Why we’re still banging pots for Gaza
Earlier this year, David Carr wrote about why people had started to gather at Queen’s Park gates to bang pots for Gaza. As the winter nights get colder, people are still gathering – a show of solidarity and because they can’t stay quiet.
By David Carr
November. It is a lot harder banging pots than it was over the warm August evenings. We gather still at six o’clock, every night, outside the park gates, to keep focus on Gaza.
We started because there was a human emergency. Our message was simple: all eyes on Gaza. The genocide was in full force. We had to stop the world from looking away.
Read more: ‘Don’t look away’: Why we’re banging pots for Gaza
Did it do any good?
There is a peace – of a grim sort. An American adjudicated defeat that captures half of Gaza for realtors and offers no form of justice for Palestinians. The bombing has not at all stopped – even if it has lessened. The people can breathe for a moment as they start the grim task of digging their loved ones from the rubble.
Would this have been achieved without a groundswell of global, popular revulsion that even Trump could not ignore? Pot banging was one small part of an unprecedented, rapid mobilisation, nationally, internationally, in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
And pot banging has been so much more than performative. Over the recent months it has become a space where activists can swap news, coordinate actions, take time to reflect and decompress.
It is also an important community presence. It speaks to an expression of local values – that Govanhill does not tolerate racist genocide. The appearance of Scottish-Palestinian solidarity flags on the lampposts of Govanhill and beyond is a witty antidote to the use of flags for racist propaganda.
It is harder to summon motivation to get out the door every evening for six o'clock this weather. The dreich nights are not inviting. Perhaps it is force of habit that makes us do it. But there is also a strong sense of a job left undone. As another genocide winter sets in in Gaza and the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians huddle, still hungry, in makeshift shelters, there may be respite from ultimate suffering. But the humanitarian crisis continues. Gaza has fallen out of the news cycle for now. But Palestine is still not free.
One night we were joined at the park gates by a man from Sudan. Visibly distressed, he was asking ‘Why always Palestine? Why not Sudan?’ He was right. There is so much killing in the world. But an injury to one is an injury to all. We are bound by humanity and stand against all evil. We spoke with him, reassured him that we do care and he joined us and banged a pot, united with us in solidarity for all the suffering peoples of the earth.
My pot has become somewhat concave under its nightly assault with a spoon. For me, pot banging has been an emotional release. I was at first paralysed by the constant stream of Instagram atrocities. The drive to do something – anything – even if only to make a noise at the top end of Vicky Road - helped to lift me out of a feeling of impotence and led me to up my own activism.
On Thursday nights after pot banging, I sing with my choir, Govanhill Voices. As we bang our pots, I sometimes sing to myself a French song from their repertoire: ‘Dans nos obscurités allume un feu qui ne s’éteint jamais’ – in our darkness, light a fire that never goes out.
Through the darkness, we bang on. Free Palestine.