JERUSALEM (MCT) — A protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday night took an unsettling turn when an Israeli man set himself on fire. “The state of Israel stole from me and robbed me. It left me helpless,” 57-year-old Moshe Silman wrote in letters left at the scene before dousing himself with gasoline.

With Silman’s third-degree burns covering at least 80 percent of his body, protest leaders, politicians and the public are trying to understand the act of desperation and its meaning for the calls for “social justice,” the slogan of the socioeconomic protests now into their second summer in Israel.