The interviews, with Paul Shapiro of The Humane Society and Lauren Ornelas of the Food Empowerment Project, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and the program rebroadcast on December 16 on WPKN and are available as a podcast.
Lauren reports: This year we began our first effort to work on the importance of access to healthy foods in low-income communities. Using over a dozen volunteers in Santa Clara County, CA we surveyed over 120 grocery stores, liquor stores and convenience stores regarding access to fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, as well as vegan options.
FEP have also completed the first three issues of the newsletter Food Chain—linking the issues to "help you go and stay Veg."
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Through Erin Williams of HSUS, Paul reports some of this year's major accomplishments from The Humane Society:
We have a major corporate campaign asking IHOP to start moving away from eggs from caged hens. It’s a big organizational priority now. Some other updates: · October 2009—Michigan legislature approves bill to ban battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates (with a phase-out). · May 2009—Maine legislature approves bill to ban gestation crates and veal crates (with a phase-out). · May 2009—In response to an HSUS-led campaign, Wendy’s starts using some cage-free eggs. · November 2008—Nearly two-thirds of California voters pass the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (Prop 2), which bans battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates throughout the state (with a phase-out).
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Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.
The interviews, with Nathan Runkle and Nora Kramer, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and were rebroadcast on December 9 on WPKN and are available as apodcast.
Since we spoke last year, Nathan has much much more to be proud of: Through undercover investigations with hidden cameras, Mercy for Animals has released three new reports. The first about what is described as "shocking abuse" at New England's largest egg factory farm, Quality Egg of New England in Turner, Maine. The secondtells of the "cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries at the world's largest egg-laying breed hatchery", Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa. The third documents vicious cruelty at Fann Country View Family Farms, a pig factory farm in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania.
MFA have also launched a new documentary called Fowl Play about egg factory farms which has been an official selection at more than a dozen film festivals and is available at fowlplaymovie.com I bought a copy and donated it to our local library.
MFA have also revamped their website, launched a new blog, launched ad campaigns in Denver, Toronto and New York and opened an office in New York City.
Nora Kramer and Youth Empowered Action
SInce we spoke with Nora, she has started Youth Empowered Action, vegan summer camps for kids in Northern California and Portland, OR, to support emerging young leaders who want to make a difference in the world. Their website is.www.yeacamp.org
Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.
When I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharji earlier this year, the great American health care battles had not begun in earnest and ‘health care as a human right’ was still an unfamiliar notion. Since then, I have tried to understand what it is that expectations of health care tell us about the obligations of a government to its citizens. Why, I asked, does our government not take for granted that its citizens are entitled to health care? Why is there so much argument about this fundamental question? Why is there any argument at all? I concluded that its people are seen as expense items on this country’s balance sheet. Quite simply, people cost too much.
I’ve just returned from Berlin where I learned that, along with education and an unconditional right to a basic living income, the right, that is, to live as a social being, healthcare is considered a mandatory necessity and premiums are determined by income.
What is the basis for such policies, I asked some German friends? Perhaps, one proposed, it originates in the feudal lords who considered it a matter of pride to look after their serfs and staff in a decent manner. More definitively though, we have to hand it to Otto von Bismarck. In 1883, in the first of many acts of social legislation, he was able to pass the Health Insurance Bill, followed by Accident Insurance and Old Age and Disability Bills. “That’s why we don’t have homelessness or people living in cars in Germany,” I was told by Denise Wade, who lives in Munich and who has experienced both German and US healthcare. “Everyone’s considered a valuable human being, she continued, reminding me that there’s no death penalty in the European Union. These programs she told, me in her words, “help create and maintain stability, the social tapestry is stronger and lasts longer. It’s the difference between capitalism and social democracy,” she concluded, pointing out that Marx and Lenin were alive when Bismarck was Chancellor.
We didn’t discuss other ways in which Germany has demonstrated the value it places on human life but please do rest assured that I don’t need to be reminded of post-Bismarck Germany, of the Third Reich and whatever its healthcare policies were.
Still puzzled by the moral vacuum at the heart of the American healthcare debate, I returned to the Tidings program broadcast in May of this year. Pleaselisten or, if you’d rather read about it, you can returnto the rest of the blog posting...
Why isn’t healthcare a human right? is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it is produced by Tony Ernst to be broadcast on WPKN on October 14, 2009. Tidings can now be heard streaming live on the second Wednesday of every month at 12.30 pm EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.
My first contact with Susan Nathan was seeing her book, The Other Side of Israel,in a Palestinian bookstore in East Jerusalem.After she agreed to meet with me,I traveled to Tamra, an Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived since 2003, the only Jewish woman among 30,000 Palestinian Arabs who are also citizens of Israel.
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Two years later, I called her again, this time from my home, to find out how things on ‘the other side of Israel' looked to her now, across, as the cover of her book puts it, ‘the Jewish-Arab divide.”
Susan Nathan has spent the last few years writing, cataloging, documenting, and speaking about the injustices and human rights violations imposed by the Israeli government on its non-Jewish citizens who account for 20% of the population. She has brought to the attention of a worldwide audience what it means to be a second class citizen in Israel, simply by virtue of one’s race.
Seeing life from 'the other side', understanding the Palestinian narrative, meant she had to unlearn her lifelong Zionist training, to acknowledge that the flip side of Israel’s triumphant independence in 1948 was the suffering of the displaced, uprooted and terrorized Palestinians whose historic land was seized to enlarge the UN-mandated borders of the new Israeli state. For the Palestinians, this was the Nakba or catastrophe, which today, under the new Israeli right wing government, they are forbidden by law to commemorate or to mention in school curricula.
While considerable attention has been paid recently to the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza, less is known about the situation faced by Palestinian Arabs within Israel.
One in five Israelis is a second-class citizen In her book, Susan Nathan makes vivid how these realities on the ground translate into second-class citizenship in Israel. The list of injustices has grown since her book was published and builds from the small to the momentous: identity papers coded to differentiate Jew from Arab, intense airport security including the removal of every item in the Arab traveler’s suitcase, demolition of Arab homes, refusal of permits to rebuild them, prohibitions on Arab land purchases and the resulting overcrowding in towns such as the one where Susan lives. With the loss of agricultural land outside the town, Tamra has run out of space for 'natural growth' which means the residents must build multi-story homes and keep livestock next to their houses.
The list runs on to a re-architecting of the roads and bridges so that only Jews can travel on them; gross neglect of infrastructure and services such as water, electricity, clinics and schools, especially in the Negev; exclusion of Arab workers from wealth-generating sectors of the economy at the same time that they are disconnected from their traditional agricultural economy; employment practices that include the firing of workers who speak Arabic on the job; diverting or manipulating water supplies; erasure of Arab presence and history by building parks and forests over Arab villages, removing former Arab place names from maps and roads and, as reported recently on NPR.org: When motorists head up the hill to Jerusalem, for example, the large green traffic signs say "Yerushalayim" in Hebrew, "Jerusalem" in English and "Ursalim al-Quds" in Arabic. But if transportation minister Israel Katz has his way, all three languages will spell out the word "Yerushalayim."
The use of erasure to replace one collective memory with another extends most egregiously to the school system. Palestinians Arabs have no real voice in formulating the curriculum in Arab schools which re-educates the student to accept the erasure of his own history and identity replacing it with understanding history from the Zionist perspective and sympathizing with Jewish suffering.
Activism 2.0 Since the publication of her book, Ms. Nathan has spoken at numerous events in Europe, where she reports that awareness and information levels among Europeans have increased considerably and continue to grow. At the same time, her energetic public presence have transformed how she sees her role as an activist:
There's a huge division now coming between Jews who've understood the reality of Israel and what's going on here and those who've yet to understand the reality of what's going on here, who can't accept it and find it very frightening and threatening. My role is not to continue to bash away at Israel how terrible Israel is...it's very important I've realized by being in Europe to show compassion towards Jews who are not yet able to accept that this country has turned out to be the way it is; it's very frightening actually to see Israel the way that it really is.My own position has started to evolve to understand you can't frighten people into accepting the reality here...It's important to acknowledge and understand that I was once in their position...I was very much the victim of the Zionist education which hundreds of thousands of people around the world...but the Zionist position is weakening...
Instead of the 'barrage' that characterized her earlier public presentations, Susan now prefers 'fierce criticism of our people mixed with compassion':
I've changed how I present (my argument): I'm far less aggressive but at the same time I'm far more dangerous...I have a far better view of what's going on..that's the only way you can get Jews to take on board what's happening here...a continuous barrage of criticism will not make the changes we need. I'm very fiercely critical but I'm also very compassionate. It's very difficult for people to accept that everything they've based their life on has been based on a sandcastle which is now being swept away by a wave.
Susan Nathan's new credo resonates with some of what I heard from Philip Weiss in last month's Tidingsblog post and podcast.Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a more mature, a kinder left-wing Jewish voice, one that forcibly identifies with being Jewish, that wishes to look unflinchingly at the reality of what Israel is today and that accepts as progressive Jewish responsibility the holding up of a mirror to let Israel see what others see.Perhaps this will modulate the dialogue from invective to conversation, dial down the tone from rabid to calm and, perhaps it will lead, as Susan fervently hopes it will, 'to another country, not the country we have now.'
Comment
After reading her book and interviewing Susan Nathan I wondered if we understand the price we pay for identity, identification and identity cards. How easy would it be to create second-class citizens without ID cards?
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The Other Side of Israel: an interview with Susan Nathan is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on August 6, 2009. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.
Background In November 1947, Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem administered by the UN. Following its independence and subsequent war with Jordan and Egypt, 78% of Palestine was now in Israel's hands. Following the war of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and continues to do so today.While the concept of Zionism, of a Jewish state for Jews, had its detractors before the foundation of Israel, these objections were rooted in philosophy rather than in practice. The actualization of Zionism over the last 61 years has been another matter altogether.Definitions of anti-Zionism range from the religious to the political, an inflammable debate not likely to be resolved any time soon. My own definition of anti-Zionism is neither anti-semitic nor does it call for the destruction or elimination of the state of Israel. It simply asserts that it is impossible for a Jewish state to be democratic. If Israel is a democratic state, then it belongs to all its citizens, at least 20% of whom are not Jews. A democratic state does not withhold equal rights from those of its citizens who are not Jewish.
The tide is turning American Jews could turn a blind eye to the Occupation, and they did—for forty years—but Gaza, a tipping point, was much more difficult to ignore. American Jews have been forced into rethinking the unthinking, ingrained support of Israel which in turn is loosening the iron gripthat AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby, has had on Congress and on Jewish institutions in this country. Recently, young Jews came together in New York for a program calledLove, Hate and the Jewish State, sponsored by several leading Jewish organizations, to facilitate discussions about the alienation and pain that Israel’s behavior is causing this younger generation, discussions that arguably will lead many of them to resolve their dilemmas by replacing their Zionism with anti-Zionism, or at least with non-Zionism.Where might these “new” Jews find solidarity if they do make that transition?
Anti-Zionism can produce strange bedfellows. My guests for this Tidings radio program (July 2, 2009) are both Jewish, curiously both with the family name Weiss and both self-described anti-Zionists. They have arrived at this self-description from two radically distinct starting points--one secular and one deeply religious.
Philip Weiss Philip Weiss is a 53-year old New York journalist, author of two books and articles in several leading magazines. For the past three and a half years he has blogged on the Middle East and Jewish identity on Mondoweiss, his increasingly influential blog not least because it provides a gathering place, a safe haven for "secret sharing," for Jews who are struggling with the tension between the image of Israel as a special place for Jews that they grew up with and the image of the militaristic, brutal occupier that Israel increasingly presents to the world.
It is in part a generational tension, a conflict between the tribal elders and the more integrated, assimilated younger generations. What we are seeing is American Jewish identity in transition as the insular, introspective orientation of "What is good for the Jews?" gives way to a more modern, humanistic, international question: "What is good for everyone?"It is a transition that is causing consternation and even panic among the tribal elders, especially within the powerful Israel lobby AIPAC. An interregnum tumult that is complex and often opaque, we are witnessing a reframing of Zionism, the blogsphere alive and unleashed with vitriol and scholarship, as events in Washington and Tel-Aviv are minutely and obsessively observed and analysed, with Mondoweiss and Jewish Peace News invaluable, authoritative sources of such reporting and commentary.It is easier now for American Jews, confused by the conundrum of being a PEP, ("progressive except on Palestine") to find solidarity with others who demand the same human rights for Palestinians as they would for any minority in the United States, or elsewhere in the world. Philip Weiss articulates his own personal role as one that includes responsibility for the Jews and Israelis:
It’s caused a cycle of brutalization…I am able and many Israeli Jews in the United States are able and should display leadership toward Israelis who have no concept of minority rights and no window at all on what they have done to their society…it’s a human rights disaster that they have had the largest power in creating…and they don’t know what to do about it.
I felt some degree of Jewish responsibility (after visiting Gaza) I can work as a writer and work on my country but I also need to work for my people to wake them up to what’s happening.
Rabbi Weiss Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a member of the Neturei Kartaorganization, a world-wide group of deeply orthodox Jews who believe that Zionism is "a terrible stain on Judaism", a corruption of the fundamental tenets of the Jewish religion. I met the rabbi in Brooklyn at a large Palestinian rally. Walking single file into a hall packed with young, educated flag-waving Palestinians, a group of black-garbed, bearded, orthodox Jewish men made a dramatic entry. Intrigued, I approached them to ask why they had come. Was it to support the Palestinians or to demonstrate against them?
Rabbi Weiss told me why his people oppose Zionism, starting with Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement as rejecting and belittling Judaism, rebelling against God, replacing religion with nationalism and the metaphysical with the material:Further, he explained, it is written that God made the Jews swear three oaths binding them during their exile, all of which have been flouted by Zionism: not to return en masse to the Holy Land, not to rebel against the nations of the world and not to attempt ending the exile, that is returning to Israel, by their own actions, rather than as decreed by God.
Where Phil Weiss' articulates his secular mission as helping Israelis by "waking them up to what's happening", the deeply orthodox religion solution from Neturei Karta, as told to me by Rabbi Weiss, is contrition and restitution:
Being that the land of Palestine was inhabited, you’re going to destroy those people, destroy their lives… This in itself, the Torah says you’re not allowed to steal even half a penny from another human being. This flies in the face of the Torah. Every concept of the Torah gets breached by stealing this land from the Palestinian people.
What does the Rabbi want Israel to do?
It has to be one state but the speedy and total dismantlement, total dissolution of the state of Israel... The course is to approach the leadership of the Palestinian people, whoever their leaders are, to profusely apologize for the wrongs done to them, to work on a course of restitution of paying back the damages, returning the property and the houses, and ask them humbly if they would allow the Jewish people to live among them.
If Zionism is the problem, then any solution will require a profound reframing of the proposition that is Israel. Who is up to this task?
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Zionism Under Attack is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast onWPKN on July 2, 2009 Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.
In February, 2009, after a delicious traditional 4-rice South Indian lunch in her office, I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharjee, a primary care and community medicine practitioner at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu state.
Four-rice traditional South Indian lunch
Until I saw her philosophy in action in the hospital, slums and villages around Vellore, I assumed that our first world country had invaluable advice and example to offer this (emerging? not-first world?) country. How quickly I shed those assumptions!
Grounds of Christian Medical College
Instead, I learned was that by viewing health care as a human rights issue and bringing unpaid volunteers into crucial nodes of a human network, the community itself can be transformed into an enlivened, active, effective organism in which the hospital is far more than a building populated by sick people and white-coated stethoscopes:
Shrine on hospital grounds
As Dr. Sara sees it:“Hospitals need to be seen not as worlds in themselves but as part of the community’s resource for the treatment of illness or the promotion of health,” to be educated so they know what is happening to themselves, to seek out solutions, to show them they have access they didn’t know they had.
Entrance to Low Cost Effective Care Unit
At the heart of Dr. Sara’s Low Cost Effective Care Unit are her volunteers, a small but committed group of nine women, who for the past six years have catapulted their training to enabled the disabled to self-identify their needs into expanding their own skills, initiative and self-worth so that they are now crucial members of
Volunteers and outpatients at village clinic
the community, respected 'go-to' leaders who have raised the community’s sense of self-worth and knowledge, along with their own. Dr. Sara describes it as a dynamic process that keeps giving--at the individual and community levels:
“(After the training)the volunteers were there with knowledge and skill and we thought if there were people there with knowledge and skill and good attitude, perhaps things would happen in the community. What we have found is that these volunteers are wonderful people and the knowledge and skills they have gained they have multiplied and used many times over. They’ve been very innovative in looking around in their own areas and finding resources they could use...even if they’re doing other things...they’re all keen to still get together and come together for monthly meetings and all this is totally voluntary because we don’t really pay them anything. I think it has made a change in all their lives...all of them say: ‘I’ve always wanted to serve, to help people, I always had a mind to serve but I didn’t know what to do. Now I’ve been empowered so when I’m asked I know what to do or at least I’m able to think about what to do’. I think the more they do, the more they become innovative."
Government-provided wheelchair for paraplegicvillager
In one remarkable story, Dr. Sara talks about teenage boys who, when one of their group was diagnosed with cancer, became anxious that they would also get the disease. They approached a volunteer (and, as Dr.Sara put it, “it speaks volumes for the volunteer that they felt they could go to her”) who approached Dr. Sara's team who identified the real anxieties underlying the cancer fears: typical teenage fears about HIV, sex, drinking, drugs or masturbation. The team created a life skills program for the boys who in turn initiated a garbage-cleanup program which led to contact with their elected representative and their subsequent civic empowerment.
The volunteer then asked Dr. Sara: "What about the girls? What can we do for then?" which led to teenage girls creating a program for the isolated elders of the community which in turn led to ongoing bonding of these two groups, the community's underlying network now richer and strengthened, as resilience, generosity and innovation rewarded and multiplied--living proof of what a difference a single volunteer can make in the lives of other and how this becomes amplified when several like-minded women connect to each other for shared purpose, when, as Dr. Sara puts it, "(it creates) a way of working that chimes with the forces of life that exist within the community...Our experience has been that these volunteers have been able to get young people to come together, young people to help them with whatever they do,” to start what has grown into a youth movement in the community.
Painted glass window in hospital hallway
I remind myself that we are in India, talking about slums and very poor rural people where funds are scarce and where poverty does not conflict with human goodness. What a far cry from our society’s flawed concept of our society's health care!
She explains the difference between community and family medicine: “Community medicine involves a little more focus on health within the community whereas family medicine is focused much more on the individual but sees the individual very much in relation to where they come from; their particular environment is very important to the treatment of disease. She has her young interns spend a week visiting their outpatients at their homes in the slums and villages after which they return “gobsmacked” by what they witnessed, saying they would otherwise have had never known “that this is the condition in which this person lives.”
Temple detail in village center
I am beginning to understand what Dr. Sara means when she writes about the holistic integration “of the biological and clinical, socio-economic and behavioral, emotional and spiritual aspects of life.” Her stories reveal just how personalized this approach is, in which: “the individual is valued, the family history is known, the patient is involved in making decisions and the relationship between that individual and the staff is one of trust and friendship...In our outreach work we’ve gone beyond just the typical family medicine approach...We’ve seen enormous amounts of generosity, people helping each other in the midst of violence and chaos...we see a force and a resilience among people who are actually facing very great odds against life itself...we feel that we are not the keepers of health and life, it has to be in the hands of people but we can encourage, lift up, support, if we are sensitive...being aware, to feel it.”
Government-provided house to paraplegic villager (cost Rs. 37,000/-)
All this in India, among the poorest of the poor where, as it is with plant and man-made materials nothing is wasted: every encounter is examined for what it teaches, where choices are not made between "either/or" but seen instead as "both/and", where nothing is discarded and everything holds possibility in another time frame, if not this one. This means that sometimes results may not become visible for years and that patience and being intensely present supplant the demand for immediate gratification.
Wonderful inspiring stories but I still didn’t understand how all the elements come together in what felt to me a magical, mystical way, beyond simply the result of enlightened, patient leadership. How does it actually happen?
This is what Dr. Sara told me: “I look at it like this: people are in webs of relationship and sometimes we don’t know where we are and who is connected to us and suddenly it all lights up and people hold hands and it may light up and it may fade away and somehow you find another network...there are people who in themselves are saying I want to help somebody or I want to make life better for myself and others but I don’t know what to do and suddenly across their path comes this volunteer or somebody from the hospital and they say ‘ok we’ll join into that’..or they say ‘we have this problem, can you help us?’ Certainly it’s not one way. I have, and sometimes my team has, gained more than we have given.”
Dr. Binayak Sen
As we ended our conversation, Dr. Sara told me about her friend and colleague, the physician-activist Dr. Binayak Sen, whose work with mineworkers and tribal people displaced by the building of dams in Chattisgarh led him “to stand up and speak for the rights of people, not just for health but to look at health as a human right and approach health from the human rights perspective.” Using nonviolence, discussion and writing, Dr. Sen was openly critical of the government, who labeled him as Naxalite and put him in jail where he has been since May 14, 2007. His arrest has sparked worldwide condemnation and protest.
Does it make sense to think of the giving of health care as a human right too?
This interview, broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan on May 9, 2009 on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport and 88.7 fm Montauk, is available as a half-hour podcast. Tidings from Hazel Kahan is produced by Tony Ernst.
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