Saoi O'Connor: As the UN talks shop, no food or water enters Gaza
Palestinians receive aid supplies after aid trucks sent by the United Nations under Israeli attacks enter the Zakim border crossing on Wednesday. Millions of Gazans continue to starve, and within the halls of the United Nations we are not allowed to condemn this. Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images
There is a wire mesh fence between me and the fire exit, another between me and the Rhine. The World Conference Center used by the UN for the intersessional climate negotiations each June is superior to the majority of venues in which the Conference of the Parties (or COP) has been hosted, for this reason; where I write from, you can see the river.
It’s often been speculated that the outcomes of climate negotiations would be better if said negotiations took place in rooms with windows, instead of dark little prefabricated boxes that might just as well be shipping containers for the amount of light that gets in.
I am not sure that the outcomes of the intersessional meetings validate this theory - I suspect closing plenary outputs will be just as dismal as those of COPs gone by - but at least here, in this venue, one is less disconnected from the world outside.
The lawn that I write from is a little sterile, one can be certain here that, unlike other parts of the city, no dog has marked its territory on the grass, and though the stench of cigarette smoke is as dense as anywhere else, this lawn lacks the distinctive scent of German beer.
In this place the full spectrum of attendees, from negotiators in their pressed suits and lapel pins to radical youth activists, those who have fled death to their would-be murderers, sit alike in the grass, and the shade of the trees holds the weight of history. The outcome of every COP is shaped here.
Every November, all of us pack up and head out to the Conference of the Parties to negotiate on humanity’s collective future, and every June, like a salmon returning to the river that spawned it, we return to the Rhine.
In 20, 30 years maybe there will be some kind of memorial here, maybe we will say, this was a place where we all came together, a kind of no man’s land, where the elders of our climate justice movements held council with their cigarettes and the party delegates argued in urgent, hushed tones over overpriced filter coffee.
I imagine the future will refer to this lawn in the same way that historians refer to the Christmas Truce of 1914, this is a place where we were all human together, and it changed nothing.
The topic of rivers has been a source of contention in these conferences for some time now.
Since the Dubai COP in 2023, civil society groups have been banned from using the phrase “from the river to the sea” during protests inside the conference. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the only UN agency which allows protest inside the venue during the negotiations, a fact which the agency’s secretariat is extremely proud of.
However, in recent years censorship of civil society during these protests has made organising and partaking in these actions feel relatively pointless. This June at Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), the secretariat informed us that we would also not be allowed to use the phrase “end the siege” during these actions, an action which has been echoed by human rights organizations and other UN agencies alike, the absolute bare minimum demand of humanity.
As we sit here in our talking shop, no food or water enters Gaza. Israel kidnaps humanitarians from aid ships and Egypt stops activist convoys on its borders. Their contraband consists of food and water, medicine, crutches, a prosthetic arm for a child.
The fist of empire closes around itself and the light of conscience grows dim. Millions of Gazans continue to starve, and within the halls of the United Nations we are not allowed to condemn this.
Maybe for those who have not walked these halls this comes as a surprise, though the last several years of ongoing genocide with little intervention from the multilateral system will have relieved many people of notions they may previously have had about the supreme benevolence of the United Nations.
This same distance, this discussion and negotiation and condemnation in the abstract, where human rights and justice exist only in the realms of lapel pins and SDG-themed (Sustainable Development Goals) merchandising, is another common thread which binds the Palestinian struggle and the struggle for climate justice together.
To return to my original hypothetical - I don’t know that the outcomes of this conference would be improved if they were held in a nature reserve or a forest or on the coast of my home in West Cork, but I know that they are defined by what we see out the window.
If it was not the Rhine on the other side of this fence, but the Jordan, if we stood in Congo where children are forced to mine lithium for our promised “just transition” (a phrase which has its roots in the climate justice movement, but has been largely misappropriated in this space), or in the pacific islands, where already the ocean begins to creep up to people’s doors, if we stood in the midst of fire or flood or airstrike, I know that this conversation would be different.
Many of my peers here will return home to these places, many of them on flight paths that have been disrupted due to US and Israeli aggression. It is currently precarious to transit through Qatar, and they - like me - will try to explain what they have seen.
To explain what it is to press your face up to the glass and see the individuals responsible for our global suffering — for the radical, irreversible damage to life on this planet which will define humanity’s future until we as a species cease to walk upon the Earth — to feel the weight of history and the grief of knowing you can do nothing, nothing, about it.
This place where I sit now is not in Germany, it is not in Europe, it is not even truly on Earth, I write to you now from another place. Abstracted, isolated from context, this wire mesh fence between us and the world, it protects us from realities that might interfere with our nitpicking over documents that nobody anywhere else in the world will ever read.
I have been attending these climate negotiations since I was 17 years old. I’m now 22, and as myself and many others have been remarking this week, the biggest change that we have seen in that time is that the coffee machine in this building now offers oat milk.
We do not gather here because we believe that the United Nations or the neoliberal world order can save us, or has any intention of saving us. We do this because it is a gathering place in which we exchange notes about how we are saving ourselves. Beneath my feet in this lawn the seeds of a new world are already planted.
As the eyes of the world turn to COP30 this November, a conference which will undoubtedly be the most critical climate negotiation since Paris, remember that we were already here, that we have been here before.
That the preparatory session for COP30 was defined by the twin injustices of the banning of a phrase which called for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, and the EU blocking the discussion of finance for the Global South, for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.
We are six months into 2025 and so far the theme from the UN is that whether you deserve to live, to eat, to drink clean water, depends on where you were born. When history comes to take down this fence and walk upon the lawn of the United Nations, we will not forgive, and we will not forget.
- Saoi O'Connor is a climate campaigner who has been attending the climate negotiations since they were 17 years old.
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