It was a snowy morning on 7 January 2009: the tenth day of the Israeli Defense Forces’ assault on Gaza. The death toll had already exceeded 600 – most of them civilians including many children. To divorce themselves publicly from this most recent abuse of Palestinian lives, eight Jewish-Canadian women ranging in age from mid-twenties to late fifties entered the Toronto Israeli consulate two by two.
The women were nervous that they would not get past the tight Israeli security. But they did. Once in the consulate waiting room they dropped their little pink service slips and declared their intention not to leave. It was the stunned silence that followed which surprised one of the younger activists, Jenn Peto: ‘Neither those waiting for consular services – many of them Israelis – nor the consular staff immediately reacted, as if the violence on the television was on a different planet and had nothing to do with the state that ran the office we were in.’
