event
Publishing and Political Culture
The New School’s Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism (CPCJ) and Woodbine Research Center present a discussion on the role of radical politics in publishing. ...
Event: ‘Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide’
Register for this webinar here. An organiser wrote:
The slogan Never Again symbolised the determination of anti-fascists and the labour movement that after the Holocaust, genocide must never happen again – that no one should be annihilated because of an accident of birth and who they are.
Six million Jews, a million Gypsy Roma, half a million mentally and physically disabled, to say nothing of the millions of prisoners of war, Poles, Russians and other people who were exterminated by the nazis between 1939 and 1945.
Zionism however drew different conclusions from the Holocaust. As Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and the Rector of the Central European University wrote in Ha’aretz, in ‘The Need to Forget’ in 1988:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim (arose). In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
The Holocaust played an important part in the establishment of the State of Israel yet it was because of the Nakba, the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homeland, that a Jewish State was formed. A series of massacres accompanied the Nakba which were aimed at ‘encouraging’ the flight of the Palestinian refugees.
In our Public Meeting we not only have Professor Ilan Pappe, the foremost historian of the Nakba, who has written The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine but Ghada Kharmi, a British Palestinian doctor who was expelled by the Zionist militias in 1948 from her home in Jerusalem.
Also speaking are Stephen Kapos and Suzanna Weiss, two child survivors of the Holocaust who were hidden from the fascists in Budapest and France, along with Tony Greenstein who has written Zionism During the Holocaust .
Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting
Saturday 27 January 7 pm
Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide
Register in advance for this webinar here. Event details are here.
Liverpool grassroots campaign holding Gaza medical aid fundraiser 7 Dec
Tickets now on sale for Kit it Out’s Gaza fundraiser
The Kit it Out campaign, which was set up in Liverpool to provide free football kits to players who can’t afford them, is holding a fundraiser for the Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) group in December. The event, which has a number of well-known acts already committed to attend, will be held at District in Liverpool from 7pm on Thursday 7 December.
Tickets, which Skwawkbox understands are selling quickly, can be ordered here.
Free Palestine.
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Second online Convention Meeting, 23 May
Responding to the crisis II: organising to defend Higher Education in the pandemic era (continued)
Saturday 23 May, 10am – 12 noon
Over 200 colleagues met to regroup and discuss the next steps in the campaign to defend Higher Education.
- We heard a series of two minute reportbacks of initiatives taken by specific groups, individuals and union branches and discussed a range of strategies that can be used to resist employer attacks.
- We agreed a collective statement, A New Future for Higher Education, to which colleagues can add their signature.
- We have begun work on a more detailed document in the next few weeks that can be circulated to MPs and beyond containing our vision for HE, detailed financial analysis and concrete proposals for safeguarding HE’s role in the coming period.
- We agreed to call for protests on 1 June in defence of staff facing the loss of their jobs, and in solidarity with actions to Keep Education Safe by members of the National Education Union.
The notes of the meeting are published online in a GoogleDoc where colleagues can continue to contribute towards sections of the ‘vision document’.