On Tuesday, I wrote my friend and sometime doctor, Miriam Garfinkle, to say I'd run low on the olive oil, from Palestine, that she sells. She is normally diligent, even fanatical, about it. It soothes her, she says, as she has grown ever more distressed by Israel's occupation there, and more involved in dissident Jewish actions. I didn't hear back from her.

Then, on Wednesday, I saw in the news that she was among a group of Jewish women who occupied the Israeli consulate in Toronto, in symbolic protest against the reoccupation, or "incursion," by Israel's military into Gaza. The olive oil, too, is symbolic - of the many trees uprooted there and a way of life largely destroyed with them.