The Land Justice Sessions with Miknaf Ha'aretz & Friends
Thursdays, February 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th, March 7th, 14th
7:30-9:00pm GMT (2:30pm-4:00pm ET / 11:30am-1:00pm PT)
Recordings sent to participants after each session
What is ‘land justice’ & how might it offer a revolutionary re-imagining of our world?
Like the mycelial networks that weave between, beyond, through, with and around us, issues of land justice intersect and inter-weave with all other issues for ecological and social justice.
In our latest virtual series, we want to examine these tendrils of connection, exploring the entwinement between our struggles and solidarities with peoples across the world and across time. We will explore the abolitionist roots of land justice, Palestinian liberation, the Kurdish struggle, revolutionary shepherding and its link with migrant justice, & how the Right to Roam movement & wider UK land justice movement are bringing about this vision in the UK and re-imagining the commons as a treasury for all.
This series will be grounded in a radical, internationalist approach to land justice that questions the foundations of the oppressive mechanisms of the state & borders. We, as a Jewish collective dedicated to imagining and building liberatory diasporist jewish futures centered around justice, belonging and safety for everyone, are acutely aware of the particular moment this series arrives in. The massacres of October 7th, the ongoing hostage situation and the devastating ongoing siege and military bombardment of Gaza, and the rising violence against Palestinians across Palestine/Israel has shown us the worst of what’s possible when the only framework for a peoples’ liberation is through the violence of borders and militarism.
This is not unique to Israel/Palestine - we see these patterns playing out across the world and our hope is that this series will offer possibilities beyond them.
Join us with some very special guests in February & March to cultivate more understanding, community, solidarity (and organising power!) around these issues.
These sessions will be held by co-founders of Miknaf Ha'aretz Sara Moon and Samson Hart who will be joined by guest presenters.
Miknaf Ha'aretz is building earth-based, radical-diasporist, jewish community in the UK. Join us @miknafhaaretz and www.miknafhaaretz.co.uk.
You can find more information about individual sessions below.
These sessions are open to everybody. Whilst there are some sessions explicitly exploring Jewish land justice, and others that ask how the Jewish community specifically might connect to certain struggles, the sessions will also be covering many aspects and examples of land justice. You do not have to be Jewish to attend, and no prior knowledge will be assumed.
You can join for the whole series or for individual sessions and all sessions will be recorded and sent out to participants after each session.
Sessions
Session 1: 8th February - ‘A Common Treasury for All’: Right to Roam and land access in the UK
Access to land is not only about supporting our health & wellbeing, it is also a vital part of our safety, belonging & livelihood. In our final session, we will look to contemporary land justice struggles in the UK, visioning what land justice could look like in practice. In this session we will be joined by Nadia Shaikh from the Right to Roam movement, exploring the struggles to land access in the UK today, particularly for people of colour and other marginalised folk and how we can fight to recommon the land. We will also be joined by Jyoti Fernandes, who is campaigns and policy coordinator for the Landworkers Alliance and a spokesperson for La Via Campesina (the international peasant movement), to examine how the privatization of land continues to contribute to mounting food insecurity and how a systemic overhaul of land ownership in the UK and internationally, is the only way to achieve food, energy and land sovereignty.
Session 2: 15th February - From Enclosures to the Workhouse to the Prison Industrial Complex: Land Justice & Abolition
What does land justice have to do with abolition? This session will excavate the threads between the enclosures of common land and the history of the prison system in the UK, drawing on the histories of the workhouses, the uprooting of people from their livelihoods on (common) land and the necessity of prison for the emergence of modern capitalism. We will be joined by Jesse Noon, a Jewish abolitionist (with other speakers TBC) making the crucial links between land justice & abolition.
Session 3: 22nd February - Revolutionary Shepherding & Migrant Solidarity in the Borderlands
In the 1980s, goat-shepherds Jim & Pat Corbett, along with several friends set up what would become the ‘Sanctuary Movement’ in the USA, supporting hundreds of thousands of central-american refugees across the US-Mexico border. This session will explore the roots of this movement, looking at how pastoral life has been an antidote to empire throughout time, deepening us into a more intimate and liberated connection with land and those around us. We will be joined by Laurie Melrood, co-founder of the Texas sanctuary movement and shepherds, educators & land stewards David Bronstein & brontë velez (tbc) to learn about the revolutionary potentials of shepherding and its role in the movement for land justice and re-generation.
Session 4: 29th February - ‘Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home’: Learning from the Kurdish Freedom Movement
The Rojava revolution in northeast Syria established an autonomous territory based on the principles of women's liberation, stateless democracy and social ecology. The revolution, which erupted in 2012 and has been continuing since, is built on decades of organising by the Kurdistan freedom movement across the Middle East and around the world. One of the key ethics of the Kurdistan freedom movement is about building a cross-ethnicity, anti-nationalist and anti-fascist connection to one's country/land, and to be willing to defend it. What can our land justice movements learn from the Rojava revolution and the Kurdistan freedom movement about identity, belonging and connection to land? In this session, we will hear from Kurdish and international revolutionaries who have been building a revolution and imagining deep belonging to land beyond the patriarchal institution of the nation-state. We will be joined by Natalia Szarek, who spent a year in Rojava in 2019, in conversation with other speakers TBC.
Session 5: 7th March - Food and Land justice as Resistance in Palestine
Whilst we focus on building alternative futures to Zionism across the diaspora, we also hold the reality of the harms of Zionism to those living in the lands of Palestine/Israel now. How does the occupation and ongoing Nakba speak to issues of land and food justice? In this session we will be joined by urban farmer & food activist Morgan Cooper & Aida Al-Shibli, an indigenous Bedouin from occupied Palestine sharing their experiences of connecting Palestinians to their rich land-based heritage and growing food and tending land as an act of resistance.
Session 6: 14th March - Jewish Land Justice: Belonging beyond Zionism
In this session we will untangle the complex Jewish relationships with land and landlessness, exploring visions of rooted belonging on land beyond the nation-state, questioning the notion that nationalism is the only answer to secure Jewish safety and belonging in the face of dispossession and anti-semitism. Speakers TBC.
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Speaker Bios
Nadia Shaikh is a naturalist, ornithologist and land justice activist. She has worked for the RSPB for 14 years in a variety of roles, working with underrepresented communities in the sector and community engagement before moving to environmental policy, she left to explore the links between biodiversity decline and access to land. She now works for the Right to Roam campaign. Nadia also started and leads The Raven Network, a network for People of Colour who work in the environmental conservation organisations where they explore how to decolonize conservation. She is a trustee for the Wildlife and Countryside Link. She enjoys exercising her Right to Roam in Scotland where she lives, works and spends her time kayaking and rockpooling.
Jyoti Fernandes is a smallholder in Dorset UK. She is campaigns and policy coordinator for the Landworkers Alliance, a union for farmers, growers, foresters and land based workers in the UK. As part of her work for the LWA she is a spokesperson for La Via Campesina - an international social movement representing 200 million peasant farmers across the world.
Jesse Noon (they/them) is an ecologist, co-operative development worker, and prison abolitionist based in Manchester. They were a founding member of Books Beyond Bars, an organisation that sends books and other resources to queer and trans incarcerated people in the UK. They are a member of Myco, a Manchester based urban mushroom farm, where their work involves leading educational programmes on ecology, mycology, and land justice.
David Bronstein is a grassroots educator living as a guest on the land of his own sojourning in Santa Fe, NM, Tewa land. He serves his relations through nature connection teaching, rites of passage guiding, leading jewish rituals/prayer, and tending goats. Over the years he has created pathways for seekers to deepen their own spiritual education in
liberatory and culturally relevant ways through Alt*Div and Taproot.
Laurie Melrood
Natalia Szarek has been organising in social movements on these islands for nearly two decades, with roots in feminist, ecological and land justice struggles. She spent a year in Rojava in 2019 as an internationalist volunteer with the revolution, and continues to work alongside the Kurdistan freedom movement to build a revolutionary approach to politics in our social movements here. She is a co-author of "Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home".
Morgan Cooper is an urban farmer, lacto fermenter and designer (she is founder of Little Olea all natural products and Handmade Palestine). She left academia is 2010 to build an arboretum in Palestine with her husband with whom she ran Cafe La Vie in Ramallah for 12 years. She lives with her husband Saleh Totah, and two little kids, in his native Ramallah in the home his father built.
Aida Al-Shibli is an indigenous Bedouin from occupied Palestine and a Tamera co-worker. For many decades she has worked to raise awareness of injustice, to end cycles of political violence in her home country and around the world, for the liberation of women and the feminine, for an end to sexual repression and violence, and for the restoration of community and indigenous knowledge. Born to the indigenous Bedouin tribes of north Palestine became a political activist from a young age. Aida works on the connection between inner work and outer peace work; she is a leading figure in the non-violent resistance movement of Palestine. She is active in different global grassroots organizations. a public speaker and an icon of hope. Aida is a co-worker of the community of Tamera in south Portugal and serves as a bridge between cultures. She founded Global Campus Palestine GCP, an initiative that trains Palestinians toward a regenerative lifestyle as a tool of political resistance. Aida is a core member of the Defend the Sacred Alliance DSA movement, rooting activism in sacred actions.
More speaker bio's coming soon...
Ticket Info
Per session: £7.50 / £10 / £15 / £20
All sessions: £45 / £60 / £90 / £120
These sessions are ticketed so we can properly support our amazing array of speakers (and keep building the jewish diasporist world to come!). Please be generous if you can and please keep the supported rate for those who really need it. If none of these options work for you, please get in touch for a cheaper or free ticket at: hello@miknafhaaretz.co.uk.
If you'd like to join live - you'll need to have purchased a ticket by 6pm on the day of the session in order to receive the link on time. If you sign up for 'all sessions' once the series has begun you will still receive recordings of all sessions.
Session Format
We aim to make these sessions as accessible as possible. The sessions themselves will be very informal. Samson Hart and Sara Moon will introduce the sessions, offer some brief framing and then they will mostly be offered in a webinar style with the participants muted until question time at the end. You will be invited to participate with video on or off and we will take a short ‘bio’ break half-way through the session. All sessions will offer closed captioning and will be recorded for later viewing or re-watch.
If there’s anything else we can do to support your access, presence and comfort at these sessions please let us know at hello@miknafhaaretz.co.uk.
Miknaf Ha'aretz is building earth-based, radical-diasporist, jewish community in the UK.
Join us @miknafhaaretz and www.miknafhaaretz.co.uk
With deep gratitude to Miranda Cohen for the beautiful art work...
Website: mcohendesign.com
Instagram: @mirandacohenmakes
