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.