BY MORGAN FISCHER O n a Sunday afternoon in early October, Sam Mena walked through a crowded protest in Washington, D.C. Tall and in his 20s, the Arizona native blended in. He’d come to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, and like many in the crowd, he wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. Underneath it, dangling from a lanyard, hung a press pass from an Arizona TV station. Nervously, Mena chatted with the protesters and journalists gathered in the Black Lives Matter Plaza, located just two blocks from the White House. While holding a tripod in one hand, he used his other hand to text a friend with an urgent plea. “Please watch,” he wrote. “I need at least one set of eyes on this.” Then, placing his phone on the tripod, he hit record on Instagram Live and waited for the three- second countdown to the moment that would change his life. “Hello,” the 29-year-old began, before introducing himself. Then he launched into a 30-minute speech about the carnage in Gaza and the complicity of the media and the U.S. government. America was subsidizing a genocide, Mena told the small audience watching. And news orga- nizations were not telling the truth about it. Nearly a year into the conflict, he said, he could no longer remain silent. He closed his speech with a promise. “To the 10,000 children in Gaza that have lost a limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you,” Mena said. “I pray my voice was able to raise up yours and that your smiles never disappear.” And with that, he briefly exited the frame and doused his left arm in gasoline he’d kept in a water bottle. He stepped back in front of the camera, slid his thumb across the spark wheel of a lighter and lit his arm on fire. “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” he screamed as his arm burst into flames. What followed was chaos. Several police officers rushed over, pulling off Mena’s burning kaffiyeh and dousing him with water from plastic bottles. Other protesters used their own kaffiyehs to put out Mena’s flaming arm. “Free Palestine!” Mena continued to scream, though the pain soon became so unbearable that he stopped forming words. Soon after the flames began, they had been put out, leaving his arm smoldering. “We spread the misinformation!” Mena yelled as a fellow protestor hugged him, his graying arm hovering gingerly over her shoulder. His shirt sleeve had mostly burned away. Pictures of Mena’s fiery protest imme- diately went viral. His employer, Arizona’s Family, fired him. For months, that’s where the story ended, pushed out of the news cycle in the heat of a presidential election. If anyone wondered why Mena did what he did — if they pondered what might have driven an educated, well-spoken and seemingly normal person to self-immolate in the nation’s capital — nobody bothered to ask him. But two months after he set himself ablaze, Mena was eager to explain himself. In a 70-minute interview with Phoenix New Times, the now-former TV videogra- pher recounted what drove him to such a drastic act of protest. It was “very, very painful,” he says, requiring sacrifices “which I’m having to kind of confront right now.” Wearing a protective sleeve on his left arm, which suffered second- and third- degree burns, Mena opened up about what his act cost him: his job, cherished relation- ships and, yes, his arm. Would he do it again? No, he has no death wish. But does it regret doing it in the first place? Not one bit. The road to self-immolation On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas executed a sneak attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and abducting nearly 300 more. Israel has retaliated with brutal and often indiscriminate force, killing more than 46,000 people, including more than 17,000 children, since the conflict began. The U.S. has continued to provide military aid to Israel while tsk-tsking its longtime ally over civilian casualties and its blocking of humanitarian aid. At the same time, multiple international agencies have labeled the conflict as a genocide. Mena was unaware of the complicated and fraught history of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict when Hamas militants poured into Israel on Oct. 7. He couldn’t even point to Gaza on a map. To him, “Free Palestine” was just the gamer tag he saw somebody use while playing Super Smash Bros. “I was largely unfamiliar with the context behind it,” Mena says. “If you’ve heard the word Palestine, you were familiar that it was like a region in the world somewhere, but there are so many countries in the world that you don’t know all the histories of every country and region in the world.” A year later, Mena was so passionate about the Palestinian cause that he was pouring accelerant on his arm. How, within a year, does one go from completely uninformed about an issue to sacrificing an arm for it? By working in a news station edit bay, apparently. A year into a job as a videographer for Arizona’s Family, Mena found himself spending hours editing stories about the conflict for the station’s newscasts. As days turned into months, Mena began to learn more about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The more he learned, the less he felt his employer was telling the full story. He found himself pairing audio from reporters relaying Israel’s perspective — about the efforts to return hostages, to destroy Hamas and Israel’s right to defend itself — over images of the bombed-out Gazan hospitals destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces. They didn’t match. Mena has no ill will toward Arizona’s Family, which he calls a “fantastic news outlet.” He says, “I have an extreme amount of fondness for the staff there” — just not as much fondness for his own jour- nalistic output. “I have no sense of pride in the work that I did in those days,” he says. “It was very ignorant.” He doesn’t consider himself so anymore. These days, Mena has facts about the destruction in Gaza down pat. More than 108,338 Palestinians have been Sam Mena is still hoping to regain full use of his left arm after his protest, though he says he doesn’t regret setting it on fire to bring attention to Israel’s war in Gaza. (Photo by Danielle Cortez) THE FIRE WITHIN Why Sam Mena set his arm ablaze for Gaza, and why he has no regrets.
