Thursday May 15, 2025
To mark 77 years of ongoing and escalated genocide against the Palestinian people, a small but mighty autonomous group of comrades successfully confronted Zionism head-on at the Consulate General of Israel in Toronto, disrupting their office workday and asserting our resistance and our refusal to allow Zionism to operate business-as-usual in this city.
Our successes were abundant: the goal of directly antagonizing Zionism in Toronto was met while very little risk was taken by attendees. Action participants empowered one another to confront individual Zionists without policing each other’s actions. Despite any official organizing body, participants were kept out of the hands of cops and reactionaries by keeping one another safe. New lessons and strategies were learned on-the-ground about stretching police resources thin. Previously unanswered questions were answered: how do we remain high impact while simultaneously receiving a high return with limited resources on-hand?
Our small group felt it was our duty to answer the call on an international day of action and “take (our) rightful place in the international popular cradle for Palestine, and reclaim (our) streets and squares in a day of action through whatever means available,” as Tariq El-Tahrir puts it.
Nakba Day Morning
In the early hours of May 15th, comrades arrived at the Consulate General of Israel in Toronto. Our goals? Shutting down the main entrance doors of the building, disrupting the Zionists’ pathetic 3-hour workday, and ensuring they know that they cannot and will not live in peace until Palestine is liberated at the hands of the noble and honourable Palestinian Resistance.
There was zero police presence upon arrival, which we attribute to the distribution of our call to action via direct channels only. By 8:30 am, we were a small group of roughly 15 people wearing keffiyehs, masks, with one of us carrying a drum, and holding one Palestinian flag, and we stood at the base of the stairs in front of the Consulate General’s building. We began chanting shortly thereafter, and activity inside of the building and the flow of traffic to get inside the building became increasingly busy. Eventually, what looked like building management instructed the security guards to lock up all of the doors to the main entrance, and the doors remained locked the entire time we were there. Our first goal was met almost instantly.
Many people attempted to access the building, walking around us and heading up the stairs, only to be turned away by security guards who were stationed at the entrance. The guards informed people that the main doors were closed, and they would have to enter the building via the underground entrance. We infer several of the people attempting to access the building at this time to be Zionists and/or persons involved with the Consulate General, as many of them became incensed by our presence as they walked past us and irate when denied entry via the main doors. Some individuals would curse at us on the way up, only to have to return and walk past us again after being denied entry at the main doors. The people who were especially aggravated by our presence would appear behind the locked main entrance doors again after utilizing the underground entrance. They would flit and hover about behind the glass glaring at us and contacting various people via their phones, congregating together. Second and third goal met.
Multiple Zionists seemingly unaffiliated with the Consulate attempted to engage us on the sidewalk. When we ignored them, they attempted to engage passerbys who would instead cheer on our group and sometimes even shout at the Zionists, too. When we directly confronted the Zionists, it did not take long for them to cowardly run away. Even after running away from us, though, we were still livestreamed and photographed by them across the street.
By 11:40 am, we decided to end the action and disperse together. We had originally planned to continue until the end of the consulate’s working hours, but realized that they would be able to leave by many other exits and likely would not be seen coming through the main entrance. We exited the site together, choosing a close-by location to disperse from. We did not have any police follow us, and we exited the action entirely unbothered.
What do we mean by an “autonomous group”?
About a week ago, a group of us decided we wanted to raise hell at the Zionist consulate to commemorate Nakba Day. Our crew decided when we’d be pulling up, then extended an invitation to join to our friends and comrades, to be passed along to their friendsand comrades. The people who sent out that first message were people acting in affinity with each other who wanted to encourage others to do the same. We didn’t need official organizational permission or to belong to a widely-known coalition to take part in a demonstration. What was important to us was to take action against local formations of Zionist colonialism and imperialism in Toronto on Nakba Day at the right time and place, when the Zionists would actually be there. While we had our own plans in mind, we had no expectation that other crews who showed up would share their plans.
Some responded to that invitation, meeting friends and strangers outside the consulate that morning. Those outside of the initial crew also planned among ourselves about how to keep us safe without any expectation of what the day would look like.
On the ground together, it’s easy for a smaller group of people to check in with each other about how we’re feeling, our appetites for risk, and how long we want to stick around. Sometimes that aligns; sometimes it doesn’t.
That day, it turned out that we all wanted to gather openly in front of the consulate, disrupting mainly with our presence and our sound. But had another crew unknown to us shown up with plans to more directly attack the Zionist entity or its supporters, we would have been united in our diversity of tactics. That means that we didn’t expect anyone to share our tactics or to agree to some threshold of nonviolence.
A lack of designated roles isn’t for lack of knowledge or experience. Some of us have spent years before the current moment facing down the state’s violence. Some of us have been protest marshals or legal observers or medics or police liaisons or any other role you can name. Some of us have been peace policed or abandoned or traumatized by people in those roles. It’s because of that that we know there’s more than one way to take to the streets.
This is a model of action where no one is a leader or an organizer, where no one is calling the shots for everyone, where no one wears a yellow vest. That doesn’t mean that people are left to fend for themselves in isolation against the repressive force of the state and the harassment of Zionists. On the contrary, each one of us feels the full weight of our commitments to every person present. When there’s no specialized roles, we’re all the more aware that there’s no one else whose job is to come to our comrades’ rescue. Rather than just passive attendees, each of us must be fully autonomous actors, because each of us bears the responsibility for what will happen.
To strengthen our whole, each of us shares what we know and seeks out what we don’t. When there’s no police liaison, we all learn how to keep our silence and watch the police for their next move. When there’s no lawyer to call, we all teach each other how to navigate arrest and deal with Duty Counsel. When there’s no protest marshals, we all face our enemies and ready ourselves to defend each other. When there’s no organizers, we ourselves, each and every one of us, must take the initiative instead— and through that, we become more brave, more skilful, more powerful for the next time.
Lessons and Thoughts
Our Resources and Theirs
There are many lessons to be gained from our small autonomous action. First, for how small the energy and resources used in our action, we had a tremendous impact and result. With a couple handfuls of people we were able to shut down the main entrance to the Consulate. With a small group of people appearing at the right time and place, we forced the official Zionist presence in the city to witness resistance, and they were clearly agitated and disturbed by it.
We were also able to agitate a deluge of phone calls to the Toronto Police, and a police cruiser was forced to do nothing but observe us from across the street the entire time we were there. We felt this impact, and we propose that future actions aim to target more critical locations with similar numbers of people simultaneously. (At our peak, we were 17 people). This would significantly increase impact, with a high return on our own resources. If a similar number of people appeared and stood in the entrances of locations like banks, MP offices, government buildings, or weapons manufacturing offices simultaneously, the police line would become inundated with phone calls and demands, and their resources would be stretched thin across the city.
Safety Lessons
There are some key lessons to be had around safety. First, it is clear that doxxing remains a key tool of zionists and many of the zionists who antagonized us declared their intentions explicitly. “I’m gonna doxx you! I’m gonna doxx you!” Zionists exclaimed multiple times to us. Masks and face coverings are still highly recommended for actions. As far as physical confrontations, the most direct of confrontations was comrades shouting at Zionists. No physical confrontations occurred during our action, but this should never be ruled out from being a possibility, and participants should prepare accordingly.
Ahead of the action, there were concerns expressed that the last-minute nature of the event meant that the action would not be supported well with numbers and that low numbers would result in a higher risk of danger/lack of safety for participants. The success of our small action indicates otherwise. The strength of our connections should not be underestimated; our small numbers are strong enough against enemies who are cowards. Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp reminds us that “in a revolutionary war, the people’s political superiority will be translated into a material force capable of turning the tables on the enemy.”
If you and your co-strugglers have unity around protecting one another during physical confrontations and strategically retreating when necessary— something that can be struggled through and agreed upon on-site if not done ahead of time— then the political strength of your small group of comrades outweighs that of the enemy.
Very little risk was needed to be taken by participants in order to reach our goals. We were small enough of a group to not pose a major threat to the building, and we were standing in a way without obstructing the entrance. We were also not inside the building, something that would be a significant escalation and possibly invited more police presence and response. If different goals were set, then different tactics could and should have been taken, like obstructing the entrance or occupying the building. Despite the fact that we chose not to do this, the Zionists still hated our presence and that we were there at all, so police eventually parked a cruiser across the street just to observe. This is not to say that police won’t respond to “legal” actions with violence, because ultimately the police will do whatever they want to suppress dissent. However, there was no additional action needing to be taken against police or Zionists because our goals were met almost instantly.
We arranged to have a legal observer at the action in the event of an arrest, but this was evidently not needed because of our strategic approach to the demo. Participants were kept out of the hands of cops and reactionaries because we kept each other safe and were prepared for physical confrontation if it did occur. We encouraged one another to confront Zionists and avoided peace policing others’ actions. We were free to yell back at Zionists and confront them as they antagonized us. We felt empowered in our chants as we directed them at the enemy embodied, and not yelling into the void or at empty buildings. We were shouting at people directly complicit in Zionism. We were shouting at Zionists, and we were shouting at Israel.
These kinds of behaviours do not endanger us, especially when participants are encouraged to protect one another and not wait for designated action officials to intervene, especially as de-escalation does not work on enemies committed to violence. Participants must know they are capable of protecting themselves, and it is important to embolden one another with this knowledge and skillset. If the Palestinian solidarity movement and the broader anti-imperialist front is to develop into something powerful that is capable of taking on the state and its violences, we must embrace militancy in all its forms.
Implications for Organizing
The greatest lesson given by our Nakba Day action is that autonomous actions are a powerful form of organizing. A question that surfaced again and again leading up to Nakba Day was “Is this a legit action?” which further begs the question of how we came to view political organizing in these terms of “legitimacy”. Without any official organization leading or managing this demonstration we were able to accomplish significant goals of disruption and empowerment. What could be more legitimate than the results of our few standing before agents of the Israeli state, agitating them into panic and anger, disrupting their pathetic 3-hour workday, and shutting down their main entrance?
The night leading up to the action, there appeared to be growing suspicion and high anxiety related to this autonomous action. Rumours spread that this action may have been organized by the police as a trap. To this, we remind folks that not liking another’s approaches to organizing, especially if it’s simply different than what you’re used to or something you’re not comfortable taking on personally, doesn’t mean they’re a cop.
Another implication for organizing is remembering to be flexible and solution-oriented in our resistance to local Zionism and imperialism in the city of Toronto. If our strategies stay stagnant, we cannot expand or develop this movement, both ideologically and for on-the-ground advances against our enemies. For months, police have consistently barricaded the Amerikkkan embassy and Zionist consulate ahead of large publicly-announced demonstrations. Without physically confronting riot police like we see in many other parts of the world, there is no way to access these buildings for these types of actions. If these locations will continue to be targets of the Palestinian solidarity movement, we must note the success of unannounced actions and the fruit that they may bear.
If we are to respond to the Palestinian Resistance’s calls to escalate against local enemies of Zionism colonialism and imperialism, whether this be corporate sponsors of occupation and genocide or war criminals in our government ministries, we must build a movement capable of taking on new strategies and trusting one another with this task. We must embrace militancy and learn to adapt to increasingly repressive conditions. Solidarity extends to our co-strugglers on the front-lines, even if we aren’t partaking in the action ourselves. Escalate for Gaza!
Down with Zionist Colonialism!
Down with Imperialism!
Long Live the Palestinian Resistance!
Free, Free Palestine!