CLIMATE AND MIGRATION
SUMUD AND DOIKAYT
A Palestinian and a Jewish Labor Bundist meet at their favorite café to talk about the day’s events. The news is grim.
“My home in Al Mughayyir was bulldozed yesterday along with all my olive trees and all the other trees in the Village,” the Palestinian laments about the destruction of his home in the West Bank. “The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] called it a ‘shaping operation.’ It’s their euphemism for destruction and displacement.”
My news is grim too, the Bundist replies. “Just this last week, several people died in their homes and in the fields from extreme heat. And thousands of people were recently displaced and lost their homes due to climate-induced floods in China. This included more than 30 people who died trapped in a senior home near Beijing. These are global tragedies.”
“Yet how can you compare the two,” the Palestinian argues. “Starvation and hunger, crimes against humanity, are ubiquitous in Gaza. At the same time Israeli settlers attack, displace, and kill our West Bank villagers at will. This extreme form of settler colonialism has become the prevailing form of genocide. It’s hard to fathom the magnitude of this catastrophe and talk about anything else. No wonder the Israelis target and kill journalists. They want eyes shut wide.”
“I hear you,” the Bundist replies. “We Bundists have been opposed to Zionism as a type of settler colonialism from our very origins in 1897. Like you, we believe in a connection to the land and family. We call it our ‘mishpukhedikayt.’
The Bundist then continues. “I’d like to talk about climate change and migration. I think they are connected. It was a climate-induced fire storm that devastated parts of Los Angeles and then masked ICE agents sought to terrorize Los Angeles, a city of immigrants. But Angelenos resisted, both through spontaneous and organized efforts to monitor, record, and defer the masked men,” the Bundist said proudly. “These acts of climate and anti-immigrant terror are forms of displacement and forced migration that we Bundists know well, having been murdered and displaced from both Tsarist and Stalinist Russia. But like you, we learned how to resist.”
“Yet then why talk about climate change when what happened to you in Russia and what’s continuing to happen in Gaza is so overwhelming,” the Palestinian says in response. “Climate change and displacement and forced migration are all connected, and they have roots in colonialism,” the Bundist replies in turn. “Just ask Donald Trump. Celebrating fossil fuels and getting rid of immigrants are central to his agenda. He is more than just a climate denier and anti-immigrant. He is a climate wrecker and an enforcer of immigrant removal and depopulation.”
The Palestinian sighs, and then replies in frustration to the Bundist, “You should recall that Edward Said once spoke of environmental issues like climate change as a diversion.” “But the connections and the struggles are related,” the Bundist continues to argue.
The conversation at the café ends without agreement or resolution. The Palestinian and the Bundist agree to meet the next day, knowing that the need to resist remains central to who they are.
This imaginary conversation is filled with truths and ironies. The Jewish Labor Bund no longer exists. It disbanded in 2003 after more than 80 years of fighting the good fight, whether against the Zionist displacement or in its defense of the Warsaw ghetto, along with a small left-wing faction (Poale Zion) of young radical Zionists. Yet its messages about resistance, the importance of home (and home away from home) and the value of solidarity are as relevant as ever.
The Palestinians, who represent the very essence of the colonialist project of displacement and forced migrations have long been considered a non-entity according to those who deny their very existence as a people. Palestinians can neither move nor shelter in place. Yet they resist and survive, even as they hold onto the memories of their homes and the land where generations of Palestinians had lived.
The Jewish Labor Bundists and Palestinians have much to teach us in this era of migrations and climate change. The Palestinian concept of sumud (to stay put, hold on) complements the Jewish Labor Bund phrase doikayt (to fight for freedom for themselves and for all those oppressed in the places where one finds oneself). Linking the two ideas – sumud and doikayt – provides a way to understand the choices and actions that need to be waged regarding the catastrophes of today and the fraught era ahead of us.
Sumud teaches us that place does matter. It is identity-creating even as efforts are undertaken to deny or destroy one’s identity. It’s about memory and re-creating place even as one is displaced. Asserting sumud is a form of resistance and of hope.
Doikayt teaches us that identity is also formed by resistance and struggle, and by solidarity and interdependence. It’s about the importance of “hereness” and our global connections while challenging the colonialist notion of “thereness” and the other as enemy. We are all connected by the need for change, for an end to colonialism and genocide and apartheid in all its forms, and an end to the hegemony of settler colonialism and the fossil fuel economy. Our hopes are shaped by our resistance, whether through sumud or doikayt.
I sketched out this imaginary encounter when I began to explore the idea of a book about climate and migration. This is my first Substack submission, and I plan to submit more as part of this new book project.
Very interesting, Bob, not to mention creative. And it’s a much-needed counterpoint to “no sense of place” that Joel Meyrowitz in his book of that name about the placeless-ness that the digital world engenders. Please keep posting!