Distinguished leaders, academics, diplomats. ambassadors, politicians, lawyers, writers, journalists,
My name is Jonathan O'Connor. I am from Cork in the south of Ireland. I live and work in Geneva, Switzerland. I worked for twelve years with WHO, UNICEF, UNDP and Save the Children, as a project manager and as head of logistics in humanitarian emergencies from 2006 to 2018. During this time, I worked in Eritrea twice, Liberia twice, Pakistan, Haiti, Central African Republic, Kenya/Somalia, Nigeria, DRC and Sierra Leone. I was based at WHO HQ in Geneva coordinating the logistics operation for Yemen and Myanmar in 2017. For the past five years, I have worked as Director of Aid & Relief Africa for a global freight forwarder, supporting the operations of UN agencies and NGOs throughout Africa. I have been around the development sector for the better part of twenty years. None of us has ever seen anything like what we have witnessed in Gaza over the past three months, and the horror continues daily.
I read with interest this series of emails from Professor Suarez-Villa, back in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. However, there have not been any exchanges on the subject of Gaza. I note that many world leaders, academics, journalists and writers are on this list, some of whom even have it within their power to call for an end to the annihilation of Gaza. I have therefore changed the subject title to reflect this, and I have taken the liberty of including some additional names, as we are living in extraordinarily dark times.
I must preface my comments by calling on the EU to demand an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. There has been enough killing and bloodshed in the past three months, and it has to stop now. It is a disgrace that the Secretary General's call for a ceasefire has been ignored and that the draft Security Council Resolution was vetoed by the United States.
Like many other citizens of the EU and the rest of the world, I have watched with mounting horror as Israel has continued to escalate its murderous offensive against Palestinian civilians for the past three months. Day after day we are bombarded with images of murdered and mutilated babies and children, and even now, after three months, we have no idea when this is going to end, or what the endgame is. We have been subjected to relentless gaslighting and propaganda from Israeli government and military sources, as well as from mainstream Western media outlets, who dutifully repeat the allowable points to ensure the narrative is driven home among the unthinking masses. Never was this made more plain than last Thursday, when no Western media outlet broadcast South Africa's pleadings in front of the ICJ. Personally, I watched it on Al Jazeera, and it was a crystal clear presentation from the South African legal team of the brutality and barbarity that continues to be meted out on the people of Gaza every day by Israel. It is undeniable that this is a genocide in plain sight. Billions of us have seen it. However, Friday was a different story, as Sky, BBC and the rest of them dutifully stepped up to broadcast Israel's show of 'supreme gaslighting', as Jeremy Scahill called it.
Let no-one be confused: As the occupier, Israel does not have the right to self defense. Even if it were to have the right to self-defense, such reasoning does not comprise genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel is grossly violating the two core principles of international humanitarian law - the principle of distinction between civilian and military targets, and the principle of proportionality. The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union are complicit in having delivered the weapons with which Gaza's civilians are being slaughtered.
The crimes of Israel have been live streamed to the world for the past three months and nobody can contest this. Nor could these crimes have been committed, in broad daylight, without the explicit military and diplomatic support of the United States, the UK and the EU. Practically the entire population of Gaza has been displaced and is facing famine. It has been predicted by public health experts, the World Health Organization and the World Food Programme that up to half a million people could die in the coming year from disease outbreaks, more again from starvation. The Israeli army continues to hamper humanitarian access, which is illegal under international law.
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1156749/
There is no longer a functioning health system, there is no food, no water, no sanitation, no shelter, no protection. People have complied with Israel's genocidal relocation orders, to designated so-called 'safe areas', and then they are bombed by Israel once they get there. Injured people in the courtyard of a hospital are bulldozed into the ground. Women and children asleep in a school classroom have been murdered by grenades tossed into the room by Israeli soldiers. Children and parents have been killed in the streets by Israeli snipers. If any of this is not flagrant, gratuitous slaughter, perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what exactly constitutes such a thing. Entire neighbourhoods, churches, mosques, electricity plants, water treatment plants, schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, cultural sites, cemeteries have been decimated, razed to the ground or put out of service. Gaza has been left in an unlivable condition.
Over twelve thousand innocent children have been killed, according to the Euro Med Human Rights Monitor in Geneva. Over 31,000 civilians so far have been killed.
I do not agree with the Hamas attack on 7th October, but I also refuse to accept that it happened for any other reason than decades of systematic brutalisation, dispossession, dehumanisation, provocation, killing, imprisonment of the Palestinian people by Israel. That attack continues to be portrayed in the Western media as the 'brutal Hamas slaughter of 1200 Israelis', when there has been mounting evidence for months that Israel killed huge numbers of its own civilians that day, with tanks and Apache helicopters armed with hellfire missiles. The sheer level of destruction on the ground bears this out - it could not have been caused by a poorly organised group of Hamas fighters armed with rifles and RPGs. If anything, 7th October is looking more and more like a pretext for what came next.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/how-israeli-forces-trapped-and-killed-ravers-at-the-nova-festival
https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156
Even if Hamas had done what Israel and Western media outlets claim they have done, nothing justifies the wholesale slaughter of children, as has been happening on an industrial scale at the rate of over a hundred a day, for the past hundred days. It should sicken the soul of any human being, any parent.
Also not reported is the fact that Hamas proposed a ten-year truce back in 2014, as written about in this article by UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Francesca Albanese, an offer which was ignored by Israel and the West.
So the question is, where do we go from here, as Netanyahu has made clear yesterday that he will continue his personal war against the Palestinians, irrespective of what decision is made by the ICJ or anyone else, i.e., there is no end in sight. The US, the UK, and the EU will do nothing to stop this slaughter, despite a majority of the population in these regions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the rest of the world. Which brings up the next questions: Where is our humanity? What has happened to democracy, free speech, human rights, international law, truth? It seems to me, amid this maelstrom of lies being spouted to defend the utterly indefensible, it is all dead in the water.
I am not a lawyer, but I am the father of a young child and I am a human being. Why are the lives of Palestinian babies and children (and women and men) worth less than our children here in Europe? Are they in fact worthless entirely? How can we be willing to tolerate this genocide in our supposedly civilised, comfortable Western existences? I would contend that there is nothing more uncivilised than to allow this unchecked slaughter to continue.
We are all complicit in this genocide unless we push back. Silence is not an option. Every ethical human being must demand that the slaughter stop now. I am not a lawyer, but in recent years, living in Geneva, I have had the pleasure and great privilege to enjoy numerous animated discussions with Professor Alfred de Zayas on many topics relating to the international order. The prohibition of genocide is erga omnes as has been written by Professors Jeffrey Sachs, Richard Falk, Francis Boyle, Alfred de Zayas and others. Meaning every country that is a signatory to the Genocide Convention has an obligation by law to prevent it. In attachment I have shared the 25 Zayas Principles of International Order, presented to the Human Rights Council. Also the human rights trilogy by Zayas has enormous relevance to the current crisis in Gaza. https://www.claritypress.com/book-author/alfred-de-zayas/
I would further say that Germany's support of Israel at the ICJ, announced over the weekend, is profoundly disappointing, as has been the lack of any moral courage on the part of the EU in general. Since this particular conflict began on 7th October, Israel has ramped up its usual weaponizing of the Holocaust to justify its erasure of the citizens of Gaza from the face of the earth. That is what they have vowed to do. How the EU can stand behind this is incredible, despite the fact that Israeli crimes have been so well documented. Do you exculpate yourself from the guilt of one holocaust by greenlighting another one? It is sheer madness to continue to punish ourselves in this manner as an EU collective, while allowing the colonial monster of Zionist rage to run riot. Is this the kind of world we want to leave to our children? I am saying this to you as an Irishman, someone who comes from a country that lived under the yoke of British colonialism for hundreds of years, and whose population endured famine from 1845 to 1852, at the hand of the colonisers, with over a million deaths and two million forced to emigrate, all while we were a net food exporter. Indeed, the legacy was that it took until 1998 for a durable peace in Northern Ireland, after decades of conflict.
Please, I am appealing to those of you in elected positions of power and influence - leaders of countries and of the EU - make the call for the slaughter to stop now. What would be so wrong with calling for a ceasefire? What earthly purpose does it serve to continue killing over a hundred children every single day? It serves no purpose at all, particularly as it has become abundantly clear that Israel is completely without strategy or endgame here, nor has it achieved its stated military objectives. What it does do, however, is ensure that there will never be peace for the next hundred years, as generations of Palestinians grow up raging and traumatised from these injustices. And if the goal is to ensure the security of Israel, this is not the way to go about it. Moreover, there is the extreme risk right now of the situation escalating into a wider regional conflagration, with the US and its allies potentially drawn into it. Hezbollah and other non-state actors in the region are well prepared to respond forcefully to further acts of Israeli provocation, unless checked. Not to mention Yemen, who have been clear from the outset that Red Sea maritime traffic will proceed unmolested just as soon as Israel stops bombing Gaza. But what do we do instead? Bomb Yemen. There is no good outcome to such a development, for anyone. A ceasefire in Gaza would go a long way towards calming tensions that are already very elevated.
Again, I am prevailing on EU leaders to engage today with the Biden administration and push to bring this barbarity to an end. We know that Biden could end the bombing of Gaza with one phone call to Netanyahu.
Last week I wrote to the leaders of the EU to demand a ceasefire, and as yet I have had no reply. I have put the text of this email below this one, if you wish to refer to it.
I am just one man, but I know I represent billions of us around the world who are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
We must have an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. NOW.
There is no justification to continue killing children in the name of a racist, supremacist ideology. The irony should not escape anyone.
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan O'Connor
Geneva,
Switzerland.
++++++++++++++++++++++
Dear President von der Leyen,
Dear President Michel,
I am following up on my email to President von der Leyen from mid-December, and the separate email that I sent last week of footage of Palestinian teenage boys in the West Bank being crushed by an Israeli bulldozer for no reason. I got no reply to either of those emails, so I am widening the list of recipients, for broader reach, in the hope that someone might act.
Let me re-introduce myself. My name is Jonathan O'Connor, and I am from Cork in the south of Ireland. I live and work in Geneva, Switzerland. For twelve years, I worked with United Nations agencies, including WHO and UNICEF, and international NGOs in humanitarian emergencies in Africa, including CAR, Liberia (Ebola), Nigeria, South Sudan and elsewhere. I also worked in Pakistan and Haiti. I now work for a global freight forwarding company as Director of Aid & Relief for Africa. Anything I or my colleagues might have witnessed in these other countries pales in comparison to what the world has witnessed happening in Gaza for the past three months. It is an unmitigated horror.
The situation is completely out of hand at this point, with unconscionable levels of death, destruction and suffering being meted out on the people of Gaza every single day, in the most appalling and gratuitous manner. I truly believe that nobody has a grip on the situation.
There has been enough killing.
There needs to be an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
And the EU needs to call for one. Right now.
Why has the European Union been completely silent on the suffering of the Palestinian people? Not only have you been silent, but you have repeatedly and publicly renewed and bolstered your 'unconditional support' for Israel's genocidal campaign of murder and slaughter, despite objections from your own staff. Why? What benefit is there to anyone to continue this total insanity? Your calls for Israel to respect international law have been completely ignored. To continue to call for this, despite being ignored, is nonsense. We stand by Ukraine, yet we turn a blind eye to Palestine, where we have witnessed the unprecedented slaughter of children (of children!!) and the wider civilian population for the past three months. The hypocrisy and double standards are just phenomenally brazen. As citizens, we do not accept this kind of leadership.
Europe, with its unconditional support for Israel's crimes, and its refusal to condemn them, remains complicit in the largest crime against humanity the world has witnessed since World War 2, with the possible exception of some of the US wars in Asia or Iraq. And collective European guilt over the first holocaust is no reason to allow yet another holocaust unfold before our eyes today.
The entire population of the EU is completely disgusted and outraged that this is being allowed to continue. Every day we wake up to view the carnage in real time on our phones, TVs, computers. More babies killed and mutilated. It is horrific and demoralising as we wonder when the hell it will all end. Yet with the notable exceptions of Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Slovenia, and some contradictory noises from France, there has been silence. Nobody is listening to the people. Quite frankly, it has become terribly obvious that democracy, human rights, international law, freedom of speech and truth are all dead.
There has been no statement from your level about the relentless destruction of schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, civil infrastructure, water treatment facilities, electricity plants, refugee camps (!!), bakeries, shops, warehouses, or the gleeful levelling of entire neighbourhood blocks by IDF troops. Gaza has been left uninhabitable. Nothing has been said about the slaughter of more than 100 innocent children per day by the Israeli killing machine. Per day!! Imagine if all the children in your child's school were killed every day? Can you imagine? Are Palestinian kids worth any less? These are not 'emotional moments'. This is an outrage. Everything is targeted by Israel, nothing is left to chance. The calculations are made and the murder is done in plain sight, in full knowledge of what will happen. They are testing new weapons on an imprisoned human population:
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/14/israel_weapons
https://therealnews.com/the-weapons-israel-tests-on-palestinians-will-be-used-against-all-of-us
The health system has been destroyed, and the entire population is facing famine and starvation, with 80% of them already catastrophically short of food. Over two million people, out of a population of 2.3 million, have been displaced. The report is available here:
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1156749/
Despite the fact that South Africa has referred Israel to the International Court of Justice, with the first hearing being held tomorrow, Israel defiantly continues its brutal assault on Gaza, aided and abetted by the EU and the US government from day one, with weapons transfers and diplomatic cover:
https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/17204
It continues to use weapons against a civilian population that have been banned by international conventions:
They have repeatedly forced the population evacuate to so-called safe zones, which have nothing in place to sustain a population, and then bomb them when they are there:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/6/safe-zones-israels-technologies-of-genocide
Thankfully, South Africa has referred Israel to the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Organization of Islamic States has supported it, as well as Malaysia, Turkey, Jordan, Namibia and Bolivia. As parties to the Genocide Convention, European counties also have an obligation to act, in the face of the overwhelming evidence of Israeli atrocities, but so far none of them has done anything to support the South African referral. Nonetheless, we hope for an outcome that will bring an end to the slaughter, in the absence of any international leadership to bring it about.
There is no justification for any of this unending barbarity on the part of Israel. Yes, sure, the Hamas attack on 7th October was terrible. There was no justification for that either, even if we discount decades of Israeli harassment, humiliation, killings, bombings, deprivation and dispossession of Palestinian people as possible motivating factors. But Israel has responded in a manner that is exponentially worse than anything Hamas may have ever done. Not only that, but the population of an occupied territory has the right under international law to resist the occupation. Israel, as the occupier, does not have the right to self-defense, even though this is the nauseating, disingenuous narrative we have been subjected to for decades. Self defense of stolen land? Give us all a break. We cannot continue to defend the indefensible.
Further, other than NYT and Israeli propaganda, no concrete evidence has ever been presented that Hamas were using tunnels under hospitals as command centres. In fact, the Washington Post recently conducted an investigation, using UNOSAT data, that Israel has been deliberately targeting the immediate vicinity of hospitals with 2,000 pound bombs, the blast radius from which will render anything around it unserviceable. No. This propaganda ties in perfectly with the genocidal pattern to this assault, calculated to render the Gaza Strip unliveable, resulting eventually in the forced displacement of 2.3 million people from their land. Recent calls by Israeli parliament members to this effect, of which I am sure you are aware, only serve to confirm this.
https://forward.com/opinion/575279/gaza-population-transfer/
In addition, there is mounting evidence that Israel killed many of its own citizens on 7th October, possibly hundreds, with tanks, artillery and Apache helicopter fire attacking the kibbutz and the people at the Nova music festival, under their insane 'Hannibal directive'. Look at the scale of destruction in the images. There is no way that it was carried out by a resistance force with rifles and RPGs, yet the mainstream media continues to recycle the fatuous narrative of the 'brutal Hamas massacre that killed 1200 Israelis', language used to further dehumanise Palestinians. And we are supposed to believe it.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156
https://dohanews.co/israel-admits-killing-its-own-people-at-music-festival-on-october-7/
But in Europe, despite the mountains of evidence everywhere regarding Israel's crimes, and South Africa's meticulously researched submission to the ICJ, we remain silent. We continue to support the bully state of Israel, condoning and remaining complicit in their heinous crimes against a civilian population. How they are not already an international pariah remains beyond the comprehension of any rational person.
The EU must, even at this late stage, attempt to regain some tiny sliver of moral credibility by publicly siding with humanity, and not with the murderers. It is not a time for politics or carefully choosing one's words while the lives of 2.3 million people, 40% of them children, hang in the balance. Or is that just part of the calculation?
We are at 30,000 dead civilians and counting, in the space of three months. More than 11,000 dead children. Hunger, disease and exposure will claim many more in the coming six to twelve months - we could be looking at up to half a million deaths, if not more. What is the red line here? Is there one? We cannot even begin to comprehend these numbers.
By not taking a stand against this genocide, not only is the the EU complicit, but it is also setting a very dangerous predendent for the future. It means that international law no longer applies to anybody, unless you think that it can be applied selectively. Whoever you try to hold accountable in the future can just point to Gaza and say, well, you let Israel get away with it. What's your issue with us now?
Once again, as a concerned citizen, I reiterate my call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, a halt to the horrible and unprovoked Israeli violence in the West Bank, and an end to the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
I urge you to make the call today, for the sake of humanity, our children and future generations.
Ceasefire Now.
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan O'Connor
Geneva,
Switzerland.