At Amherst Town Common, pots and pans sound alarm for Gaza

AMHERST — Gabriel Connolly paused Thursday afternoon from banging pots and pans on the Town Common to explain why he was compelled to drive from Worcester to call attention to starvation in Gaza: “It’s been the equivalent of a school shooting every day for over 650 days,” said Connolly. “So every day I ask myself, ‘what if that was my kids?’”

Connolly joined dozens of others on the Town Common to raise awareness about the dire situation by clanging their kitchenware in unison with rallies held throughout the world on Thursday, from Boston to Amsterdam, and from Dearborn, Michigan to Sydney, Australia.

The rallies were ignited by ever-worsening conditions in Gaza, where reports of starving people has reached new extremes. The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, warned in the New York Times this week of the “new and astonishing levels of desperation with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.” The Times report included details of “hollow-eyed skeletal children” with “protruding eyes.”

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, there have been 40 hunger-related deaths this month, 16 of them children. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war nearly two years ago, 111 have starved, 81 of them children, the ministry said.

The worsening crisis led Bisan Owda, who has documented the war on social media throughout the past two years, to call for global pot-banging protest in which people worldwide would make noise to sound the alarm for the loss of life in Gaza.

That brought out dozens to the Amherst Common, many wearing keffiyehs, more of them waving Palestinian flags — but all of the participants gonged their utensils. The rally started with a chaotic array of noise and random clanging, but eventually all the noise came together to form a united sound of Arabic-like melodies as Michel Moushabeck orchestrated a kitchenware symphony that sounded in defense of Gaza.

“It’s been horrible for two years,” said Casey Maloney, an Amherst resident who has attended a few pro-Palestinian protests over the past two years. But current conditions have surpassed what she imagined possible.

“Every time I think it’s going to get worse, it gets worse,” she said. “I feel embarrassed to be American.”

This was a shared feeling among many rallygoers, including Rich Karsten.

“It is an impossible feeling, a horrible burning sensation deep in the soul to watch this livestream mass mutilation of humanity,” he said, likening the current events in Gaza to an “ethnic cleansing.”

Stephen Brevik, an Amherst resident and psychologist, spoke to these feelings in one of the several addresses given on the lawn.

As he went to make waffles this week, Brevik said he looked at the bag of flour he was using and felt uneasy. From the microphone he pinpointed that emotion as “existential guilt.”

“It’s a response to being alive in an unjust world,” he said.

And what to do with that feeling? “The answer, at least from a liberation psychology perspective, is to engage and bear witness … through just speaking up or through ritual mourning,” he said.

Leyla Moushabeck, author and editor at Interlink Publishing, a Northampton-based and Palestinian-owned business, gave a glimpse into the current environment in Gaza based on text messages she has received from teachers at the Sumud School in northern Gaza.

The community-led school, given an Arabic name meaning resilience, is currently carrying the weight of educating and providing emotional support for 350 children.

“Today we went to the market, but there wasn’t a market at all. Everyone in the streets are hungry and the kids are crying,” began the text Moushabeck read to the crowd.

The message went on to say that, “The children are exhausted and tired because no food is available, but even the teachers are tired and hungry. We finished today at 11 a.m. instead of 2 p.m. for the funeral of a child who died of famine and passed out.”

Outraged by these conditions, Moushabeck told the crowd, “I know that all of us here are seeing the same images. I know that we are overwhelmed as our headlines are filled with the development of U.S.-funded, taxpayer-funded concentration camps in Gaza as people are tortured, starved and killed by American mercenaries.”

These mercenaries she speaks of refer to allegations that have surfaced from various news sites that American contractors have been guarding aid distribution sites in Gaza using live ammunition and other crowd control methods against Palestinians seeking food.

Moushabeck encouraged people to follow the conditions at the school on the Friends of the Samud School Facebook and Instagram page, and to financially support there is an ongoing GoFundMe.

Louai Abu-Osba of Sunderland, a member of the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine, also spoke on America’s role in the war from the perspective of a first-generation Palestinian-American.

Hampshire College’s 2003 valedictorian speaker, Abu-Osba recounted in an off-the-cuff address about how his education brought him back in contact with his roots in Palestine after his parents came to America in the 1970s.

“I researched my roots and discovered the history of European and American colonialism, and realized I was incredibly privileged beyond my understanding,” he said.

He added that, “Those of us who are citizens of the United States are not simply citizens of a country — we are citizens of an empire, the most powerful empire that has ever existed in history.”

But he cautioned that with great power comes great responsibility.

“This means we have a special duty to the subjects of the American empire, who cannot vote, who cannot advocate for themselves,” he said. “And what brings us here today is genocide of Gazans. They are subject to the American empire. We simply cannot live our lives ethically without advocating for them.”

He also acknowledged that because of privilege, speaking out may be especially difficult for ethnic minorities. But he told his ethnic peers the need to speak up.

Calling on his fellow Palestinian and Arab Americans, he said, “we must tell our stories as loudly and as brazenly and unapologetically as we can, or it becomes replaced by the propaganda machine that has created consent for this genocide.”

And addressing those who are “racially privileged,” he said, “you cannot tell our stories for us … but the biggest thing you can do is normalize empathy for Palestinians.”

Doing so, said Abu-Osba, can be as simple as weaving awareness into a greeting.

“When someone asks you how you’re doing today, you can simply respond, ‘I’m doing great, but I saw some really disturbing images on Instagram today.’ That’s all it takes,” he said.

Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com.