Belém (Brazil): One day we will always have been against this, but today, at Belém in Brazil, where 50,000 people have gathered to discuss a way out of the climate quagmire, you just really have to ask if a global meeting for a common cause can aim to be successful in a world which has allowed a genocide to have taken place.

Israel’s sustained assault on Gaza for the last two years has killed at least 69,182 people, according to the Al Jazeera live tracker. It has decimated life as Gazans knew it, destroying an ecosystem into rubble and making mockery of all tall global talk of multilateralism and a unified world. A ceasefire was struck earlier but Israel’s attacks have continued. 

Palestine, as a result, does not have a pavillion at the Blue Zone of the COP30 venue – the area where governments set up kiosks to advertise what they have done to go more green. 

But several at this annual climate jamboree will not let Palestinian people flicker out of our attention. Young and old, in keffiyehs that identify them in a sea of coats, people from all walks of life are firm – there is no climate justice without justice for Palestine.

Alex Brooks is a civil rights lawyer who practices in California. But on November 17, he was at a kiosk built to hold sessions for the rights of indigenous people at the COP30 venue. Brooks was clear about the fact that the global hypocrisy cannot continue. Travelling from an America that has seen relentless ICE raids and also an America that has stepped out of the global Paris Agreement that vowed to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C, Brooks is a first-hand witness to "what happens when colonisers run amok," he says. They cannot be allowed to get away with it, he says. 

Memories of the US authorities' crackdown on campus protests for Palestine are fresh. Several Indian scholars are among those who were jailed and forced to self-deport, if not severely censor themselves. Is Brooks not afraid of the blowback his decision to be at Brazil in a keffiyeh will have? He is, but he says, “We must sacrifice a bit of ourselves for a cause, if you believe in it.”

Incidentally, Israel’s delegation to Brazil – a country which joined South Africa’s ‘genocide’ case against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice – is three people. This is reportedly a tiny fraction of the sizable delegations dispatched to previous editions of the annual meeting, says Times of Israel. Incidentally, Israel does not have a pavilion either. In its absence, the entrance point of the Blue Zone serves as the site for multiple groups to register support to Palestinians. The Wire was able to spot a small group with the Palestinian flag sloganeering peacefully and a posse of security forces standing with plastic shields out. 

Among them were geopolitical analyst Angelo Giuliano and activist Sarbaz Ruhullah Rizvi. A resident of Iran now, Rizvi is originally from Kashmir. 

He entered Gaza in 2011 for the first time with an Asian caravan of activists. “There were communists, liberals, leftists, Muslims, Sunnis and Shias. All were together,” he says. 

As he began focusing on Gaza, Rizvi says that he noticed an ecocide at play. Gaza, which once had 43% green cover, has none of it now, he says. “93% livestock was killed or starved to death. The air in Gaza is polluted. Israeli raids alone have produced 280 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – which is more than what some countries produce,” he adds in a torrent. 

The Wire had reported on the impact that Israel’s strikes on Gaza had had on its air pollution – military operations have contributed to elevated emissions of NO2, SO2, CO, CH4 and aerosols, among others, originating from missile strikes, fuel combustion and fires, a study had found.

Rizvi says that he got in touch with like-minded activists to scrounge up the money and arrive at Belem for COP30, because it is necessary to allow Palestine’s voice be heard at a large platform like this. 

He has a stall set up in the Green Zone – the area outside the negotiations tent where civil society mingles. 

“We believe that in COP30, you can't ignore what they have done in the last 200 years of industrialisation. Now they want to put other countries under pressure. America withdrew from the Paris Agreement but on the other hand, they are directly involved in ecocide, and that's something really important that we believe is being ignored,” he says. 

Several groups at COP30 have been pointing out how the very act of war is so antithetical to a movement towards a world that can fight climate change that it boggles the mind how people cannot see it. 

Mariya Reyes is from Mexico and two years ago, she and a group of like-minded young people from around the world came together to form a coalition that has the telling acronym – ANGRY. ANGRY stands for Alliance of Non-Government Radicalised Youth, Reyes said. 

At a session on Palestine and the collective agenda for food sovereignty, Reyes says that she and others in this movement have had it with how governments are using buzzwords like “just transitions” to offer solutions that are not really even a bandaid to the destruction they are wreaking. The session, organised by the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy and Climate Action Network, discussed the hard topic of what restoration would mean for Palestine. Young speakers asked for its land, its seeds and resource sovereignty to be restored. 

“Israel talks of food innovation, can you believe it? It is responsible for famine in Palestine!” says Reyes. 

She says that she and the others who make up ANGRY have been approached by firms to discuss topics that greenwash the genocide – like solar engineering projects in Palestine – in exchange for money but they have refused. “Youth is not a demography,” she says.  

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