Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi on Women, War and Nukes

It’s an honour and a privilege to share this platform with Jess Barnard, Lindsey German and Carol Turner, great women dedicated to the causes of equality, justice and peace. I want to thank Arise! and Labour CND for giving me the opportunity to bring to the table a Jewish socialist perspective that is not heard often enough.

I’ll be looking at our subject through three different lenses and will be including some personal stories.

1. Women and war
2. Nukes
3. Jews and nukes

I hope you’ll agree they overlap in interesting ways.

So, first.

1. Women and war

Throughout history, and tragically to this very day, as Lindsey said, women and girls have suffered terribly as victims of horrific crimes in wartime. But they have also been heroic fighters and passionate anti-war campaigners.

When my late mother was living with me in 2016-17, she insisted we visit a little-known sculpture erected by the socialist, anti-war feminist Sylvia Pankhurst in 1935. The monument, an 18 inch stone bomb on a plinth, stands in what used to be Pankhurst’s own front garden on Woodford Green High Road.

Pankhurst had been appalled by German bombing of London in WW1, and Mussolini’s aerial bombing of Ethiopia in 1934.

“The people who care for Peace in all countries must unite to force their Governments to outlaw the air bomb,” Pankhurst wrote. “We must not tolerate this cruelty, the horror of mangled bodies, entrails protruding, heads, arms, legs blown off, faces half gone, blood and human remains desecrating the soil.”

Pankhurst certainly did not mince her words!

In World War ll, it’s well known that huge numbers of women took on traditionally male roles in the UK, many sacrificing their lives as part of the war effort. I want to share with you stories researched by Sue Levi Hughes, from Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party, about 12 women who fought the Nazis. Resistance took many forms, from quiet acts of bravery to open acts of rebellion.

By mid 1941 nearly all Jews in Poland had been forced into ghettoes. 490,000 Jews, Roma and Sinti struggled to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto. Women served as couriers and smuggled arms for ghetto fighters who, in April/May 1943, put up a 27 day battle against Nazis intent on liquidating them all.

They deployed Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons. Some  descended into the sewers, stockpiling arms for the resistance.

I don’t have time to name all those in Sue Hughes’ moving stories. I will just mention a few.

Tosia Altman travelled on false papers between ghettoes, passing on intelligence, weapons, and training people to fight back. She was captured by the Gestapo and died in their custody.

Ala Gertner, Rosa robota, Ester Wajcblum and Regina Sarirsztajn were arrested and tortured to extract from them the names of others involved in smuggling operations. They refused and were hanged on 6 January 1945. Of all the 12 whose stories Sue has documented, only four survived.

Next:

2. Nukes

I’ve already mentioned my mother’s insistence on visiting Sylvia Pankhurst’s bomb sculpture. We were actually something of an “anti-nuclear” family. My sister and I travelled together with our parents to CND demos. Mum wrote numerous protest letters to the press, which I discovered among her papers after she died. My Auntie Dora – an all round activist firebrand – would never miss an Aldermarston march, even after she had a hip replaced!

Naturally we supported the Greenham Common protests and were inspired by the women who dedicated themselves to trying to avert the nuclear threat. Father was a medical doctor and a signatory to a group called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War – IPPNW – based in Boston, Massachusetts.

As Reuters chief correspondent in Amsterdam in 1983, I covered IPPNW’s third congress taking place in the city in June that year. It was the brainchild of two leading cardiologists, Professor Bernard Lown of the Harvard School of Public Health and the director general of the Soviet Union’s National Cardiology Research Centre, Yevgeny Chazov. It brought together doctors around the world trying to alert the world to the “final epidemic” a nuclear war could trigger.

Opponents accused it of spreading horror stories to frighten the ill-informed, but the group was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1985 and continues active to this day. You may have been one of the more than a million people who signed a global petition submitted to the UN last month rejecting war and nuclear weapons.

It said

“The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people. The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.

It called for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all Russian military forces, adding:

“We call on Russia and NATO to explicitly renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, and we call on all countries to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.”

Moving on to my third lens:

3. Jews and nukes

From within the Jewish tradition have come many powerful voices strongly opposing nuclear weapons, as well as some who helped to create them.

Jews fleeing the Holocaust included many top physicists who were recruited into America’s Manhattan Project—to build the first atomic bomb.

Albert Einstein had a peripheral role in the Project’s creation but has since been widely quoted saying these memorable and chilling words:

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Former United States military analyst Daniel Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War.

He wrote in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,  that he had seen a “descent into the deep heart of darkness” comparable to what happened when German bureaucrats decided to use the most advanced technology available to exterminate Jews

– “a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.”

“..virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”

Mordechai Vanunu was a technician at Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona who turned whistle blower, telling the Sunday Times in 1986 about his country’s secret nuclear weapons.  Vanunu was convicted of grave security offenses, jailed for 16 years and has lived under severe restrictions in Israel ever since.

Israel has always refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to confirm or deny the existence of their weapons.

According to a Harvard Divinity School paper on Jewish and Israeli attitudes to the bomb, published in 2018, it is widely known that by 2014 Israel had at least 80 nuclear warheads.

While some Jews believe having atomic bombs will deter the next Holocaust, many others, particularly in the United States, worry that these weapons will  bring it about. For them – and I include myself among their number – “never again” means advocating for complete nuclear disarmament.

4. Conclusion

To conclude, realisation is dawning among swathes of the world’s population that humanity faces existential threats on several fronts – destruction of the planet through pollution, global warming, corporate pillage and environmental devastation ; mass poverty, hunger, homelessness and hopelessness; displacement of populations on an unprecedented scale; an accelerating rise in xenophobia and bigotry of all kinds; attacks on hard won rights and liberties;  AND, on top of all this, an international political order in which the most powerful players are willing to contemplate consigning us all to a nuclear apocalypse. This is graphically illustrated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and its grisly, ongoing outcome.

The UK political establishment, including the Labour leadership, is tied increasingly to a web of aggressive, US-led, expansionist alliances. We’re seeing plans for US nuclear weapons to be stationed at RAF Lakenheath, 100 km north of London, while an emergency motion passed at last September’s Labour Party conference opposing Washington’s security pact with Australia and Britain (known as AUKUS) is being ignored by the current party leadership.

Given this scenario, I’m grateful for the inspiration that is my inheritance – from generations of courageous women, Jewish and otherwise, from those Jews who have been among the most determined advocates for peace, and also from the wider socialist tradition that Jeremy Corbyn represents. My goal in standing for Labour’s NEC is to work in the heart of the party, as part of a team with Jess and the other candidates on the Grassroots Five slate, for a nuclear free world, and for security and peace for the whole of humanity.

FURTHER NOTES

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) His parents were Ashkenazi Jews who had converted to Christian Science, and he was raised as a Christian Scientist.

iAmerican political activist, and former United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.

On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973.

Ellsberg was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006. He is also known for having formulated an important example in decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox, his extensive studies on nuclear weapons and nuclear policy, and for having voiced support for WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.

Ellsberg was awarded the 2018 Olof Palme Prize for his “profound humanism and exceptional moral courage.”

Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the “Plumbers” to have 12 Cuban Americans who had previously worked for the CIA “totally incapacitate” Ellsberg when he appeared at a public rally. It is unclear whether they were meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to hospitalize him. In his autobiography, Liddy describes an “Ellsberg neutralization proposal” originating from Howard Hunt, which involved drugging Ellsberg with LSD, by dissolving it in his soup, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington in order to “have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak” and thus “make him appear a near burnt-out drug case” and “discredit him.” The plot involved waiters from the Miami Cuban community. According to Liddy, when the plan was finally approved, “there was no longer enough lead time to get the Cuban waiters up from their Miami hotels and into place in the Washington Hotel where the dinner was to take place” and the plan was “put into abeyance pending another opportunity.”

n December 2017, Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He said that his primary job from 1958 until releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was as a nuclear war planner for US Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He concluded that US nuclear war policy was completely crazy and he could no longer live with himself without doing what he could to expose it, even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life in prison. However, he also felt that as long as the US was still involved in the Vietnam War, the US electorate would not likely listen to a discussion of nuclear war policy. He therefore copied two sets of documents, planning to release first the Pentagon Papers and later documentation of nuclear war plans. However, the nuclear planning materials were hidden in a landfill and then lost during an unexpected tropical storm.

His overriding concerns are as follows:

1. As long as the world maintains large nuclear arsenals, it is not a matter of if, but when, a nuclear war will occur.
2. The vast majority of the population of an initiator state would likely starve to death during a “nuclear autumn” or “nuclear winter” if they did not die earlier from retaliation or fallout. If the nuclear war dropped only roughly 100 nuclear weapons on cities, as in a war between India and Pakistan, the effect would be similar to the “Year Without a Summer” that followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, except that it would last more like a decade, because soot would not settle out of the stratosphereas quickly as the volcanic debris, and roughly a third of the people worldwide not killed by the nuclear exchange would starve to death, because of the resulting crop failures. However, if more than roughly 2 percent of the US nuclear arsenal were used, the results would more likely be a nuclear winter, leading to the deaths from starvation of 98 percent of people worldwide not killed by the nuclear exchange.
3. To preserve the ability of a nuclear-weapon stateto retaliate from a “decapitation” attack, every country with nuclear weapons seems to have delegated broadly the authority to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.

“Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“That exchange did it. Already oppressed by the briefings up to that point, I shrank within, horrified. I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe, using methods of mass extermination more technologically efficient than the vans filled with exhaust gases, the mass shootings, or incineration in barns and synagogues used until then. I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface. Those feelings have not entirely abated, even though more than forty years have passed since that dark moment.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Holocaust Memorial Day 2022

Introduction and film by Sue Levi Hughes

The Holocaust is part of my family history. My parents and grandparents were refugees from Nazi Germany in the late ’30s, after several years when Jews were being persecuted, driven out of their homes and physically attacked. My aunt, uncle and cousins perished in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.

The history of the Holocaust is also part of my present. It is a part of me, ingrained into me. I live with it and I live with the trauma my parents unwittingly passed down to me and my sister. My mother’s fear of not having enough food means both my sister and I are unable to throw food away or waste even the smallest scrap. 

My families’ fear that we would be recognised as Jews outside of the Jewish area we lived became my reality and I ditched my recognisably Jewish name as soon as I could. Now I am proud to use my Jewish surname: Levi.

You can watch the short film here: We remember – Stories of Jewish resistance with a focus on women fighters

Of the 12 women below only 4 survived.

1. Tosia Altman – escaped from Warsaw Ghetto uprising, captured by gestapo 2 weeks later, died 2 days after that
2. Frumka Plotnicka – died fighting against Germans a couple of years later
3. Hanna Fryshdorf – survived
4. Chaika Grossman – survived
5. Vladka Meed – survived
6. Malka Zdrojewicz – survived
7. Bluma Wyszogrodzka – shot
8. Rachela Wyszogrodzka – died in concentration camp

These four women were arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in Bloc 23 of Auschwitz but they refused to reveal the names of others who participated in the smuggling operation. They were hanged on 6 January 1945

9. Ala Gertner
10. Rosa Robota
11. Ester Wajcblum
12. Regina Sarirsztajn

An emergency motion at the Labour Party conference, called AUKUS (the new trilateral security agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia) a “dangerous move which will undermine world peace” and called on the government  to adhere to terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But the shadow defence secretary John Healey and Labour leader Keir Starmer welcomed the pact.

Military bunkers in the UK are being upgraded so they can be used to store US nuclear weapons again after 14 years of standing empty, according to US defence budget documents.

In the Biden administration’s 2023 defence budget request, the UK was added to the list of countries where infrastructure investment is under way at “special weapons” storage sites, alongside Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey – all countries where the US stores an estimated 100 B61 nuclear bombs.

Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), who first reported on the budget item, said he believed the British site being upgraded is the US airbase at RAF Lakenheath, 100 km north-east of London.

Already having seen the horror of WW1 bombing in London, socialist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst was appalled at Mussolini’s aerial bombing of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia). In October 1935 she erected this monument as a protest in her own front garden at the Red Cottage. The sculpture represents an 18 inch stone bomb on a plinth.

Sylvia Pankhurst Anti-Aerial Bombing memorial

In May 1936 there appeared an announcement in the Essex based New Times and Ethiopia News. ‘In these days of ever threatening war, the necessity of effective and ceaseless opposition cannot be over-emphasised. The powers of Science have given aerial war a capacity of devastation and destruction without parallel in the history of mankind’. It was important, she continued, that people were ‘made more fully alive to this danger’ and, with this aim in mind, it was intended to ‘erect a model in stone of an aerial torpedo bomb’.

The monument would be the first of its kind.
‘There are thousands of memorials in every town and village to the dead, but not one as a reminder of the danger of future wars. The people who care for Peace in all countries must unite to force their Governments to outlaw the air bomb. We must not tolerate this cruelty, the horror of mangled bodies, entrails protruding, heads, arms, legs blown off, faces half gone, blood and human remains desecrating the soil. We must not assent to this merciless destruction of men, women, children and animals.

The first Anti-Air War Memorial was unveiled on 21 June and stood prominently outside Red Cottage, Sylvia’s home along with a plaque dedicating it ironically to politicians who, at the World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva in February 1932, ‘upheld the right to use bombing planes’.

The memorial was as ‘a protest against war in the air’, on land owned by the socialist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst. During the first world war, Sylvia Pankhurst had experienced the first Zeppelin raids on London where she worked with destitute families during the war and unlike her now better know sister objected to the war. She deplored Britain’s bombing of rebels in Burma and north-west India.

According to Eric Banfield who carved the memorial, the stone bomb was a response to the fact that, in 1934, the year after Hitler’s accession to power, a section of the press was ‘making much of certain politicians who seemed to be boasting that they, and they alone, had prevented the abolition of bombing planes’, proposed by Germany at the League of Nations Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. The monument was treated as a provocation by fascist sympathisers. It was smeared with creosote on its very first night, and shortly afterwards it was stolen. Benfield promptly set about making a new one, and the publicity caused by the despoilers ensured that the second unveiling, which took place on 4 July 1936, achieved much greater interest than the first.

Scenes of women and children displaced from their homes and fleeing the conflict in Ukraine are an urgent – though far from unique – reminder of the particular ways in which conflict impacts on women.

Join Labour CND Chair Carol Turner and the all-women panel for a discussion of the dreadful consequences, and occasional opportunities, war brings for women – from Hitler’s Germany & the US atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII, to the decades-long “war on terror,” to the concerns of a new young generation of women today..

Women and nukes

I’ve already my mother’s insistence on visiting Sylvia Pankhurst’s bomb sculpture. We were actually something of an “anti-nuclear” family. My sister and I travelled together with our parents to Mum’s letters to the press.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War!

Global call by peace laureates – March 2022

We reject war and nuclear weapons. We call on all our fellow citizens of the world to join us in protecting our planet, home for all of us, from those who threaten to destroy it.

The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people. The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.

We call for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian military forces from Ukraine, and for all possible efforts at dialogue to prevent this ultimate disaster.

We call on Russia and NATO to explicitly renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, and we call on all countries to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.

The time to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons is now. It is the only way to guarantee that the inhabitants of the planet will be safe from this existential threat.

It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.

We reject governance through imposition and threats, and we advocate for dialogue, coexistence and justice.

A world without nuclear weapons is necessary and possible, and together we will build it. It is urgent that we give peace a chance.

Signatories list of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates:

His Holiness The Dalai Lama (1989)
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985)
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017)
Juan Manuel Santos (2016)
Kailash Satyarthi (2014)
Leymah Gbowee (2011)
Tawakkul Karman (2011)
Muhammad Yunus (2006)
David Trimble (1998)
Jody Williams (1997)
Jose Ramos-Horta (1996)
Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (1995)
Óscar Arias Sánchez (1987)
Lech Walesa (1983)
American Friends Service Committee (1947)
International Peace Bureau (1910)

International Physicians’ Statement, 16.03.2022

A Joint Statement of IPPNW Physicians in Russia and Ukraine

03/16/2022 IPPNW physicians in Russia and Ukraine publish a joint statement condemning the war in Ukraine and its humanitarian and nuclear consequences. They appeal to the authorities of the confronting parties and the United States to pursue swift and effective peace negotiations in order to save lives and preserve worldwide healthcare systems.

Read the full statement here