Adventures in the Terrible Beauty of Resistance With the 'Death to Toll' Campaign

Yeah, so there's obviously been activism in solidarity with Palestine for a long time in Australia, but I would say that post Al-Aqsa flood, there was this moment of intensity where, for a minute, it felt like everything changed.

And it felt like things had changed in a bad way because of the horror of the genocide and the urgency that that engendered.

But I think that one thing that also changed was the sense that, like honor and agency had been returned to colonized people in a way, you'd be familiar with the sort of humanitarian thing of like, all these poor people, they're suffering but the idea of colonized people fighting back.

Of colonizers running for their lives.

And of the possibilities of what this world can look like just being blown open.

Like suddenly I felt and I think many others felt that this was something which was opened up by Al-Aqsa flood.

And of course, when possibilities are opened up, you know the possibility of resistance is opened up.

And then at the same time, where you have resistance, you have counterinsurgency.

And so there was this energy.

You've got thousands of people marching in the streets.

And at the same time, you have all of these kinds of counterinsurgent movements or pressures to channel this resistance or this desire for resistance into a purely symbolic outlet.

So it was like, okay, we can walk from A to B.

A hundred of us can walk.

A thousand of us can walk.

But ultimately, we're going to march.

There's going to be marshals in yellow vests walking next to us.

We're going to obey directions of police.

And it felt quite reminiscent of when you look at the historical footage of the marches against the war in Iraq and all of the good that that did, which in hindsight, it is clear, is very little.

And even at the time, like you had National Security Agency, so that ASIO is the National Security Agency in Australia.

Well, they actually explicitly described some of the marches taking place at this time as a pressure release valve.

So they wanted people to have the ability to sort of blow off some steam, you know, express a bit of symbolic anger and then go home.

And so there were some people around the sort of pro-Palestine movement who could sort of feel how messed up this was.

You know, we could feel the sense of contradiction that we were walking around shouting things like, there is no other solution, intifada revolution.

And then going home with absolutely no sign of an intifada or a revolution being enacted through our actions.

And so there were people who wanted to take it a bit further and who identified this need to really hit the supply chains of genocide.