the people’s summit

by anzya

All this week, the “People’s Summit on Climate Change” is taking place in the usually sleepy town of Tiquipaya, just outside of Cochabamba, in Bolivia. The summit was called by Bolivian President Evo Morales and is seen by many as an alternative to the failed Copenhagen summit –  one that isn’t driven by the interests of government and corporations, and one that engages people in the global south who are the most affected by climate change. Below is a snapshot of some of the attendees at the Summit.

Though it might sound like a random place to hold a world climate conference, Cochabamba is where the “Water Wars” took place in 2000, where citizens shut down the city in protest over the privatisation of their water supply by the American corporation, Bechtel. Jim Shultz, the founder of the Cochabamba-based NGO, the Democracy Center, gives a great overview of the climate summit and the history of the town in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. It is well worth taking a look at it.

The Conference is divided into 17 working groups on climate change. But a very interesting twist to this is a group that calls itself “Messa 18” that has set up just outside the official conference to hold alternative workshops and discussions. A participant and blogger, Elizabeth Cooper, writes on Blog from Bolivia:

Here, participants lay bare some of the conflicts within the government that is now looked at by many as a global rallying point for (more) radical movements against climate change. One participant addressed the tension in the new government’s and the new constitution’s pro-indigenous rhetoric. “There are a series of contradictions here,” he said. “On one hand, the new laws recognize indigenous sovereignty in theory, but on the other, they are permitting capitalism to pervade our communities even more.”

…

An indigenous woman sitting next to me in the audience explained another shortfall of the supposed autonomy afforded by nationalization. “According to the constitution, we have the right to be consulted in the plans for development the corporations bring, but what we must have is the right to their administration itself, and the power to actually make the decisions. Right now, what happens is that the corporations arrive and they cheat us. They come and the first thing they do is offer some small improvement for our homes to gain popularity, but then once they gain approval for their plan, the way is wide open for them to do what they want.”

If, as Marek Edelman says, (and I paraphrase Dave Slucki here ;)…) being a Jew means siding with the oppressed and working towards their liberation, then it is important, I think, to follow what is happening at and around this summit, as it represents a gathering of people committed to giving a voice to those usually silenced in the mainstream discourse of climate change.

The Democracy Centre is  blogging about the summit every day on Blog from Bolivia,  so make sure to check it out.

(Post updated on 22 April)

Reflecting on the Holocaust

by tobybee

Last night, April 19th, was the Bund’s Holocaust commemoration. And this speech, in full below, was given at that commemoration by a very good friend of jewonthis, Dave Slucki. It’s a truly important and momentous speech, I think – the best bits are after the jump, so make sure you read on. (And it’s also worth reading Arnold Zable’s piece from The Age on the weekend about Edelman, the Bund, and the Holocaust.)

Marek Edelman, who we honour tonight along with his fallen comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto, once said that to be a Jew means always to be with the oppressed, never with the oppressor. He lived his life in a constant struggle against the oppressor, whether it be Nazism or Soviet communism. No doubt this is a lesson he learnt through his bitter experiences as a resistance fighter during the Second World War, and that was confirmed throughout his life as an anti-communist activist in Poland. What does it mean for us today? Have we learnt the same lesson? Against whom do we struggle in the fight for justice? There is certainly plenty of injustice in the world today, but have we, Jews, forgotten our responsibility to work towards a less violent world? Is Khaver Edelman an inspiration for us only because of his bravery as a commander of the oyfshtand, or also because his whole life was characterized by that kind of bravery? Given his experiences, Khaver Edelman had every right to spend the rest of his life in quiet anonymity. But he chose a more courageous path, risking his professional life, his livelihood, and his reputation in the fight for justice. Is this not ultimately the most important thing for us to learn as descendants of Holocaust survivors?

It’s important for us to remember all those who perished during the Holocaust; the heroes who died in battle, and the heroes who went quietly to their deaths. Geto akademye is a time to honour the memories of those who were murdered for no other reason than their Jewishness. We should also take it as an opportunity to remember all those that have died as a result of state-sanctioned violence. It is our chance, once a year to reflect on what it means to be survivors and descendants of survivors; what it means to be directly affected by genocide; what responsibility that gives us. Khaver Edelman has left us an important legacy. He has taught us that bravery is not characterised only by armed struggle, and often not at all through such means. Importantly also, he has taught us that as Jews, we now carry a grave responsibility to work towards ensuring that no-one suffers the same fate that many of our closest relatives did. He has taught us to be activists in the struggle for justice. He has taught us that remembering the Holocaust and honouring the memory of those who died is not simply a passive act, but also a call to action. As David Rosenberg, leader of the Jewish Socialist Group in London wrote in his obituary to Khaver Edelman, “He refused to allow the historical experience of the Ghetto fighters to be claimed by any group/nation exclusively. On the contrary, he argued that this history belonged to everyone and carried a universal imperative to fight for equality, democracy, human rights and dignity wherever these were threatened or suppressed.” What is our responsibility today to ensure that we honour Edelman’s legacy? When we say “Never Again”, do we mean that those should never happen again to Jews, or to anyone?

In our own backyard, violence is a fact of life. We hear it daily in the violent rhetoric against migrants and refugees in the media and from politicians. We see physical violence against migrants from Sudan, Lebanon, India, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries. Most damning perhaps is the reality that the Indigenous population of this country, the original inhabitants of this land, have for over 200 years been subjected to oppression—physical, economic, social, psychological. There are so many stories – too many. We can read stories of children being stolen from their parents, and of people dying in police custody; of massacres, and of lynchings; of ‘interventions’ and welfare money withheld; of bans on alcohol, and bans on congregating in the streets of Fitzroy. And we can read about what happened on the very land on which we stand, on the land of the Boonerung people and the Wurundjeri people, two groups who are part of the Kulin Nation.

Marek Edelman, the diasporist

by tobybee

Marek Edelman, a Bund member who was one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has died in Warsaw.

The New York Times has an obituary about him, which tells us that…

Marek Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at work. His father died when he was very young; his mother, who worked as a secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14. While going to high school he was looked after by his mother’s friends from the hospital.

Dr. Edelman was an early member of the Solidarity free labor union and was among those interned when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981.

Two years later he was asked to serve on the organizing committee for an observance of the 40th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. He declined, saying that to do so “would be an act of cynicism and contempt” in a country “where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion.”

Eight years later he served as Solidarity’s consultant on health policy in the round-table talks that led to democratic rule for Poland. In the first free elections, he ran for the Polish Senate, losing narrowly. He kept working at the hospital in Lodz, dodging any suggestion that he retire.

Edelman was twenty in 1939, and worked at the Ghetto hospital, as well as organising resistance with other young Jews in the ghetto. The NYTimes explains that “He spent every day at the Umschlagplatz watching as trains were loaded and sent off. He was there ostensibly in his official capacity as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, carrying documents in his pocket that enabled him to pull people off the trains by designating them too ill to travel. Since the Germans held to the fiction that the passengers were being sent to better surroundings, they made a show of holding back the sick. In fact, young Marek used the passes to save people who would be useful to the Jewish Combat Organization, then being formed.
‘I was merciless,’ he recalled many years later. ‘One woman begged me to pull out her 14-year-old daughter, but I was only able to take one more person, and I took Zosia, who was our best courier.'”

He made it out of the ghetto at the end of the Uprising, living until today in Poland. Interestingly, the NYTimes obituary makes very little explicit mention of Edelman’s diasporist Jewishness.

Edelman is also the author of, for me at least, one of the most profound commentaries on Jewish violence. As Daniel Boyarin noted in his essay “The Colonial Drag”,

“it is also true that the seemingly most forceful resistance can turn into the most efficient complicity with the cultural project of the colonizer, by becoming just like him, sometimes even more than he is himself, and that this is what we need to understand about Zionism. The socialist cocommander of the Warsaw revolt, the anti-Zionist Marek Edelman, who remains in Poland as a Diasporic Jewish (Yiddish) nationalist and member of Solidarity, saw this very clearly: ‘This was a revolt!? The whole point was not to let them slaughter you when your turn came. The whole point was to choose your method of dying. All of humanity had already agreed that dying with a weapon in the hand is more beautiful than without a weapon. So we surrendered to that consensus.’”

In the NYTimes obituary he is quoting as saying that “‘These people went quietly and with dignity,’… speaking of the millions killed in the Nazi gas chambers. ‘It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.'”

I start to write that it’s sad that such a man should die, but, of course, it’s inevitable. And he was ninety. That’s quite amazing. I suppose what’s sad is that this man, who seems to be so skillful at drawing out the complexities of life and of death, of not accepting simple answers, who is so capable of seeing the problematics of the events he has participated in, of rebelling against accepted narratives and discourses, and who thereby has provided space for us all to think a bit differently – actually, demanded of us that we think differently – has died. It’s a demand worth following.