Headlines about Palestine and Israel are rarely pitched in context, especially in Australia. In the small moments of the everyday, Israel is the aggressor. When we judge the enduring situation from an objective human rights perspective, there is no competition for responsibility: Israel is the heavily resourced military and governing power of both societies, the transgressor of international law, the enforcer of Apartheid, and for historical and political reasons, it’s the main recipient of western governments and media sympathies. This must change.

Within a globalised landscape where protest poetics and aesthetics are vital tools in the fight against white supremacy, Palestine solidarity has found shelter in new places within which to breathe and exhale.

In Israel, as in Australia, colonisation is the context without which nothing else makes sense. The Israeli state depends on the dispossession of Palestinians, and so, by its nature, will constantly create and recreate violence, just as the Australian settler state did.

The scenes unfolding in the streets of Jerusalem, disturbing as they may be, should be seen and understood in context of decades of continuous dispossession and dehumanisation of Palestinians. A context marked by a violent rhetoric of displacement and replacement whereby those who are Indigenous to place and land can simply be replaced, erased, and removed without hesitation.

Driving through the West Bank, you get the sense that the hope-turned-disappointment cycles of the failed, successive peace accords have been replaced by grim resignation to the reality of an implacable occupation and settlement project. All the trappings of occupation and land theft have only reinforced the incongruity of the Israeli settlements, not least of which is the prison-like fencing and barbed wire that encircle them.