Great stuff happens and then goes by the boards, but below is an exchange from 6 weeks ago that I don’t want to forget.
In May we (along with the Culture Project) staged a panel on the Goldstone Report with Naomi Klein among others on stage in New York, and at the end moderator Laura Flanders asked Klein a question about global warming as it touches on the Israel/Palestine issue. I thought about it today because of the water war that Israel is now carrying out on the West Bank, destroying Palestinian cisterns. So here’s the exchange, wonderful for Flanders’s koan about self-interest & solidarity (I haven’t stopped thinking about it since), and for Klein’s inspired answer:
Flanders: I do want to give Naomi a chance to say, to answer one other question. Because I hear solidarity I also want to hear, I believe real solidarity is based on self interest. We all share an interest in resolving this conflict, and our own conflicts we are responsible for, and our part of it. We also I think have a self interest in a climatic way, having to do with our climate, our planet, our future as a planet. You’re working on this; I don’t want you to spill the beans on your book and your movie. But you said behind, backstage that it’s not unrelated.
Klein: …That’s a really great last question. I was mentioning to Laura, I am working on a book about climate change, it isn’t about Israel Palestine. But I am really immersed in this issue, and have been now for three or so years. And I find myself in situations talking to groups of people whose countries are going to disappear under the waves. They are literally planning for the disappearance of their states. And this is the future we are headed to, I know this is a completely different topic, but obviously climate change is going to affect the region that we are talking about very strongly. Water wars are going to intensify. I think we can see a really bad outcome for how climate change would play out in Israel Palestine, particularly when it comes to water. But I have this other idea, about what could happen. Because, I really do think we are looking at a much less secure world where it’s only a matter of time before everybody is confronting these facts, that a great many people in the world are going to be looking at their states disappearing. We are going to be looking at a huge number of climate refugees because of our refusal to deal with climate change. When I think about that world of insecurity and I think about what that means to me as a North American Jew, and the fact that I have been told that I have a right to not just one state but two, two secure states, I actually think that climate change might be something of a game changer there. And my hope is that it may create an opening for North American Jews to think about what security really means; what real security means, that it’s not a fortress and that it is these universal values.
