A Parents’ Climate Movement in Israel
At the end of August 2019, with the huge fires burning in the Amazon, the climate crisis was becoming impossible to ignore, and I was crying hard in Co-Counseling sessions about the news.
I decided to try something I had been thinking about for months. I wrote a post on Facebook stating that as parents we had an important role to play, that young people had taken the lead in climate change work but it was time for us to take our place in the struggle. I posted something similar in an Extinction Rebellion Facebook group I had recently joined.
Both posts received a lot of attention and interest, and I decided to pursue my idea. I began writing personally to all the people who responded to my posts, both people I knew and people I did not. Then I set up phone conversations with those who were interested in talking. I sensed right away that parents had a lot of hunger for something like what I was proposing. Many told me that they’d been thinking of starting a parents’ group on climate for a long time.
At first I was hesitant about going forward. I had to make a decision, to overcome my timidities.
I noticed that I was good at the phone conversations. I would ask about people’s lives and families. Then I would put forward a clear and hopeful picture of what I thought we could do, and listen to people’s thinking, fears, and discouragement and about their difficulties in organizing the parents around them. Then I would share my thoughts about what needed to and could happen so that we could move forward. I talked about lending other people confidence, how people need someone who can be brave and take them by the hand and say, “We can do this.”
As I was moving along with the phone conversations, I began to formulate what we could do and how we could go about doing it. Early on I suggested that we form local groups so that people would know each other and could most easily work together. It was clear there was no way to be effective countrywide without people being able to meet each other, build relationships, and work together closely.
Things began taking shape faster than I had thought possible. An administrator of a Facebook parents’ group focused on ecology and families joined our movement. Another parent offered to run our Facebook page. A graphic designer created a beautiful logo. We were suddenly up and running [in operation].
I decided to kick-start things by calling a meeting in Haifa, the city where I live. Just calling it and setting the time and place made a difference. People could see that a parents’ movement was possible and that things were taking shape. I knew that not many people would be able to make it to [attend] the meeting, but I also knew that that didn’t matter—just calling a meeting would help things take form.
I put forward early on that it would be good to support the young people who were striking on Fridays, and we joined the global climate strike on September 20 as our first event. People from our group joined demonstrations in three cities.
I work as an electrician in a small underground train, a working-class environment, and I told people there about the project. Three of my friends from work came to a demonstration during their break time (it was outside one of the stations). I think it was their first demonstration.
Just the idea of our then very sketchy existence gave one of the striking young people in Jerusalem the idea that she could gather parent support. She got the parents’ committee at her school to support the strike, and as a result the whole school became involved in the protest.
For the November 29 global strike, we got the municipal parents’ boards of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to issue a public declaration of support for the students. Because of our work, several school principals e-mailed their staffs expressing support for the strike, and they allowed their students to miss school for it if they had parental approval.
We now have several hundred activists countrywide and roughly eight groups either active or in the early stages of development.
I have also been involved in an international movement of parents, which has put me in touch with parent activists around the world.
I am learning to push myself beyond my feelings of despair. I feel the feelings, but then I move and they don’t stay stuck.
I have a long history of activism. I have always known I have something unique to offer, because of my knowledge of and work in RC, but it is showing clearly in what I can do with this movement. I can be caring; show that I want people and can think about them; lend my confidence; have ideas about how to work together and what to do when things get stuck; and let people know that we are all in this together, that it is a movement for everybody, and that there are no bad people. I can offer RC understandings about young people’s oppression and help adults with any difficulties they have with the young people’s movements. All these things have made a big difference in what we have been able to build.
There are many struggles and challenges as well, and hopefully I will get a chance to write about them at some point.
Haifa, Israel
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 198, January 2020)