Radical Hope #14: If Not Us, Who?
From Generative Practice to Radical Hope #14
You are a body that has awareness.
You are nature.
You are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
You are an island of coherence in your community.
In the last newsletter, If Not Me, Who?, we brought the justice model down to the everyday scale — the family dinner, the workplace meeting, the conversation in the street.
Now we widen the lens again.
What becomes possible when we bring everything we have learned — body, field, awakening, emergence, living systems, calling, mastery, justice, personal agency — to the world stage?
How do we flock more fully with movements towards justice, and towards a shared vision for humanity and the ecosystem?
This is the fourteenth newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
Acting at Scale
I feel hopeless about the Climate Crisis
Thinking about where I have intervened on a national and international level recently, I feel like quite a failure in regard to the climate crisis.
Too little is being done, and too late.
The UN Environment Programme says we have missed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target; the best-case scenario predicts a peak temperature rise of 1.8°C, and others suggest over 2°C. (1)
Even though I feel hopeless about it, I still hold to radical hope: I continue to take action to mitigate the ongoing mass extinction of species because doing something is better than doing nothing at all.
The tragedy in Israel and Palestine
The other issue I have flocked towards in the last few years is the massacre at the October 7th 2023 Nova music festival in Israel, and its aftermath.
I don't think I need to go into the detail of the horror of the October 7th massacre, or what has been happening since then, here.
As readers will know, I had Jewish relatives gassed in the Holocaust, and ethnic German relatives living in Berlin at the time. I have committed to the vow of survivors of Auschwitz, "Never Again" — but also to not being a passive bystander to horrific acts.
So when the destruction of Gaza started, I was shocked by the silence of so many Global North countries, including Britain.
As we know from bystander research, two forces keep us silent.
The first: the more people present, the less personally responsible any one of us feels. The second: we look to others for cues about what's happening, so when everyone stays silent, we think we should stay silent too, despite our misgivings.
So I asked myself the key question, "If not me, who?"
And remember this isn't someone else's quarrel. Britain made this.
During the First World War my country promised the same land twice over — an independent Arab state to Sharif Hussein, a national home for the Jewish people to Lord Rothschild. It then governed Palestine for twenty-five years under a Mandate that required it to safeguard the rights of all inhabitants without discrimination, while recognising a Jewish agency as a public body and creating no equivalent for anyone else. When Palestinians revolted in 1936, it crushed them.
Then, on 14 May 1948, the Mandate expired and Britain left — no settlement, no protection for the population it had governed for a quarter of a century. War began within hours. (2)
Britain wrote down what justice required and then spent a quarter of a century not doing it.
That is my inheritance. I have written about Britain's part in the Israel-Palestine conflict here.
You may have noticed me speaking out about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank on various social media platforms. I don't claim to have always got it right. I am on a learning curve. But I know that, at least to a small degree, I have influenced my communities to think about these issues. I don't feel very powerful in this, but I have consoled myself that I am just one among a flock. It hasn't been easy — I have been called all manner of names, including antisemitic, more times than I can remember.
In Newsletter 12 we talked about naming specific harm conducted by specific individuals — we can name governments without blaming all Israelis, or all Jews worldwide.
Then on 8th September 2026, Ed Miliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, speaking in Parliament, declared that while he was proud to be a British Jew, the treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounted to “ethnic cleansing” carried out by “settler terrorists.” He announced that the British Government would impose sanctions on Israeli goods originating from the West Bank, framing the move as a necessary response to escalating human rights violations. (3)
Something happened the day Miliband made his statement that felt different.
Within twenty-four hours, senior British rabbis — from the Masorti, Liberal and Progressive wings of British Judaism — came out publicly in support, several of them explicit that silence was no longer a neutral position. (4) Lord Levy, Prime Minister Tony Blair's Special Envoy to the Middle East, added his voice too. (5) So did a striking range of prominent Israelis: a former Prime Minister, a former army chief, a former Knesset speaker, and fourteen Israeli human rights organisations all welcomed the sanctions. "It's a good beginning," said Avraham Burg, once speaker of the Knesset. "Do not stop." (6) France and Canada announced matching import bans the same day; the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway had already done so or were in the process; several more European governments pledged to follow. (4)
We are a million miles from having a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. And a million miles from Israelis feeling safe enough to permit it. Yet I didn't believe Apartheid would end in South Africa, but it did. I didn't believe the Berlin wall and the iron curtain across Europe would come down, but it did.
Radical Hope is about continuing to act even when the outcome seems distant and uncertain.
Change From Within the System
Thinking about what it costs to criticise your own people, I feel a kinship with Fatima Mernissi, who challenged the patriarchal orthodoxy of Islam in Morocco and helped to bring women much better rights.
She grew up partly inside a harem, a protected, private domestic space for women, in Fez. As a girl she played a game with herself: to look at an ordinary thing as though she had never seen it before. She kept that habit all her life, and eventually made a method of it — becoming a sociologist, and turning that same unfamiliar gaze on the texts she had been raised inside.
She looked at the hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet, and when she came to the misogynist ones she asked the questions any historian would ask. Who first reported this? When? What else was happening at the time?
One of them holds that a people who entrust their affairs to a woman will not prosper. It was reported by a man called Abu Bakra, who recalled it some twenty-five years after the Prophet's death — in the immediate aftermath of a battle in which Aisha, the Prophet's widow, had led an army and been defeated. Abu Bakra had stayed out of that war, and now had to account for why. Mernissi's point was not that the words were invented, but that the moment of their recall deserves as much attention as the words themselves .(7)
Her questions were feminist, and they were entirely internal to the tradition. She was not importing a critique from outside.
She was asking Islam about itself.
And she did not let the West off either, writing about our own harem — the harem of ageism, where a woman may go wherever she likes so long as she stays young and thin and a particular kind of beautiful.
In February 2004 the Moroccan parliament unanimously adopted a new family code, giving both spouses joint responsibility for the family, curbing the requirement for a male guardian, restricting polygamy, raising the age of marriage from fifteen to eighteen, and securing rights to divorce and to custody. (8)
Fatima Mernissi didn't do this on her own. A movement did.
The Union de l'Action Féminine had been gathering signatures since 1992 and collected a million of them. A smaller reform in 1993 had already shown that the code could be changed. A royal commission in 2001 deliberately put modernists and traditionalists in the same room and made them talk to each other.
What Mernissi gave them, across years of writing, was an argument they could use: that much of what was being defended as Islamic law had actually arrived with the French, out of the Napoleonic code. If that was so, reform was not rupture at all, but return.
Someone made the argument. Others carried it. A movement gathered the signatures. A king convened the room. Nobody was in charge of any of it, and it took twelve years.
That is a murmuration, at the scale of a country.
And it is why I keep speaking. Change from within asks you to stay in the room you are trying to change, and to accept that you may only ever supply one small part of something you will not live to see finished.
You Do Not Need Everyone to Join a Murmuration
We carry a quiet assumption that change waits on consensus — that nothing really moves until most people agree.
Erica Chenoweth's groundbreaking research found that a non-violent movement which drew around three and a half per cent of a population into its largest single moment had historically achieved its aims.9 It is a rule of thumb rather than a law, and movements have had a harder time as governments become more authoritarian.
But the general principle holds:
A system does not need converting, it needs a tipping point.
We have seen this shape already. In Newsletter 10 it was a murmuration — no bird deciding, no bird in charge, and yet the whole flock turns. What looks from outside like a decision is, from inside, a great many small acts of attention to whoever is nearest.
How do you join a murmuration?
The French Resistance to the Nazi occupation did not recruit by broadcast. It grew through people who already knew one another. Someone you trusted came to you, in person, and asked.10
The answer to "someone should do something" is not to argue more loudly. It is one person talking to another and deciding to do something themselves.
You know such people. You could name them now.
Why Does This Matter Now?
Nothing new is being asked of you. The attention we have been building to flocking towards a fair, peaceful and healthy future is just at a national and international scale.
The size of the field has changed — and the honest fact that at this scale you may not live to see the results, and you choose to act anyway.
That is what radical hope has meant all along. Not confidence about outcomes. But faithfulness to the vision and the rightness of it.
A Practice
Find the Murmuration
Find a quiet ten minutes.
Sit, and let your weight go down. Feel the ground take it. Three slow breaths, letting the shoulders drop and the jaw soften, or whatever takes you most easily into embodied awareness.
From that settled place — not from the planning mind — from your feeling body allow to emerge one thing in the national or international sphere that grieves you or excites you.
Notice what the body does with it, wherever it lives in you. Do not fix it. Let it be there while you keep breathing.
Then ask: who is already moving on this?
Name one group, one organisation, one campaign.
Then a smaller question: who do I already know in that movement? How do I connect with them?
Later, perhaps days later, you can ask, who do I know who might flock with me? Perhaps someone who already trusts you. What would you actually say to them?
Then let it go and come back to the breath and your meditation. The impulse to act will still be here later if it comes from inner coherence.
Next Newsletter
Next: The Pilgrim's Summons. This newsletter has been about the world, and what it is asking of all of us. The next recognises your long years of inner work, which, despite your ongoing difficulty and vulnerability, or perhaps because of it, summons you to a quiet form of leadership in the world, what we might call servant leadership.
Who is already moving on the thing I care most about?
What would it take to join them?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world's crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. Untain's part in the Mandate and its ending is set out at length in the linked document above; this note covers only the departure date and itsited Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Limiting Overshoot: Navigating Exceedance of 1.5°C and Pathways to Technology Decline (Nairobi: UNEP, 2026).
2. Bri immediate aftermath. The 1948 displacement figure is broadly accepted at around 700,000–750,000, though its causes remain among the most contested questions in the historiography — see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3. Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, oral statement to the House of Commons, 8 September 2026, Hansard, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-09-08/debates/B9E48476-ADE4-4D56-8EA8-F76BBFF188E8/IsraelAndPalestine. In his statement Miliband cited a former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and a former Israeli Minister of Health and IDF brigadier general, Ephraim Sneh, both of whom have described West Bank settler violence as amounting to ethnic cleansing.
4. Aamna Mohdin, "Senior UK Rabbis Come Out in Support of Sanctions on Israeli Settlements," The Guardian, 9 September 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/09/senior-uk-rabbis-come-out-in-support-of-sanctions-on-israeli-settlements.
5. “Ed Miliband rewrites UK policy on West Bank settlements,” PM, BBC Radio 4, 8 September 2026, audio, 59 min, accessed 13 September 2026. The programme's own billing named Lord Levy — “a prominent member of the Jewish community in this country and Tony Blair's Ambassador to the Middle East” — as a live guest alongside Middle East Minister Stephen Doughty and Israel's Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.
6. Emma Graham-Harrison, "'It's a Good Start': Prominent Israelis Welcome UK Sanctions on Illegal Settlements," The Guardian, 9 September 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/09/israelis-welcome-uk-sanctions-on-settlements-palestine-west-bank.
7. Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), first published as Le Harem politique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987). The hadith appears in Sahih al-Bukhari; Abu Bakra recalled it after Aisha's defeat at the Battle of the Camel in 656. Mernissi also notes that Abu Bakra had once been flogged for false testimony. Her reading is disputed: Bukhari accepted him as a reliable narrator, and defenders argue that a narrator's reliability and a witness's court testimony are judged by different criteria. I give her argument because the method is the point here, not the verdict.
8. Naomi Alderman, "Human Intelligence: Fatima Mernissi," BBC Radio 4. That programme is where I met this story, and it is a retelling rather than a primary source — the details of Mernissi's childhood and her writing for the magazine Kalima rest on it. The 2004 reform itself I have checked independently: the family code was adopted unanimously by the Moroccan parliament in February 2004, placing the family under the joint responsibility of both spouses, curbing the requirement for a male guardian, restricting polygamy, raising the age of marriage from fifteen to eighteen, and securing rights to divorce and child custody. The Union de l'Action Féminine's million-signature campaign began in 1992; a smaller reform followed in 1993; King Mohammed VI convened the drafting commission in 2001 with both modernist and traditionalist members.
9. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Chenoweth presented the three-and-a-half-per-cent figure two years later in a TED talk, and discusses it at length in Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Two cautions are hers, not mine, and matter more than the number. She calls it a rule of thumb rather than a law — descriptive of what has happened, not a promise about what will. And she has since found that both non-violent and armed resistance have been losing effectiveness, as authoritarian governments learn from one another and train their forces against defection. Other scholars have questioned which campaigns the underlying dataset counts. I have used the finding because its shape is robust and its shape is what this section needs: movements succeed from committed minorities, not majorities. The precise figure is less solid than its fame suggests. Elsewhere in the research a different number circulates — around twenty-five per cent, from Damon Centola's experimental work on tipping points in social convention — measuring something else again. Anyone quoting either at me should expect to be asked which one, and why.
10. Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (London: Faber & Faber, 2015). What is documented is the recruitment pattern — personal, trust-based, face to face.