The result is an actionable plan to motivate widespread take-up of part-time work and part-time care.

Highlighting how these new norms can create synergies of institutional transformation while fostering a cultural shift in the value of care and work, this "care manifesto" identifies the deep changes that are needed and lays out a feasible path forward.

1933

IN MEMORIUM

03.16.

Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Rafah

This day in 2003, the IDF killed American activist Rachel Corrie as she defended homes in Rafah from destruction. As Israel threatens to invade the city, a volunteer who stood alongside Rachel writes on her legacy — a call for steadfast solidarity with Gazans.

Rachel Corrie, then twenty-three, speaks during a mock trial of US president George W. Bush on March 5, 2003 in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

 (Abid Katib / Getty Images)

BY TOM DALE

Tom Dale is a writer who has worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis, and journalism in the Middle East. Follow his work at @tom_d_.
JACOBIN
03.16.2024

Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south to Rafah, swelling its population to seven times its earlier size.

But now, Israel’s sights are set on Rafah itself — threatening a devastating invasion.

Rafah is today a sprawling city of canvas and plastic sheeting as much as concrete; cold and often sodden, hungry and distraught. Disease is spreading, as people barter what little food they have for medicine, and women tear scraps from tents to use as sanitary towels. Orphans — there may be as many as ten thousand in Rafah — fend as best they can.

Last year, Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling Palestinians to go to “shelters” in Rafah, to escape the fighting. But there are no shelters, and there has been no escape. Early in the war, a friend lost thirty-five members of his extended family in a single air strike on the town. Most were women and children.

More frequent than attacks on Rafah itself, the sound of air strikes echo from the north, an ominous reminder that the worst may yet be to come.

Last month, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that a failure to invade Rafah would be tantamount to his country’s defeat, and that he would order an invasion even if all the Israeli hostages were released.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said that Washington will not support an invasion of Rafah without a “clear” plan to protect civilians, and that no plan has been provided yet. Israeli officials are reported to be working on a scheme to transfer Palestinians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” to the north — where, already, food and medicine are scarcer still, and people have starved to death.

President Joe Biden has said that an invasion of Rafah would be a “red line,” but promised no consequences if Israel crosses that red line, as it has crossed so many others. Netanyahu, as he has before, responded with contempt: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” he said.

“Razed and Bullet-Riddled and Bare”

At the height of the second intifada, in 2002–03, I lived in Rafah as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that supports nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Among my colleagues was Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer from Olympia, Washington State, in the United States, with a zany sense of humor that belied a seriousness about life — and the purpose of it — that I would not fully understand until reading her writing years later. Later to join the group was Tom Hurndall, a talented photographer who was shot through the head by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper in April 2003, and died the next year after a nine-month coma

.

Rachel Corrie. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)

Rafah, even then, was “razed and bullet-riddled and bare,” as Rachel put it in a message to her parents. We spent most nights in the houses of families near the border with Egypt. Israel had been creating an empty strip of land there, demolishing homes to create a free-fire zone, and so a tactical advantage for their troops who occupied positions along the border. Sometimes they warned families to leave with bullhorns. Sometimes they shot into the homes until the families fled. And at any moment of day or night, demolition or not, they might rake the homes on the border’s edge with gunfire.

Not every bullet fired at a wall penetrates the building — but some do, especially those fired from more powerful weapons. Everyone who stayed at our friend Abu Jamil’s house, including Rachel, could not but notice, as they played with his children, the pockmarks left by bullets that struck the interior wall, at head height, over the kitchen sink.

When Palestinians called us, we used to go out to protest Israel’s armored bulldozers as they worked along the border strip, watching them and trying to intercede if they moved to demolish a home. We slowed them down a few times, made it more awkward, gave a family here or there a respite of a few days, or weeks. Perhaps we dragged the global spotlight onto that strip of land more frequently than if we hadn’t been there. But the demolition rumbled on. And the world had other preoccupations: the invasion of Iraq was looming

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Cynthia and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel, with the Nasrallah family. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)

On March 16, 2003, a little after 5:00 p.m., I watched as one of Israel’s US-made bulldozers, huge and hulking, turned toward the house of Dr Samir Nasrallah and his young family. Rachel, a friend of Dr Samir’s, placed herself between the bulldozer and the house. As the bulldozer started toward her, it began to build up a roiling mound of earth in front of its blade. As the mound reached Rachel, she began to climb it, struggling to keep her footing on the soft earth, steadying herself with her hands, until her head was mostly over the level of the blade. The driver might have looked her in the eye. But he ploughed on, and she began to lose her footing.

A few weeks before that day, Rachel had a dream about falling, which she recorded in her journal:

. . . falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react . . . And I heard, “I can’t die, I can’t die,” again and again in my head.

The soil on the Rafah border, an uneven mixture of clay and sand, has a warm hue, not so different from that of the Utah cliffs. From across the years, like much of Rachel’s writing, the nightmare seems to have the quality of a premonition.

Try though she did, Rachel could not keep her footing; the bulldozer pushed on, it dragged her under, pushed her into the earth, crushed her insides. She died as I held her hands in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. In my initial account of the event, written two days later, I noted that ten Palestinians had been killed across Gaza since Rachel, largely without notice beyond the enclave itself.

Rachel Corrie stands in front of an IDF bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, on the day she was killed. (Courtesy of ISM Palestine)

My own friendship with Rachel aside, there is a discomfort in relating this that it is necessary to acknowledge, especially today, in the light of the devastation that Rafah faces. Part of our aim, all those years ago, was to exploit a racist structure of violence, and the racist structure of attention that sits alongside it, in order to undermine those same structures. Some people might believe that such an attempt was always quixotic, or that any bid to exploit such a racist structure, such as our effort to pull international eyes to Gaza, is inevitably to affirm that structure.

Regardless, having made my choice, more than two decades ago, I am committed. Whenever I am asked to speak about Rachel, I do so, not only to honor a friend, but on the theory that perhaps her story is a way to render comprehensible to some people, far from Palestine, broader truths about the violence of occupation, and the politics that make that violence possible. And that those truths lead us ultimately back to Palestinians, and back to Rafah. I believe they lead other places too.

Israel’s military operates under the assumption of impunity. So, when some exceptional event, such as the killing of a non-Palestinian, raises the prospect of accountability, the system is ill prepared to respond. The result is often a series of bizarre lies. In Rachel’s case, the authorities could have stuck to disputing details of our eyewitness testimonies. Instead, they also fabricated the claim that Rachel had “hid behind an earth embankment” and was hit by a falling concrete slab. Our photographs of the scene, both before and after Rachel was killed, showed that she was standing in open ground.

In a familiar pattern, the official response was, in approximate order: we didn’t do it, we did it but it wasn’t our fault, even if it was our fault we aren’t liable, and anyway they were terrorists. The IDF’s commander for the southern Gaza strip at the time of the killing told a Haifa court, presumably with a straight face, that “a terror organisation sent Rachel Corrie to obstruct IDF soldiers. I am saying this in definite knowledge.” Observers of the current war will recall a series of similarly “definite” pronouncements.
Israel’s Impunity Is an American Export

Volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines have always been at the heart of the internationalist tradition. And that remains true today, whether accompanying shepherds and olive-pickers in the hills of the West Bank, running supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war with Russia, giving medical support to the revolutionaries of Myanmar, or fighting the so-called Islamic State group alongside the People’s Protection Units in northeastern Syria. These endeavors, and the people who undertake them, shouldn’t be idealized. But the deep solidarity and connection they embody are unique.The solidarity of volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends.

Still, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t need to be. The solidarity of volunteers needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends. That’s something most people can get involved in somehow. In the case of Palestine, it starts by building public support and political pressure toward a cease-fire and a halt to military aid to Israel. That includes unrelenting pressure on Biden and the defense of congressional advocates of a cease-fire from those who want to punish their stance.

The United States underwrites Israel’s occupation through massive military and financial aid, and it is underwriting the present war on Gaza. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official, told the Washington Post that the administration had facilitated “an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.”

The result, always painfully evident in Rafah, is that Israel’s impunity is an American export. But a withdrawal of support will, in all likelihood, not be enough. Sanctions designed to coerce the recognition of Palestinians’ fundamental rights will be necessary. They will need to go far beyond targeting individual settlers or their supporters.

The call for sanctions is a direct challenge to the main, unspoken tenet of US policy toward Israel. Biden and his subordinates will speak about the need for a Palestinian state, and the need for Israel to show restraint. But their main principle, which has held absolute for three decades and was predominant for decades before that, is that Israel must never be forced to make such concessions. Israel may be cajoled, flattered, persuaded, and nudged, but never compelled. The result is that Palestine is held in a permanent state of exception.

A relative of Dr Nasrallah, the pharmacist whose family home Rachel was defending when she was killed, told me that he felt as though Rafah had been sucked into a “black hole, where international rules do not apply, and the world cannot see or feel us.”

He describes returning home one afternoon to a scene of carnage, the aftermath of an air strike on a neighboring building, in which at least two families were entirely wiped out and another lost two children. (Friends of the Nasrallahs are raising funds to help them out of harm’s way.) The relative, who asked that his name not be used, said that it was now common to see men breaking down in tears at the slightest defeat, unable to provide for their wives or children. “We speak,” he said, “about a fine line between life and death.”

An invasion of Rafah, which may be several weeks away, would be a disaster “beyond imagining,” United Nations doctors say. As Rachel put it a few weeks before she was killed: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”

Killing of Rachel Corrie: A life given in the struggle for Palestinian freedom

US peace activist Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family's home 21 years ago

Ikrame Imane Kouachi |16.03.2024 -



JERUSALEM

In southern Gaza 21 years ago today, American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to stop from reducing the home of a Palestinian family to rubble.

Through her activism in Gaza, Corrie helped bring to light many rights violations perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, becoming a symbol of the Palestinian cause.



Corrie, who devoted her life to defending the rights of Palestinians, was very much taken aback by what was happening under Israeli occupation.

In an email to her mother, Corrie wrote: “It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States.”

She added: “I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons.

“I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere.”

An Israeli investigation concluded that her death was an accident, in findings that has satisfied neither Corrie's parents, nor many others worldwide.

In 2005, Craig and Cindy Corrie filed a civil lawsuit against Israel, asserting that she had either been intentionally killed or that the soldiers had showed criminal negligence. They sued for a symbolic one US dollar in damages.

An Israeli court rejected the lawsuit in 2012, ruling that the Israeli government was not responsible for her death.

The ruling was slammed by human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as activists.

Corrie has since become a symbol of the fight for Palestinian rights.

An Irish aid ship that set out for Gaza in 2010 named itself after Rachel and her story has been told in several documentary films about the plight of Palestinians.

Rachel Corrie

On a Sunday 21 years ago, the 23-year-old American woman was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in the southern town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Since then, she has become an icon of solidarity with the Palestinians.

Born on April 10, 1979, in Olympia, Washington, Rachel Corrie had dedicated her life to human rights, defending Palestinian rights in particular.

In 2003, she traveled to Palestine for her senior-year college assignment — to connect her hometown with Rafah, as part of a sister cities project.

During her stay, she engaged with members of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian non-governmental organization.

There, on March 16, she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, staging a peaceful protest to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition.

She was crushed to death when the bulldozer driver ran her over, according to witnesses.

Gazans received news of her murder with grief and horror, describing her as a "martyr" and staging a massive funeral for the American activist.

Near the home Corrie was protesting to save, Palestinians launched an annual sports championship in her memory.

Many films, plays, and books were written in memory of Corrie, whose name was given to many schools, hospitals and newborn children in Palestine.

The letters Corrie wrote to her family from Palestine were compiled and published as a book with the title, Let Me Stand Alone.

*Writing by Ikram Kouachi

Everybody’s fight’: Palestinians hail the sacrifice of Corrie, Bushnell

People of colour cite a tradition of white allies risking everything to help them.

Lebanese anti-American protesters display a poster of peace activist Rachel Corrie during a demonstration near the US Embassy in Aukar northeast of Beirut, Lebanon 

[File: Bilal Hussein/AP Photo]

By Benay Blend
Published On 16 Mar 2024

Twenty-one years ago today, an Israeli soldier drove an 80,000-pound (26,287kg) bulldozer over a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington. Her name was Rachel Corrie, and she was part of an international team of peace activists who had volunteered to protect Palestinian homes from demolition by Israeli settlers. The US magazine, Mother Jones, gave this account of her final hours:

“At two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. ‘The Israelis are back,’ she told Corrie. ‘Get over here right away. I think they’re heading for Dr. Samir’s house.’ The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.

Certain that the pharmacist’s house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighbourhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played football – badly but enthusiastically – with local youths. At 2:30pm, a neighbour of Nasrallah’s named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. “Come inside and have some tea,” he urged her. But Corrie told him she did not have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading towards the roar of machinery.

This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.”

Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse.

Palestinians in Gaza hailed her as a “martyr”, holding a massive funeral for her, dedicating an annual football tournament to her memory, renaming a street in the West Bank for her, and building a shrine to her strewn with wreaths and olive branches.

On the fourth anniversary of her death, Palestinian youth activists organised a permanent art exhibit of Corrie’s personal belongings at a government site in Rafah, from which they hung placards that expressed sentiments such as “Rachel Corrie died as a Palestinian” and “We welcome her in the highest esteem and honour.”

Every year, on the anniversary of her death, Arab newspapers commemorate her sacrifice, and Palestinian scholars and diplomats pay homage to her.

A United States Marines jacket, flowers and candles are placed outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington at a memorial for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty United States Air Force member who died after setting himself on fire outside the embassy in an act of protest against the war in Gaza 

[Bonnie Cash/Reuters]

‘Sacrificed everything for Palestinians’

In a YouTube video posted Friday, Lowkey, a British hip hop artist of Iraqi ancestry cited Corrie’s death to rebuke narratives that date the current conflict only back to Hamas’ attack on Israeli settlers last year, saying, “Rachel Corrie died as a US citizen defending Palestinian homes in Gaza. . . this didn’t begin on October 7th. Rachel Corrie represented the conscience of humanity. Through her, that basic aversion to watching human suffering was channelled. She gave her life to the Palestinian cause.”

Corrie’s sacrifice has special resonance this year, however, not just because of Israel’s five-month siege and blockade of Gaza, but because of the equally shocking death of Aaron Bushnell nearly three weeks ago.

On the afternoon of February 25, Bushnell, dressed in his US Air Force uniform, livestreamed himself while walking to the Israeli embassy in Washington while calmly declaring his intentions.

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Once he had reached the front steps outside the embassy, he poured a flammable liquid atop his buzz-cut head, lit himself on fire, and shouted “Free Palestine!” several times before collapsing in a heap onto the pavement.

As was the case following Corrie’s death 21 years earlier, Palestinians and antiwar activists hailed the 25-year-old Bushnell as a “martyr”.

In a statement published on Telegram a few days after his death, Hamas wrote that the US pilot ” immortalised his name as a defender of human values and the oppression of the suffering Palestinian people because of the American administration and its unjust policies”. Continuing, Hamas wrote admiringly of Bushnell’s effort to highlight the “massacres and Zionist genocide” against Palestinians.

Similarly, the mayor of the Palestinian town of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, named a street for Bushnell only days after his death, declaring that he “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians.

“We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. There were no social, economic or political ties between us. What we share is a love for freedom and a desire to stand against these attacks [on Gaza],” Sidro told a small crowd assembled on the new Aaron Bushnell Road, which adjoins a street named after the iconic Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. In Yemen, Bushnell’s image can be seen on billboards across the capital city of Sanaa. And in Portland, Oregon, a group of US military veterans burned their uniforms in a gesture of solidarity with Bushnell.

Jericho City Councilman Amani Rayan, who grew up in Gaza and moved to the occupied West Bank to study when he was a teenager, told the Guardian newspaper: “He [Bushnell] sacrificed the most precious thing, whatever your beliefs. This man gave all his privileges for the children of Gaza.”

In his YouTube video released Friday, Lowkey noted that Bushnell was mocked, just as Corrie was ridiculed as a “pancake” by Israelis following her death. He said: And much in the same way that Rachel Corrie was mocked after his death, we saw an outpouring of fake posts– produced who knows where– so in his death Aaron Bushnell was smeared.”

Although the media in the US has suggested that Bushnell was suffering from depression or mental illness, Lowkey and others point to his words that indicate clearly that the motivation for his self-immolation was his concern for the Palestinians’ plight. In his will, he wrote, “If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”

Said Lowkey, “What Aaron Bushnell and Rachel Corrie were responding to was a political system that has invested in the genocide of Palestinians and they stated their objection to that relationship with their bodies. These are wounds of humanity; these are a testament to the universality of the Palestinian cause. The holding of the picture of Aaron Bushnell from Gaza to Yemen pays tribute to the fact that the Palestinian cause is not a cause for one group of people only; it is a cause for all of humanity.”

A man holds up a sign during a ‘Muslims in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza’ rally in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles, California July 25, 2014 

[Lucy Nicholson/Reuters]

A tradition of white allyship

Corrie’s parents say that their daughter calculated – wrongly – that her white skin would protect her in a way that it did not immunize Arabs, although on the same day that she died, nine Palestinians were killed, including a four-year-old girl and a 90-year-old man, with none meriting so much as a mention in the Western news media. Human Rights Monitor reported that, during Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli tanks have “deliberately” run over several Palestinians defending their homes or land, fatally injuring them. The Western media has largely ignored these deaths.

Commenting on social media in recent weeks, many Americans have noted that questioning the motives of white allies who articulate solidarity with racialised groups is consistent with a US tradition in which the media typically portrays white dissidents – from the abolitionist John Brown to the slain civil rights activists David Goodman and Michael Schwerner – as demented, naive or cynical in an effort to delegitimise resistance movements. Similarly, Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife who was killed while shuttling African American volunteers registering voters in Selma Alabama – was called a “whore” by some whites and the late director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover, said that she was having sex with her Black passenger when she was killed.

That signals to supporters of both Corrie and Bushnell that acts of solidarity, especially when it is interracial, jeopardise imperialist projects by beginning to change hearts and minds. At a memorial for Bushnell, Mike Prysner, an Iraqi war veteran, contextualised Bushnell within a long line of soldiers and veterans whose antiwar leadership helped end the war in Vietnam.

“It can again for Gaza,” Prysner said at a memorial for Bushnell.

In an interview, Rabab Abdulhadi, the Palestinian-born associate professor of ethnic studies, race and resistance studies and the founding director of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas studies at San Francisco State University, noted the proliferation and long history of solidarity movements, from Palestinians supporting Spaniards in the Spanish civil war against Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, the support of Palestinian resistance movements by African American activists such as Malcolm X, and Che Guevara’s visit to Palestine just months after the Cuban revolution toppled the US-backed government of Fulgencio Battista.

In an unpublished 2015 interview with a book author, Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of a radical, far-left organisation, the Weather Underground, said that her activism was inspired by seeing the news coverage of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered by a mob of white men in Mississippi in 1955. She was struck, she said, by the fact that she was the same age as the boy whose mutilated body had been dragged from a swamp.

“It was one of the things that taught me that when white people say they hate violence”, she said, “they don’t really hate violence. What they really mean is that they hate violence against them. The whole idea behind the Weather Underground was, as we stated, to bring the [Vietnam] war home and have white people feel just a fraction of the violence that they were visiting on Black and brown people all over the world.”

The Weather Underground was formed as a response to the state’s assassination of the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, and is part of a tradition of white allies – sometimes violent – who emerged after World War II to provide material support to resistance movements by people of colour, and include the West German organisation, Rote Armee Fraktion (known as The Red Army Faction or the Baader-Meinhof group), as well as white, Jewish anti-apartheid fighters such as Ronnie Kasrils, Ruth First (who was assassinated by apartheid-era security forces) and her husband, Joe Slovo, the head of South Africa’s communist party. So beloved was Slovo, in fact, that his 1995 funeral procession in the all-Black Johannesburg township of Soweto was long regarded as the largest in Soweto’s history until it was surpassed in 2018 upon the death of Winnie Mandela.

While Liuzzo was not as radical as Slovo, she might be as beloved by Blacks in the US as Slovo is by Black South Africans. Watching televised accounts of law enforcement’s savage attack on the more than 500 peaceful, African American protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, the 39-year-old mother of five was moved to tears while watching Martin Luther King’s televised appeal for people of conscience to help register Black voters, and decided at that moment to heed King’s call and make the trip to Selma in her ’63 Oldsmobile.

Shuttling a Black volunteer from Montgomery to Selma on the night of March 25th, 1965, Liuzzo was accosted by a car carrying four Ku Klux Klan members, and shot dead, her car veering into a ditch.

On the afternoon she left for Alabama, though, her husband, a business agent for the Teamsters, arrived home to find his wife packing a suitcase. He tried desperately to dissuade her from going, but she would have none of it. As she opened the front door to their home to leave, suitcase in hand, he made one final, desperate plea.

“Vi,” he said, “this isn’t your fight.”

“This,” she said, “is everybody’s fight.” And with that, she turned to walk out the door, heading south.

'You are supporting Israel solely for the reason that they look like you. Light hair, light eyes'

A widely circulated video shows an activist being given two minutes to explain why she supports Palestine during an event at the Raleigh City Council in North Carolina, United States.


March 16, 2024 

IN MEMORIUM

Aaron Bushnell Opposed ‘All State-Sanctioned Violence’ — Not Just the War in Gaza

Before his self-immolation, Aaron Bushnell supported his friend’s conscientous objection and deeply regretted joining the military.

By Chris Lombardi

March 16, 2024

Source: Waging Nonviolence

Credit: Elvert Barnes / Flickr



Levi Pierpont’s voice was steady, the day I called him to ask about his friend Aaron Bushnell. “He was the sweetest guy you’d ever meet.”

The 23-year-old Air Force veteran was talking about one of his military peers — whose name was suddenly everywhere. Four days earlier, on Feb. 25, Bushnell had set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza.

I’d reached out to Pierpont because he’d left the military last year as a conscientious objector, long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that burst the blister of Israel’s long siege. As someone who has spent much of the last 20 years writing about such servicemembers, I wanted to know more about Pierpont’s journey, and his response to his friend’s far more visible and permanent act of conscience.

In the three weeks since that day, Bushnell’s name has been spoken often at the near-daily Gaza protests across the country — especially those organized by veterans of the U.S. military. Last week, artist-activists got his words on the New York City subway, replacing ads with his final statement on social media: “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.”

Pierpont talked to me shortly before The Guardian published his op-ed: “Aaron Bushnell was my friend. May he never be forgotten.” When I talked to him it was still very fresh; his voice trembled a little as he described his journey, one he wishes Bushnell had shared more fully.

They met in May 2020 at Goodfellow Air Force Base, at the beginning of basic military training. Bushnell arrived almost too late to start training; Pierpont said he “stood up for me” when Pierpont felt harassed. Bushnell’s bonhomie was a salve, Pierpont told me, amid basic training’s stereotypically loud atmosphere. Both were moving beyond their restrictive Christian families — Pierpont’s in evangelical Michigan, Bushnell the secretive Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts. And both were going on to work with intelligence with high-level security clearances.

“[W]henever people in basic training would talk about me or would talk about him, we would stick up for each other. And he always stuck up for me,” Pierpont told “Democracy Now!” on Feb. 28. They spoke and texted often, even after basic training ended and they pursued different divisions of Air Force Tech School,Bushnell for cybersecurity and Pierpont for Operations Intelligence. Pierpont later started to ask the questions that would ultimately lead him to seek discharge as a conscientious objector, just as Bushnell was exulting on social media, “Man, the Air Force does some cool-ass shit.”

Still, Bushnell’s own doubts about the institution would grow after he was a firm member of the 571st Cyber Division, with access to real-time intel about what the Air Force was up to. The two of them didn’t talk much at Tech School, but did once they were at their respective bases, Pierpont at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Bushnell staying in Texas at Lackland AFB.

By then, Pierpont had left Operations Intelligence behind. At Tech School, learning to develop “intelligence products” assembled with Microsoft PowerPoint, he was bemused by its focus on Russia and training products he called “Secret YouTube and secret Wikipedia.” Less amusing was a video in which his whole class watched the death of an enemy combatant. Pierpont found himself feeling bad for the guy’s family, even if he was one of the terrorists they were being trained to hate. When “a bunch of my classmates laughed at that video,” Pierpont realized he wasn’t one of them. He asked to change classifications, so he wouldn’t be so directly involved in violent “operations.”

At Minot, Pierpont was 2ROX1, a Maintenance Management Analyst — in charge of generating and monitoring data on the maintenance of Air Force planes and equipment. It wasn’t a stress-free gig, though; all that data was in service of weapons of war, like Minot’s 488,000-pound B-52 bombers. “It was very traumatic for me to think about those aircraft,” Pierpont told me. After nearly a year, he contacted the Center for Conscience and War, and began working on his application for conscientious objection, or CO. He told his friend Aaron about it all “and he was really supportive,” he said.

In June 2023, Bushnell said on Reddit that he agreed with Pierpont, noting that “Apparently it’s very doable to become a ‘conscientious objector’ on religious grounds even after voluntarily enlisting. It’s a bit of a process and it takes about a year, but there are organizations to help guide you through it and the success rate is very high.”

But in his case, Bushnell said, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract, as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”

Pierpont, who now identifies as more of a Buddhist than a Christian, said he had told Bushnell that CO wasn’t only for religious resisters, but respected his commitment not to break his contract. Still, Bushnell told Pierpont that he “wanted to take a stand against all state-sanctioned violence.”

The last time they saw one another was in January 2024 in Toledo, Ohio, after Bushnell moved to Akron for SkillBridge (a transition program for members about to separate). They talked about Pierpont’s CO discharge, which had been approved in July 2023; they did not talk about what happened two months later, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. “We never talked about Gaza” he said. Pierpont felt it was due to his own “centrist” position on the conflict, since Bushnell was on Reddit describing Israel as a “settler-colonialist apartheid state.” Back then, said Pierpont, “the Gaza war felt complex to me … but that was before 30,000 were dead.” And in the meantime, Bushnell was learning more about what he considered U.S. complicity in those deaths.

Afghanistan veteran Jeremy Lyle Rubin, pointed out in The Nationthat “The U.S. Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting.” He added that the U.S. is contributing to “what the political scientist Robert Pape has called ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history, [now sitting] comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.’”

Given Pierpont’s Buddhism, I asked him if he knew about the high-profile Buddhist CO, Aidan Delgado. He had not; neither did he know about Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire nearly 60 years ago, to protest the U.S. war against Vietnam.

I don’t mention Morrison in my book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,”a history that focuses on dissenting military personnel like Pierpont and Bushnell, drawn on those I spoke to daily in the 1990s as a staffer with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Many of the latter were like Pierpont, describing how military service had triggered a moral crisis that made it impossible to stay in the military.

The book does describe the all-hands movement against the Vietnam War, which included many Quakers like Morrison, whose fiery death, on Nov. 2, 1965, came as the U.S. war against Vietnam was metastasizing. At his Baltimore Quaker meeting, Morrison and his wife Anne watched, worried and prayed as more than 100,000 servicemembers were shipped to Vietnam and TV screens showed the massive bombing of North Vietnam by American fighter planes.

Morrison’s revelation of “what I must do” was triggered, his wife wrote, by an account in Paris-Match of the incineration of families in the village of Can Tho. “I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits,” a French priest told the author, Yves Larteguy. “I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it’s not possible!” Morrison circled that sentence in the clipping of the article he mailed to Anne from the Pentagon, just before he poured kerosene on himself and lit the match in full view of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Though it still took 10 years for that war to end, Morrison’s act helped catalyze the sustained anti-war movement that shaped how it ended.

As Colonel Ann Wright points out, the death of Morrison and others “mobilized the anti-war community,” with years of weekly vigils at the U.S. Capitol that ultimately persuaded members of Congress to stand up against the war, the first of whom was Rep. George Brown. “After the Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the names of the war dead, Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying congressional immunity from arrest.”

Perhaps hoping to build similar momentum to end the war in Gaza, Veterans for Peace and About Face — the antimilitarist group formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War — swung into action after Bushnell’s death. They expressed regret that he never connected with either organization. In Portland, some About Face members burned their uniforms, and the group has seen a surge of new members since those protests.

In addition to these actions, a separate “autonomous network of active duty service members across nearly all U.S. Armed Forces branches have released an open letter condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” journalist Talia Jane tweeted on March 4.

Activists have still had complex responses to Bushnell’s “extreme act of protest,” wondering whether self-immolation damages the movements they’d hoped to propel — in addition to the damage to their families. Anne Morrison writes that she and her three children suppressed their pain and rage for years. Advocates for servicemembers and veterans raised the alarm that valorizing Bushnell’s death would do nothing to abate the already-high suicide rates in both populations.

Nonetheless, Bushnell’s name has been invoked frequently by the “Vote Uncommitted” movement, an electoral pressure campaign that made a noticeable impact on the primaries in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia and Washington State.

Many of the vigils broadcast Bushnell’s last words, livestreamed on Twitch before he lit the match: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. 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.” Those words have been ubiquitous on the internet ever since.

So has the voice of Levi Pierpont, who is now volunteering for volunteering with the Center on Conscience and War and active with the divestment coalition at Michigan State University. “I want people to remember that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message,” he said in his interview with “Democracy Now!,” which has played at numerous vigils. “I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to.” But after seeing the way the media responded to Bushnell’s immolation, he added, “it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I just — I want people to remember his message.”

Aaron Bushnell's Sacrifice Was a Deeply Loving Act

War resister Rory Fanning reflects on Aaron Bushnell’s legacy.

RORY FANNING 

MARCH 14, 2024  

People in London gather on February 29, 2024, to collectively mourn U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of an Israeli embassy in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

PHOTO BY RASID NECATI ASLIM VIA GETTY IMAGES


This article was originally published by Tempest Magazine.


It was 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning when I watched Aaron Bushnell pour accelerant over his head and light his military uniform and self on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.

My kids were still sleeping. My wife was upstairs preparing to start another week of teaching first graders. Water for oatmeal and coffee heated on the stove. The sun cast an unseasonably warm light through the window over the sink in our kitchen.

I learned of Aaron’s name via text from my friend Spenser Rapone, who famously opened his dress blues at his West Point graduation to reveal a Che Guevara T-shirt. Spenser then renounced the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His military career ended with the protest, his conscience fully intact. Spenser’s text that morning read:

Aaron Bushnell.

Now that’s personal courage.

Truly we are led by the most gutless cowards.

I Googled Aaron’s name. ​”Active-Duty Air Force Member Self-immolates in Front of Israeli Embassy,” one headline declared at the time. I found the video.

As Aaron walked down the street, his cell phone broadcasting through Twitch, I knew I was about to watch something horrifying and gruesome. ​“You owe it to Aaron to watch,” I told myself, trusting my ability to block out what I was about to see before my kids walked down the stairs that morning.

Writing about my time in the military, my experience as a war resister for the last 15 years and the deadly consequences of U.S. imperialism, I’ve grown accustomed to compartmentalizing my feelings around my kids and wife. (Although I’m sure they could point to many examples that contradict that.) I thought I would be OK that morning.

I was struck by how calm Aaron was as he addressed the camera.

He talked about the genocide in Gaza and refusing to be complicit in it. He also spoke of the ruling class normalizing the kind of death he was about to show us.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The sun was bright overhead as he walked to his final destination. It seemed too sunny, too nice of a day, for what I was about to see. Aaron reached the Israeli embassy, placed his phone on the ground at an upward angle, walked up the driveway and stood in front of a black gate that looked like it was made of iron spears. Aaron then doused himself with a liquid stored in a large navy blue water bottle covered in bright stickers. The fuel looked like water. He bent over and had a hard time with the lighter. Yet his hands weren’t visibly shaking. I rooted for it not to light.


Then it happened. The fire grabbed hold of his pant leg. The flames were in control now. My blood started racing. Aaron yelled ​“Free Palestine” as fire rushed up his leg and back. His yell turned to a visceral scream. Aaron’s government issued boots pounded the pavement in a heavy stomp. For a second, the thought of the U.S. military burning Pat Tillman’s uniform after he was killed in an act of friendly fire in Afghanistan flashed in my head. Aaron wasn’t running or rolling on the ground trying to put out the flames. He was in complete control of his protest. I wondered what I would do at that moment. How would I handle the pain Aaron was experiencing? My body tensed.

Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.

The air was then sucked out of his lungs. It looked like his mouth was moving but there was only silence, as a cop — who would come to represent the antithesis of Aaron — moved into frame hunched over a weapon drawn on Aaron’s burning body. Aaron was still standing. I imagined every memory from his short and now hallowed life flashed before him.

Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.


The water boiled on the stove.

Repressing the anxiety and shock I was now feeling, I made the coffee, sprinkled blueberries and cinnamon over the oatmeal and started cleaning. More than usual. Everything was in order when the kids walked down the stairs. I felt an urgent love for them. I gave them both a kiss through their messy bed heads. I didn’t want to stop moving so I made eggs, carved up an apple and filled their orange juice glasses.

I asked them how they slept. ​“Good,” they both wearily answered as they ate their breakfast.

I was living. Not on fire. My kids were in front of me.

After breakfast, I sat down in the living room, opened my phone and tried to take a few calm, deep breaths. I sent a text to Spenser.

Jesus.

I just watched the video.

I couldn’t say more.

I opened Twitter and the first picture I saw was of a leveled city block in Gaza. I tried to guess how many bodies were under the rubble. It’s likely there were hundreds. Many undoubtedly experienced the same fiery death as Aaron, yet it was Aaron’s image that I couldn’t shake. Sometimes a photo that holds hundreds of dead bodies can be less haunting than an image that holds one. The mind is strange.

I scrolled and saw a story about an ambulance in Rafah that had been bombed the night prior. Then I scrolled to see the last pictures of yet another Palestinian family that had been wiped out by a U.S.-funded airstrike.


A billboard in Sana’a, Yemen, commemorates Bushnell. The billboard reads, “Martyr for Refusing the American Genocide.”

PHOTO BY MOHAMMED HAMOUD/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES


In the days since Aaron lit himself on fire, I haven’t slept much. I’ve thought a lot about the genocide that drove Aaron to such a protest. I’ve read about other massacres carried out against Palestinians, like Operation Protective Edge when Israel slaughtered 2,251 people in 2014. And Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 when more than 1,400 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, with the blessing of the United States. And the innumerable people who have been killed since and before the 1948 Nakba.

I also reread articles about Chelsea Manning’s revelations that showed how only a select few highly vetted reporters were allowed to cover the war in Iraq — a war where the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Many were burned alive. The United States had learned much from the holocaust that was the Vietnam War, when images of death and destruction were broadcast into homes across America on a nightly basis. There would be no such images shared on mainstream news channels from Iraq and Afghanistan. Social media is changing things.

The military taught me that, for some, death carried out from a great distance is not as haunting and disturbing as death executed in close quarters. Paul Tibbets, the Air Force pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima proudly stated that he ​“never lost a night’s sleep on the deal.” If that same guy personally watched children burn — like Aaron burned — after his bomb detonated maybe he would have lost a night or two of sleep. Unless, of course, he was a sociopath. Lucky for Tibbets, he couldn’t see what he had participated in flying at 31,000 feet.

Aaron’s death was a lot of things. Above all it was intimate. You and I could look into his eyes as he died. We could see his dignity and honor up close. We could almost feel his immense suffering. The genocide in Gaza is also intimate. At least more so than the recent mass murders the United States has helped carry out. We’ve seen young babies die in their parents’ arms and in hospital emergency rooms, sometimes on the floor because there are no beds. Now there are no hospitals in Gaza, so we mostly see children dying in the streets. It’s this intimacy that the ruling class — that Aaron referenced — is most fearful of. Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.

Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.


Aaron showed us how deep our capacity for love and care can run, even for those we have never met. People who try to dismiss Aaron’s sacrifice and protest suppress their own capacity for love and their innate bond with humanity that extends well beyond our closest relations.

I haven’t fully processed Aaron’s sacrifice. I imagine I never will. I will, however, continue to think about his unsuppressed love of humanity. As frightening and challenging as it is to try to put ourselves in the shoes of others experiencing pain and oppression, there is purpose and life in the action. Especially when we can use that sense of connection to stand courageously with those who are most vulnerable to the wanton greed and pathological destruction of the ruling class, as Aaron did.

Connection — not racism, not murder, not indifference — is at the core of who we are. Aaron’s death was a stark reminder of this. He showed us the depths of his soul, and for those who were looking close enough, he showed us ourselves.


RORY FANNING is the author of Worth Fighting For, recently released from Haymarket Books. He walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008 – 2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion.

The Obscene US Profiteering From Israeli War and Occupation

It’s not just the defense industry — plenty of US-based corporations do business with Israel and are complicit in its violation of Palestinian human rights in Gaza and beyond. Here are some of the worst offenders.

An Israeli army battle tank moves along the border between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip on January 31, 2024. 

(Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)

BYNICK FRENCH
 03.16.2024
This article was originally published by Dollars & Sense.

Since it began in mid-October of last year, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of 29,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians — including 19,000 women and children. Israeli government ministers have made statements that strongly suggest they are aiming at the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on January 26 that Israel may be in violation of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and ordered it to immediately cease violations, including its killing of Palestinians.


Meanwhile, despite increasing evidence of Israeli war crimes, the US government has offered unconditional support to the offensive, apart from perfunctory pleas that Israel exercise “restraint” and respect human rights. The Biden administration has requested $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel from Congress, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion in aid the United States already sends annually.

That aid has been held up in Congress; but in December 2023, President Joe Biden twice circumvented the legislature to sell weapons to Israel, with a total value exceeding $200 million. All this is taking place in the context of decades of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a proliferating and increasingly violent settler movement that continues to displace Palestinians, and what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations have described as a system of apartheid.

The long-standing Israeli occupation and the current war on Gaza are big business for many US-based defense contractors. But beyond military suppliers, many US corporations have substantial investments in Israel. These companies are also complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses — and as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long recognized, putting pressure on these companies may be crucial to changing Israeli policy.

The Defense Racket

The US corporations with the most direct complicity in Israeli crimes, of course, are military contractors. According to Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, writing for the investigative news website Eyes on the Ties, five of the six biggest weapons manufacturers in the world are based in the United States. Those are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon).

Disturbingly, but unsurprisingly, many of these companies saw their stock prices shoot up when Israel’s war on Gaza began, Gott and Seidman reported. And weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war. Discussing the conflict on an earnings call on October 24, RTX CEO Greg Hayes declared, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” On General Dynamics’s earnings call the following day, the company’s CFO and executive vice president Jason Aiken said, “If you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”Weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war.

There can be little doubt that Israeli forces are using these weapons to commit war crimes against Palestinians. As Stephen Semler reported in Jacobin, many of the specific weapons that the Biden administration has sent to Israel have been repeatedly used to commit war crimes in the past. This includes Hellfire missiles, artillery shells, and assault rifles that have been used to kill clearly identified civilians. It also includes white phosphorus, which Semler describes as “a brutal incendiary weapon capable of burning straight through flesh, bone, and even metal” that is outlawed for use near civilians by Protocol III of the Geneva Conventions. Israel has used white phosphorus repeatedly, including in the current war.

Profiting From War, Occupation, and Apartheid

Looking beyond weapons companies and their investors, plenty of other US corporations are profiting from the brutal assault on Gaza and the Israeli occupation and apartheid more generally.

The BDS movement is targeting a number of international corporations for consumer boycott campaigns, which are “carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid,” according to a statement on the BDS website. Among the companies based in the United States are Hewlett-Packard (and its enterprise and government services spin-off Hewlett-Packard Enterprises), Chevron, and real estate company RE/MAX.

Hewlett-Packard provides computer hardware and other technology to the Israeli military, police, and government offices. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises provides servers for the country’s Immigration and Population Authority, which BDS says Israel uses “to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Energy giant Chevron, meanwhile, extracts gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean; according to BDS, it provides the Israeli state with billions of dollars in revenue in gas-licensing payments. In addition, according to BDS, Chevron is:

implicated in Israel’s illegal transfer of extracted fossil gas to Egypt through a pipeline illegally crossing the Palestinian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in Gaza, owing Palestinians millions in transit fees. It is also potentially complicit in Israeli pillage of Palestinian gas reserves offshore the occupied Gaza Strip, a war crime under international law.

In 2017, SOMO, an Amsterdam think tank that investigates multinational corporations, produced an extensive report on Noble Energy’s involvement in the violation of Palestinian rights connected to its extraction of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean — the company was acquired by Chevron in 2020. In addition to participating in illegally blocking the Palestinian Authority’s access to its small gas reserves off the coast of Gaza via collaboration with Israel’s navy, SOMO reports that its extraction activities in Israeli gas fields could be draining Palestinian gas reserves as well.

“By failing to make efforts to assure Palestinian consent to gas extraction from [Israeli gas fields contiguous with Palestinian gas reserves],” SOMO concluded, “Noble Energy has failed to comply with the OECD Guidelines [for Multinational Enterprises] and [the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights] and conduct appropriate human rights due diligence to identify and prevent potential adverse human rights impacts.” Their report continues:

The company has also potentially contributed to a violation of the collective right of self-determination. Furthermore, if Palestinian natural gas was indeed drained . . . it could be argued that Noble Energy participated in an act of pillage, in violation of international humanitarian and criminal law.

RE/MAX markets and sells property on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. The Israeli settler movement has long committed violent attacks against Palestinians, often with the implicit or explicit blessing of the Israeli armed forces. It has only grown bolder and more violent since the start of the war. Other US corporations that do business in Israel and have been singled out by BDS for divestment or other forms of pressure campaigns (though not complete boycotts) include Intel, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Airbnb, Expedia, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Papa John’s.

Following the example of other successful boycott and divestment campaigns, BDS selects only a handful of companies as targets in order to maximize the impact of its campaigns. But these companies are only the tip of the iceberg. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) maintains a more comprehensive list of companies complicit in various aspects of Israeli occupation and apartheid. Plenty of US-based corporations are, no surprise, to be found on their list as well.

Leaving aside weapons suppliers, among the other prominent and particularly egregious offenders is Caterpillar Inc., the construction machinery and equipment manufacturer, whose D9 armored bulldozer is frequently used by the Israeli military. Israel has deployed Caterpillar D9s to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and other buildings in the occupied territories, as well as in attacks on Gaza that kill civilians. In 2003, US activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by one of these bulldozers “as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home from being demolished while the family was still inside,” according to the AFSC.US trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state

ExxonMobil Corporation and Valero, not to be outdone by Chevron’s violations of human rights, provide fuel for the Israeli aircraft that have been relentlessly bombarding Gaza for the past few months. Motorola Solution Inc., the communications and surveillance company, has long provided the surveillance technology that Israel uses to monitor Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements and at separation walls and checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Travel and tourism company TripAdvisor, meanwhile, is involved in the occupation in a more mundane way: like Airbnb, its websites frequently list and act as booking agents for properties in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.

Overall, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, in 2022 the United States exported $20 billion worth of goods and services to Israel, accounting for 13.3 percent of the latter’s total imports. Israel in turn exported $30.6 billion to the United States, with that figure amounting to 18.6 percent of all Israeli exports. US trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state.

The Importance of Economic Boycotts

The BDS movement is partly inspired by the decades-long anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa’s system of apartheid. The boycotts began when African National Congress leader Albert Luthuli called for them in 1958, and the UK-based Boycott Movement (later the Anti-Apartheid Movement) was founded the next year. It initially called for a boycott of South African goods, but expanded to demand total disinvestment from and economic sanctions on South Africa.

Eventually, the international pressure created by the Anti-Apartheid Movement helped bring an end to South African apartheid. The hope of BDS supporters is that a similar movement might one day help bring about an end to Israel’s oppression of Palestine.

Right now, the prospects for ending Israeli occupation and apartheid anytime soon look quite dim. The immediate demand that advocates for Palestine are pushing in the United States is a permanent cease-fire in Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza; some activists have also been protesting and attempting to disrupt US weapons sales to Israel. In the long run, though, achieving justice in Palestine will likely require pressuring our own government, and the many US companies who are currently complicit in Israeli crimes, to change course.

Republished from Dollars & Sense.