A Happiness Bouquet For Airman Aaron Bushnell at the Israeli Embassy
And a car ride through embassy row
I don’t particularly share the late Airman Aaron Bushnell’s leftish politics but I do think it’s important to show respect for the sort of commitment it takes to self-immolate yourself. Something seems momentous about this occasion. Could we really be this close to a Palestinian state? What’s really happening?
The friend who took the picture is the son of an American of an Israeli and an American Jewess and he is among my oldest friends. When the Israeli world came for me many years ago he defended me in the newspapers and to all who would listen.
We’d gone threw a lot together over the years and we seemingly swapped politics. I was a high school and college right-winger but divorce and disappointment made me reconsider
We spent the ride from our breakfast meeting going past the embassies — I pointed out the Brazilian and South African embassies — and then we arrived. The photos of the hostages and Israeli flags. The handwritten placards. The retirees looking for justice and community.
I tell my Israeli-American friend as we pass by the Nelson Mandela statue at the South African embassy that I think apartheid is bad for both the practitioner as well as the victims. At a certain point, I tell him, good natured white South Africans didn’t want to put up with this stuff anymore. It isn’t normal.
But the Israeli embassy is not a normal embassy, I said, as I drove up in my convertible. There were police and armed gun men. The top was down. I was wearing my Biden shades.
The police officer told me I couldn’t stay there and I said I’d come with flowers. “Better make it quick.” I made it quick and thanked the officers. There’s a lot of things you can get away with if you’re well dressed in a Jaguar with the top down in DC.
One of the women in a hijab thanked me and I choked back tears and left.
Bushnell was only 25.
“Do I have anything to say,” the one of the journalists there asked me as I laid the flowers down.
“I think Aaron spoke for a generation. I have nothing to add.”
And then we took off as quickly as we had arrived.