[News] Israel-Palestine: How food became a target of colonial conquest

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-food-colonial-conquest-target-how>
Israel-Palestine:
How food became a target of colonial conquest
Joseph Massad - November 17-2021
------------------------------

A few years ago, I was incensed that an upscale, hip restaurant/bar I
frequented in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village listed something they called
“Israeli couscous” as their plat du jour. Appalled, I demanded that they
change the name of the dish immediately. I explained to the manager that
what they called “Israeli” couscous was actually Palestinian maftoul,
traditionally made by hand.

I recall as a child how our neighbour and family friend, the late Marie
Jou'aneh, would sit down for hours to *tiftil*, rounding semolina into
pearl-shaped balls. Although historical references cite
<https://archive.org/details/waq11717/01_11717p/page/n10/mode/2up?view=theater_>
Palestinians’ knowledge of North African couscous in the 17th century or
earlier due to the North Africans who moved to Palestine with the Muslim
armies who fought the Crusades and then settled in Jerusalem, the modern
version of the dish was perhaps re-introduced to Palestine
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> and Greater Syria
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/syria> in the second half of the
19th and early 20th century.

This is when Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian and Libyan exiles fleeing French
and Italian colonialism moved there and introduced the much smaller North
African couscous, which Palestinians and other Syrians modified to the
larger pearl-shaped maftoul.

In the case of maftoul, Israelis stole the Palestinian dish and marketed it
as their own, just as they did with the Palestinian homeland

The smug New York restaurant manager, however, said that he did not know
where the dish originated, and that it was known in New York as “Israeli”
couscous. I explained that the item was also sold in New York under the
more “neutral” term “pearl couscous”, which he could opt for instead, to
avoid antagonising customers.

The manager countered glibly with what he apparently thought was the
cleverest riposte he could muster: that the restaurant also referred to
fries as “French fries”, even though fries originated in Belgium
<https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180730-can-belgium-claim-ownership-of-the-french-fry>.
I retorted, while walking out of the establishment, that it was not the
French who stole Belgian fries, as in France they are referred to
simply as *pommes
frites*; rather, it was the Americans who mislabelled them as “French”
<https://www.hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/how-did-french-fries-get-their-name-here-s-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-world-s-most-favourite-potato-snack/story-7EhD7eDifk6Rd5k95jOHUK.html>
(the real or apocryphal story being that American soldiers were introduced
to fries during World War I in French-speaking regions of Belgium and
misidentified them as “French” upon returning home).

In the case of maftoul, Israelis stole the Palestinian dish and marketed it
as their own, just as they did with the Palestinian homeland and other
Palestinian food. Suffice to say that I never went back to the restaurant.
Local innovations

Palestinian cuisine
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html> is
part of the larger and rich Syrian cuisine, which includes two major
branches: Damascus cuisine and Aleppo cuisine. Most dishes cooked across
the region in modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine originate
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culinary_Cultures_of_the_Middle_East/afkOAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Sami+Zubaida+culinary+culture+of+the+middle+east&dq=Sami+Zubaida+culinary+culture+of+the+middle+east&printsec=frontcover>
from these two cuisines, with some innovations that include locally grown
vegetables, grains and herbs.

As falafel, hummus, tabouleh, maftoul, the zaatar spice mix made of
Palestinian hyssop
<https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/zaatar-spice-blend>, rural
fallahi salad (known in the US as “Israeli” salad), Nabulsi knafeh, and
other foods have come to be appropriated - or more accurately stolen
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/food-art-and-literature-how-israel-stealing-arab-culture>
- by Israel’s Jewish colonists over the decades, a whole slew of
justifications have emerged in the western press. More recently, we also
see the “shakshuka” omelette and “Labaneh”- or strained yoghurt (its name
being the feminine rendering of the Arabic word “Laban”, meaning yoghurt in
Syrian Arabic) added to the roster of Israeli-claimed food.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/story-palestinian-maftoul#autoplay>

The story of Palestinian Maftoul

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/story-palestinian-maftoul#autoplay>

Some <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html>
might casually claim that Jewish Israelis are now part of the region and
thus have a right to partake in its food, even as the official Israeli line
has described the country as living in a “tough neighborhood
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-we-live-in-a-tough-neighborhood/>”
- essentially in the Middle East, but not of it. While famed Israeli
historian Benny Morris <https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262428> has claimed that
Israel is “Rome” and Arabs are the “barbarians” threatening it, former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once described
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/jewish-majority-israel-villa-in-the-jungle>Israel
as a “villa in the jungle”.

The former Israeli ambassador to Sweden and Egypt, Zvi Mazel, in turn
asserted
<https://forward.com/opinion/311900/is-israel-pivoting-from-west-too-woo-the-east/>:
“Israel is a western country, that, despite sometimes treacherous behaviour
by its western kin societies, still belongs in that slot culturally,
conceptually and economically.”

British Jewish cookbook writer Claudia Roden, nee Douek (whose Egyptian
Jewish family is originally Syrian), has asserted
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html>that
many European Jews who migrated to Palestine “wanted to forget their old
food because it reminded them of persecution”. According to an article
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html> in
the New York Times: “In the food of their Palestinian neighbors, [Israeli
Jews] found a connection to the land and their ancestors.”

The problem is that Palestinians are not the neighbours of Israeli Jews,
but the people the Israeli colonists conquered, and whose lands and food
they stole.
Ownership of food

Israeli chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi and his Palestinian
coauthor, Sami Tamimi, want to dispense
<https://www.amazon.com/Jerusalem-Cookbook-Yotam-Ottolenghi/dp/1607743949>
with the bothersome issue of food "ownership" and colonial theft. They
unapologetically tell us: "Hummus, for example, a highly explosive subject,
is undeniably a staple of the local Palestinian population, but it was also
a permanent feature on dinner tables of Allepian Jews who have lived in
Syria for millennia and then arrived in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s.
Who is more deserving of calling hummus their own? Neither. Nobody 'owns' a
dish because it is very likely that someone else cooked it before them and
another person before that.”

The problem with this explanation is that Aleppo’s Jews were not the only
ones eating hummus; the majority population of Muslims and Christians in
Aleppo, along with other Syrians, also ate it as a major staple. The issue
is not that Aleppo’s Jews did not eat it, but that it is identified today
as "Jewish" or "Israeli" food by this suspect argument.

[image: Chef Yotam Ottolenghi prepares food in New York City in 2014 (AFP)]
Chef Yotam Ottolenghi prepares food in New York City in 2014 (AFP)

Ottolenghi and Tamimi argue that attempts at claiming ownership of cuisine
and dishes “are futile because it doesn’t really matter”. But to whom does
it not matter - to the Israelis who market stolen Palestinian cuisine as
their own, or to the Palestinians who are deprived of even claiming their
own dishes in a western Israel-friendly context?

Theft of Palestinian and Syrian cuisine by Israelis has become such a
normalised phenomenon, given its proliferation in Middle Eastern cookbooks
and “Israeli” restaurants in Europe and North America, that Palestinians
are harassed if they open restaurants that refer to their own food as
Palestinian. A top Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn recently complained
<https://ny.eater.com/2021/10/13/22724129/ayat-palestinian-restaurant-bay-ridge-online-harassment>of
online harassment by people who had never been to the restaurant, but were
motivated by anti-Palestinian hostility. The owner said
<https://ny.eater.com/2021/10/13/22724129/ayat-palestinian-restaurant-bay-ridge-online-harassment>in
a media interview that even calling his restaurant “Palestinian” opened it
up to potential harassment.
Racist presumption

Then there is the claim
<https://www.amazon.com/Persistence-Palestinian-Question-Zionism-Palestinians/dp/0415770106/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=persistence+of+the+palestinian+question&qid=1592782083&s=books&sr=1-1&asin=0415770106&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1>
that Jews who originate in Arab countries constitute half the population of
Israel, and consequently have a right to claim the region’s food as much as
Palestinians. But this is based on the racist presumption that the entire
Arab region, from Morocco to Iraq to Yemen, has one cuisine. Indeed, the
largest majority of Arab Jews in Israel come from Morocco, Yemen and Iraq,
areas of the Arab world that have their own regional cuisines
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Persistence_of_the_Palestinian_Quest/y_2SAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Morocco>
.

There are only a paltry number of Syrian and Lebanese Jews who live in
Israel, constituting
<https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/doi/abs/10.1080/13537129608719420>
"one
of the smaller origin-groups" in the country. But even if the majority of
Israeli Jews came from Greater Syria, how would that make Syrian or
Palestinian food “Jewish”, let alone “Israeli”, except by resorting to
colonial theft?

Most Arabs are rightly outraged that their food and cuisine have become
part and parcel of Israel’s overall colonising efforts

Ottolenghi
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/dining/claudia-roden-middle-eastern-cooking.html>
credits Roden with paving the way for chefs like him. According to a recent
article on Roden
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/dining/claudia-roden-middle-eastern-cooking.html>
in the New York Times, she “describes the cuisine of the Syrian Jews as
sophisticated, abundant, varied - and purposely intricate and
time-consuming”, as if Syrian Jews had a different cuisine from Syrian
Christians or Muslims, which was not the case.

While the Jews of Greater Syria, like Muslims and Christians, have every
right to claim Syrian dishes as their own on a Syrian national or regional
basis, they do not have the right to claim them as dishes that belong to
Jews, and then market them as such, with these thefts then celebrated in
the European and US media as “Israeli” national cuisine.

Israel became part of the region through colonial conquest. Most Arabs are
rightly outraged that their food and cuisine have become part and parcel of
Israel’s overall colonising efforts.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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