San Francisco drag performer Mama Ganuush has spent the past year marching, writing to elected officials and performing at fundraisers for humanitarian aid in Gaza. They even joined a lawsuit against the Biden administration for funding Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
Meanwhile, the artist says, the Israeli military has killed 211 members of their extended family in Gaza over the past year. So Mama Ganuush decided to resort to a more extreme form of protest: a hunger strike.
“This is not a figurative thing that I’m asking Blinken, Biden and Harris to stop the raping, the killing, the starving and the kidnaping of my people,” Mama Ganuush explains, pointing to a recent study from Brown University showing that the U.S. has given $22.76 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, by far the highest amount this country has sent to Israel in a single year.
Mama Ganuush announced the hunger strike on Oct. 19, and has been posting video updates and rallying others to join on Instagram. They went eight days without food, subsisting on only fluids. As their health began to deteriorate (the artist lives with multiple sclerosis), other community members began to step in for 24 hours each to continue the strike in solidarity. The ongoing effort is now on its 11th day, and has no end date in sight.
“There’s seven people that have been participating and starting this cycle of their own sequence of hunger strikes,” Mama Ganuush says. “In this way, we want to continue passing this on so Palestinian people are not forgotten. And the request is for Joe Biden, for Blinken and for Harris, because they are the people who could stop Israel from killing Palestinians.”
Mama Ganuush was born in Egypt to Palestinian refugee parents. Aunts, uncles and cousins they grew up with returned to Gaza in 1993 — and most of those family members have been killed in the recent bombings. “We only have 35 people carrying my family name because of this genocide,” Mama Ganuush says.
They recount the horrific process of checking on family members over the past 12 months. “If I don’t see them on WhatsApp groups, I start checking the the Palestinian Ministry of Health records of dead people,” they say, “and I go on Telegram to check any updates on bombings that happened in specific neighborhoods in Gaza, to kind of do the math and understand whether or not my family has been murdered or not yet. It’s really difficult.”
Mama Ganuush tells the story of their cousin Iman; they heard she was taken with her daughters by Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza two weeks ago. They say their other female cousins have been asking for birth control pills so they won’t get pregnant if sexually assaulted by soldiers.
In December of 2023, another of Mama Ganuush’s cousins, Muhammad, was one of the 11 unarmed Palestinian men killed by Israeli soldiers in front of their families, in an incident the U.N. has called a “possible war crime.”
In recent weeks, Israel has increased its airstrikes and ground invasion of northern Gaza. Israeli lawmakers also passed two laws banning UNRWA, the chief agency bringing food and aid into Gaza.
“It’s not PTSD, because we’re living in the trauma,” Mama Ganuush says. “If somebody wakes me up, I get really scared because I don’t know if I’ll hear another [piece of] news.”
