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Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of February 26
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
Israel-Gaza war: More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy (BBC)
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US Airman Sets Himself on Fire by Israeli Embassy:
Source appears Greyzone affiliated so I'm still taking it with a grain of salt but Bushnell didn't kill himself for another country's war; he killed himself because the biden admin was deploying air force troops to support Israel: https://fxtwitter.com/i/status/1762196403969728851/
Not a fan of the argument that he was just mentally ill and too online and radicalized by Internet leftists. Not sure what realistic options someone being forced to directly support a genocide has other than protest suicide or dishonorable discharge, which would immediately tarnish your record anyway.
Perhaps instead of calling into question his mental faculties those who would make such arguments should consider for themselves what would compel a 25 year old with, ostensibly, his whole life ahead of him to "throw it all away" in such an act of desperation.
Perhaps they should consider more deeply which side of history they will end up on.
Well you could be dishonorably discharged and work to support the cause you wanted to have helped for starters.
It is mind boggling to me how casually people are suggestion suicide by immolation as "yeah seems reasonable, it was either that or get a bad record".
Well mental illness and radicalization for one. Especially since so long as I can support an issue while alive, I see little reason to protest it with my death.
I’ll keep my opinions to myself on most of this topic, but I will chime in to say that a dishonorable discharge is basically the military equivalent of a felony. You become ineligible for a lot of military benefits, you are prohibited from owning a firearm, lose access to loans, and lose many job opportunities. So it isn’t a particularly light decision to make.
It is still far lighter than suicide
Is it? Is knowing that you may never be able to hold a fulfilling, well-paying job again really that good? Especially if you are depressed, etc, being dead is much better than resigning yourself to a life of homelessness, etc. Normally I wouldn't comment something like this on a comment that's a couple days old, but in this case, it's a point of empathy that people need to understand. The military is always told "go to mental health! It won't affect your career! And if it does, it's better to be unemployed than dead!" To someone who truly is in that situation, there's a good chance that they see being dead as preferable to unemployment and all the extra difficulty that will come from that. If depression is that bad when you have a well-paying job, being depressed without a job at all will be hell.
The problem is a person who is suicidal already feels like life is pretty hard to live already obviously, right? I 100% agree that this person probably could’ve achieved a lot more for Palestine without burning himself to death, and that everything you say, from a tactics perspective is totally correct. However, does it offer any relief to the person who is suicidal to ask them to “how about instead of killing yourself you just work even harder than you’re already struggling to do and accept a lifelong stain on your honor held by your peers and go talk to a therapist?” ?
I also just wanna make this clear: I agree with the idea that mental illness is a necessary component of any suicide, including this one. That being said though, I don’t believe that 100% of mental illnesses are purely caused by irrational or disordered thinking, and are best addressed by simply “funding the mental healthcare system better” or whatever, and that many widespread mental health struggles are actually principally caused by our values systems, and how we organize ourselves. I mean, we literally have known since 1899 that there is a significant sociological component to suicide. And in this case, I think it’s pretty obvious that this dude felt completely hopeless about not just effecting any kind of meaningful justice within his lifetime, but even limiting his complicity to a level that he could accept. Now the question you have to ask yourself is, was that hopelessness actually the product of disordered thinking? Because even if you can understand even a tiny bit why somebody would feel hopeless in this way I don’t think you can call it disordered thinking and if you can’t call it disordered thinking then I really think that vaguely gesturing towards the broken mental health care system is not addressing the real issue here. and if you’re actually interested in preventing these sorts of tragedies from happening more in the future, you really should be interested in finding ways to help people who are not experiencing disordered thinking to feel less hopeless.
I mean, you'll probably get a less than honorable discharge instead of a DD. You gotta rape and murder to get a DD, really, but I could see disobeying an order pissing someone off enough to do the paperwork for it...
But at the same time, hot button media issue? Less than honorable, chapter them out quietly and hope the guy leaves quietly.
I suspect you’d ultimately be right, although given the issues with IT airmen as of late, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would’ve made an example of him.
You're not wrong, it's really a flip of the coin.
I had a much angrier comment but I deleted it in favor of this: when the choice is between being undermined as whistleblowers always are in America and making a very clear statement, and when the stakes are this high, I understand it. This is about more than any single one of us. This is about 40,000 dead civilians. There's nothing "casual" about it.
Where is this happening? Because it’s not in this thread, and I haven’t seen it elsewhere either.
Perhaps I have merely missed it and you have seen it somewhere, but blaming this on “radicalization” (and therefore leftism implicitly) instead of desperation brought on by a horrible situation – sans evidence – is more than a little crass.
Mental illness, I could grant, as I would not be surprised it depression was a factor. But that does not absolve the institutions that perpetuate the genocide in Palestine of their blame.
(Disclaimer: Since tensions are high and trust is low around here lately, I want to make it abundantly clear that I do not condone self-immolation. The last thing this awful situation needs is more lives lost.)
Obviously, he felt very strongly about this conflict and wanted to protest it. I'm not going to accuse him of being mentally ill because I don't know him, I only know one thing he did. This is sad because there are so many ways he could have protested this that didn't end his life. You can be dishonorably discharged from the military. You can refuse orders and be imprisoned instead of participating in a conflict you don't want to be a part of.
We can try to empathize with him and imagine what compelled him to commit suicide, but that doesn't mean it was the only or best option. We can acknowledge how he felt so strongly that he made the choice to end his life, but we should also acknowledge how there was a way past this without a public suicide. It isn't a heroic act of protest, it is a tragedy.
No, I think it's both actually. I don't disagree that discretion is often the better part of valor, but he obviously thought this was the best way to make a public statement. The only thing we can do now is to make sure it wasn't in vain.
Not as many people would have seen that. Not as many people would be wondering what they might do, if ordered to contribute to genocide. People often say they wouldn't have helped commit the Holocaust, or any other genocidal event, but clearly some people do.
This guy didn't. It is unquestionably a tragedy, but it may have also been a heroic act of protest.
If this is his reddit profile, as people claim based on the fact that the name is the same as his previous Twitch name, it stopped posting 4 days ago and the opinions expressed are in tune with what is known about the guy (plus because mods recently started removing his post en masse, so they're only visible through his profile), then I think this argument in particular is reasonable.
What I see is a classic case of radicalization and fatalism that seem to be correlated with spending way too much time in certain online leftist communities. Whether this had an influence on his decision is impossible to say, but it seems likely.
Excerpts:
"Classic colonizer brain. Same mentality as “sometimes it hurts my feelings when my husband cheats on me with his slaves”"
"Whiteness erases culture."
"“Democracy” is a sham that was invented by the first great slave state of history, and not coincidentally adopted by the last."
None of these excerpts you've pulled out for a convenient character assassination to avoid serious thought about why our military is directly materially supporting a genocide are relevant to why someone would choose to perform the most final protest possible.
I suppose if you consider caring about the lives of others more than your own mental illness I will agree that Aaron Bushnell was mentally ill. But then the same is true of most parents.
Maybe instead of assuming that the status quo must be the best thing possible and that anyone at sufficient odds with it must be mentally ill we should consider that maybe the American government is far more evil than is publicly known. Maybe instead of deciding to rob Aaron Bushnell of his agency posthumously we can consider his actions those of a rational actor and listen to his reasons why.
People don't just light themselves on fire because they see the right words on a screen. Maybe instead of blaming the people who are pointing out the deeply evil institutions that run this country, you should leave that blame where it actually belongs - with the people who are using our tax dollars to support the indiscriminate murder of civilians.
Most of what you say is just putting a lot of words into my mouth.
What I am saying is that if those excerpts (and other things posted) were written with relative seriousness and not as a shitpost, it's reasonable to assume he was mentally unwell and the communities that he participated in online likely did not help.
What conclusions anyone makes of that is up to them.
I can definitely understand seeing those statements and others like it as being mentally unwell. It makes me feel unwell to consider them, and what somebody has to be experiencing to feel them. They are hopeless statements, and they don't include any nuance. However they are also completely removed from whatever context they had for him. Understanding suicide even in "normal" circumstances is impossible. And opinions about it are so subjective.. we can't ask him, you know? From where you sit in the world, and where I sit, what you're saying makes sense. There are also people in the world and in the united states for whom the statement "democracy is a sham" is true. As a blanket statement, it is much too broad to be considered reasonable. Democracy isn't a sham, but there are people in the US who are living in a completely different version of it than me. And for them, it absolutely is a sham. Zoomed way out, and from a place of safety, these ideas seem extreme and unreasonable. But I think he was putting himself in the headspace of people who live in a different reality than us, as much as he could, and often. In that sense, those communities were not helping him to be well. They were helping him explore human suffering. If you spend enough time really trying to feel the feelings of people who are experiencing extreme suffering beyond survivability, then suicide feels like a pretty natural conclusion. You would want the suffering to end, and you would want your death to be meaningful because what you really want is THEIR deaths to be meaningful. Maybe the fixation was not healthy for him, but it doesn't really address the root cause. He killed himself because he was unwell, but why was he unwell? He was unwell because he fixated on hopelessness and suffering. But why did he do that? He participated in a military that participated in a genocide. That is what was unhealthy for him. I think calling him mentally unwell is fair, but I also think being mentally unwell because of the suffering of others is a spiritually healthy response. There were 30k+ people alive last fall for whom hopelessness was an inescapable fate. He believed he had been complicit in genocide, and I believe him. I would never be able to be mentally well if I believed that about myself. And I wonder who else's feelings he was feeling when he made those choices. He wanted people to understand that it isn't normal, and that we should not feel okay about it. This whole thing has me pretty fucked up and I appreciated reading this exchange. Apologies if I am not making a ton of sense. I have spent probably too much time thinking about the headspace of a person who self immolates, due to a family member choosing that same route when I was a child, though not for any sort of political reason. I think she wanted her family to know what they made her feel. Seeing someone burn alive makes it impossible to minimize the anguish, because you just have this intense aversion to being burned it's almost impossible to imagine doing it on purpose. You can't really get away with telling yourself "oh she just wanted the pain to stop" because the nature of that death forces you to be honest with yourself. She didn't pick a quick and painless way. She wanted us to believe her. We aren't able to blame her being mentally unwell, because we, as a family, were complicit in the suffering that led her there. She showed us. But it is so hard to accept. It feels like a parallel to me. We want to believe this action was just caused by him being unwell, a mental defect. But our government and military can not be removed from the story, as painful as it is to accept that. If the US was not participating in atrocities, he would not have done this.
We can't get all the context, couldn't really even if he was still alive, but people are free to go look at his profile and get a more complete picture instead of the most out there comments. Personally I don't think the context that is available changes anything.
I understand the intent here, but the issue I take with this is that I don't believe he was actually doing that. He was putting himself in what he thought would be the headspace of certain people, but that may very well be quite far removed from their actual reality, further worsening the fact that the fixation on this is likely quite unhealthy.
Wasn't he a member of the US Air Force? I don't think it is reasonable to say that the US Air Force participated in a genocide. I'm not a US citizen, so I may be missing something.
For some context, something that I am not saying is that anybody who kills themselves in this way is just mentally unwell. A very well known and almost universally respected person in the modern history of my country was a university student who did just that, as a response to us being invaded by the Soviets who wanted to stop us from implementing reforms in the oppressive communist regime. But his mindset, reasoning and the context of his actions were different and apparently more more clear-headed and grounded in reality.
The air force is commonly called in by other branches to provide support for operations. From what I could find, the US sent air force intelligence officers to Israel in November. The official story is that it was to assist with intelligence for hostage rescue, but the likely reality is that they also assisted in targeting. Bushnell was a "cyber defense operations specialist" assigned to an intelligence and surveillance wing.
I agree that a healthy response to trauma does not include suicide. And I appreciate you sharing your perspective and reading my long comment. But I want to try to add context, because it is plausible that he was more clear headed and grounded in reality than you think. He had no healthy options to choose.
30,000 active duty and veterans have taken their life since we first invaded Iraq under the pretense of "self defense" after 9/11. There were 200k civilian casualties in that war. We committed war crimes, and have never been held to account. What our soldiers were commanded to do was more than many of them could live with. What our military did is the same thing IDF are currently doing, using 10/7 as a justification. And our military is being commanded to support this. There is not an avenue to enact change within that system, so if you don't like it, your choices are prison, suicide, or dishonorable discharge which makes you un-employable. There are little to no services in America that make it feasible to live here without a job, so many prefer suicide to homelessness. There are 37k homeless veterans. In 2021 there were 17 military suicides per day. Many people are desperate for us NOT to repeat this very recent history. But again, there are no avenues to enact change in this system.
I don't know if our protests are being covered by media elsewhere, they are certainly not being covered by media here. It makes sense to me that someone who has decided to commit suicide, and sees the suppression of our dissent, might decide to try to force people to look as a desperate last attempt at protest. The first self immolation in Atlanta because of this conflict was not covered by any media outlets here. We are screaming into a void.
I think you're right in where you assign blame here, wholesale. Even so, I don't think it's safe to discount mental illness as a factor. I don't mean to downplay Bushnell's sacrifice here (though I feel there is no way to say this without inevitably doing so to some degree), but I find it difficult to believe that some level of depression isn't present when someone chooses to commit suicide, especially in such a painful way.
The way I see it, depression and fatalism were likely present, but it was the American government – not leftism – that caused them.
I don't disagree, but my point is more that saying "he was depressed!!!" and then not asking further why he was depressed is such classic sticking-your-head-in-the-sand liberalism, as though being profoundly sad about child murder is a sign of mental illness if the child murder is indirect enough, or that being so profoundly sad is sufficient justification to question someone's agency.
To quote a much more eloquent man: "In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair."
I would love to hear an opinion of an unbiased psychologist about this, because I unironically believe that while this is not a sign of mental illness, it is abnormal and mostly unhealthy.
An unbiased psychologist wouldn't weigh in on the individual - I mean someone out there will go on the media and talk really indirectly about what might have been going on, but you cannot diagnose someone ethically without speaking to them and assessing them. Not all suicidal people are also dealing with mental illnesses.
Not talking about him though (and I have a counseling degree but am not licensed to practice clinically by choice so take this as you like), It is fairly 'normal' for people to be able to compartmentalize indirect, distant, or similar sorts of harm and negative outcomes. Its also common for that compartmentalization to break down - and thus people do all sorts of things like, stop buying chocolate made with child labor, go zero waste/emissions, and yeah to be sad or horrified at things happening in the world, especially when you can connect direct lines from your actions to them.
Is it ideal to live in that sadness and grief? No. But it's really not "abnormal" to feel it. Is it unhealthy to fixate on? Yeah in the same way it's unhealthy to fixate on anything you cannot change. (And some things that you can). I had a student come crying to me several years ago overwhelmed because of everything going on in the world at the time - BLM, pandemic, political strife, etc. but the topper was the ocean being on fire. And I had to tell her the ocean had been on fire before and would be again, and the world would still turn and bad happens but so does good. But if you don't have people telling you that, or it isn't enough, you can absolutely be weighed down by even distant devastation. But most of us shove that horror into a box and move on with our day and it sort of dissipates rather than exploding out at inconvenient times and in less productive ways.
(I don't find normal and abnormal useful here. A lot of behaviors are common and unhealthy, or unusual but absolutely fine and normal means very little and is often a biased standard, especially in psychology)
Thank you! This is more or less what I assumed.
Yeah, I normally say useful/not useful instead of normal/abnormal in similar discussions, but it made sense to me in the context of the previous discussion.
Although I specifically mentioned a certain type of online leftism, I want to reply to this in general, because I really disagree here, but I think the specific ideology mentioned is kind of a red herring.
There are millions of people living in much more desperate situations than he was not committing suicide every day. The conclusion you may get from me saying this is that I'm lessening the tragedy of this particular guy in a disgusting fashion, but my point is in fact the opposite. All suffering is entirely subjective and based on context, for example it is likely that when you go through a bad breakup you temporarily feel much worse than a homeless addict even though his life is by all common standards worse.
While outside factors influence how you react to desperate situations, the response is largely dictated by how your mind deals with them. And obviously both possible mental illness and an ideology that you get too deep into and that covers large areas of your life influence that exact process.
I'm not saying he was mentally unwell simply for feeling desperate due to the actions of his government at all, but the specific reaction that stemmed from that imo is a good reason to at least have the discussion. It seems like people who agree with his opinions do not like the idea of him being possibly unwell because it would likely undermine the value of his actions in the public eye, but I don't think that's a good reason to just ignore the topic.
Perhaps, though such a discussion warrants extreme care. In the end, then, I suppose we instead disagree about who's responsible for him feeling the way he did. You appear to blame ideology where I blame the atrocities.
All in all however, if it's not leftism generally you might blame here, it may help to elaborate on what kinds of communities you feel are partly responsible. I follow a huge amount of leftist content creators who talk about the realities of Gaza very frequently, but I don't see any of them as having a damaging influence that would lead people to suicide. They often spend their time talking about either mutual aid & protest marches, or they mention how the actions of the government of Israel will inevitably fail (in many ways they already have) and history will not remember them kindly. People are given outlets and hope, not doom and gloom, so I can't see how that would lead to what Bushnell did. Overexposure to the pains of the people of Gaza might, but I feel that's largely unavoidable due to the high-profile and severe nature of these tragedies.
I think the kind of depressing fatalism that I mean mostly exists in echo chambers like reddit and other "discussion" spaces and is not too commonly spread by actual content creators. I do not think it applies to online leftism in general.
Also, I should have probably clarified, I don't think this is the only or necessarily the main cause. Spending way too much time in online echo chambers is certainly unhealthy, but I don't think it just happens on its own, it usually traps and affects people who already have some problems or are unhappy with their life for whatever reason. So I mainly blame "normal" mental issues, but again, I don't think we can blame the government for them, perhaps we can blame it for policies affecting the ability to get help, but not for the cause.
Appears greyzone affiliated? It's the site's founder...
For @phoenixrises and anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone
I would have to double check outside if they told me the sky was blue, it's basically a misinformation factory...
(And FYI: Despite sharing a name it's not affiliated with the the Telegram channel maintained by former Wagner members)
Thanks for letting me know! I think I just got confused because I assumed "the BBC" was the British news network, I'll replace the link!
Sorry, now I'm confused haha.
The twitter link @supergauntlet posted is from Max Blumenthal, the founder of The Grayzone. It's a tankie propaganda outlet that plays extremely fast and loose with the truth when they aren't just making stuff up entirely.
OKAY I'm just stupid. I blame just getting off work and skimming social media, I didn't realize that they were referring to their own link. My brain is not working I'm gonna just go play video games and pretend that this never happened!
Actually, I only saw the image, but the article comes from Ken Klippenstein at the Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2024/01/11/israel-air-force-targeting-intelligence/
Dunno if that changes your opinion on "the sky being blue" or if there's some other reason Klippenstein is now considered personae non grata by liberals.
I'm not sure I follow. I'm not a huge fan or anything but I don't have a problem with the Intercept article. Blumenthal predictably jumps from there to conjecture on why Bushnell killed himself -- in all probability he had no idea a team was being sent.
Curious, what does "Greyzone affiliated" mean? Definitely good to know the first bit of info though, I definitely think the mental health aspect is super misguided.
Max Blumenthal runs The Grayzone (news website) and shows up on Russian state tv like Sputnik and RT sometimes. He is definitely a bit of an idiot to put it nicely, but he is generally more right than wrong when it comes to American imperialism.
Oh I did not know that! I'll have to keep an eye out for that next time, generally I get my news from AP or Boston Globe.
Edit: I edited the first link to the newsweek article instead, thanks for letting me know!
Also discussed here in a separate thread: https://tildes.net/~news/1eio/active_us_air_force_serviceman_self_immolates_himself_in_front_of_the_embassy_of_israel
Biden announces U.S. will airdrop food aid into Gaza as famine concerns grow (NBC News)
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