For five days, the Australian representative to the 2026 Venice Biennale was to be the first ever Arab-Australian artist selected for this honour.

The stumps under our floor are teetering and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight of thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books, missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me.

It is true that there are Israelis whose ideas are more nuanced than the media’s. Probably these are a subset of the Israelis who do not attend raves mere miles from the perimeter of an open air prison (the world’s largest). One, who I last saw at the American Colony in Jerusalem, in June, where we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes together, wrote on Tuesday, when quite by chance I was at a funeral, “everything [Hamas] is inflicting on us now, we have been inflicting on the Palestinians for years.

We are deeply concerned by the Australian government’s complicity in enabling the Israeli state to suppress the aspiration of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Last week, Australia was one of only two countries (with the Marshall Islands) to vote against a UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning the illegal annexation of significant parts of the occupied Palestinian West Bank by Israel.

Smoke haze hangs over Melbourne. The rim of my car-door is caked in orange dust after red rains. People post shots of the compromised view from their windows and balconies, visibility updates, rain water tank statuses: water like sweet sticky soft drinks left out on a hot summer’s day. I do not rejoice in these recent months of bushfires. But I am pleased that their traces have arrived in our capitals.

It is not the stones Palestinian children throw or their threats to armed military personnel that motivate arrests. Their arrests are a sign of what Israel will not countenance, of why Israel cannot countenance Ahed Tamimi. These are children who have lived their lives under a violent military Occupation in which Palestinian lives are curtailed in every imaginable way. And the message sent in each small act is that they do not accept it; that they will continue to wrest agency from its oppressive and victimising reign.