Majandra Rodriguez Acha

The AWID Forum in Brazil this year provided a model for rejecting the journey from the margin to the mainstream. Instead it explored a feminist future based on the ‘politics of friendship’. This article is part of 50.50's in-depth coverage of the 2016 AWID Forum held on 8th -11th September 2016 in Bahia, Brazil. This year, the year the United States of America may elect its first female president, we will hear more about glass ceilings than perhaps any other time.

There is much in Jonathan Rosenhead’s reply to my article (The Contestation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism; openDemocracy, 27 July 2016) with which I agree, albeit he accuses me of wrestling with a straw person. Given that Rosenhead appears, wilfully or not, to misunderstand the main purport of my argument, I am inclined to throw the ‘straw person’ metaphor back at him. I do not argue that, to quote him, ‘criticism of Zionism as a whole should be off limits’.

Climate and environmental impacts are ravaging our planet, and women and marginalized groups are among those most affected. “We must resist in the different ways that we can and we must do it together, (as) our struggle is vast and intertwined.” We live in a world where global climate change is occurring at a much faster rate than previously predicted.