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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-food-colonial-conquest-target-how">middleeasteye.net</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel-Palestine: How food became a target of colonial conquest</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Joseph Massad - November 17-2021<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>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.</p>
<p>I recall as a child how our neighbour and family friend, the late Marie Jou'aneh, would sit down for hours to <i>tiftil</i>, rounding semolina into pearl-shaped balls. Although historical references<a href="https://archive.org/details/waq11717/01_11717p/page/n10/mode/2up?view=theater_" target="_blank"> cite</a>
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 <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank">Palestine</a> and Greater <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/syria" target="_blank">Syria</a> in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the case of maftoul, Israelis stole the Palestinian dish and
marketed it as their own, just as they did with the Palestinian
homeland </p>
</blockquote>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180730-can-belgium-claim-ownership-of-the-french-fry" target="_blank">originated in Belgium</a>.
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 <em>pommes frites</em>; rather, it was the Americans who <a href="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" target="_blank">mislabelled them as “French”</a>
(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).</p>
<p>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. </p>
<h3>Local innovations</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html" target="_blank">Palestinian cuisine</a>
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 <a href="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" target="_blank">originate</a> from these two cuisines, with some innovations that include locally grown vegetables, grains and herbs.</p>
<p>As falafel, hummus, tabouleh, maftoul, the zaatar spice mix made of Palestinian <a href="https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/zaatar-spice-blend" target="_blank">hyssop</a>,
rural fallahi salad (known in the US as “Israeli” salad), Nabulsi
knafeh, and other foods have come to be appropriated - or more
accurately <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/food-art-and-literature-how-israel-stealing-arab-culture" target="_blank">stolen</a>
- 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.</p>
<div>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/story-palestinian-maftoul#autoplay" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/video_thumbnails/Mqsp1J-J4_o.jpg?itok=is7iWa2V" alt="" width="400" height="250"></a></p><p>The story of Palestinian Maftoul</p>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/story-palestinian-maftoul#autoplay" target="_blank">Read More »</a>
</p></div>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html" target="_blank">Some</a>
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 “<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-we-live-in-a-tough-neighborhood/" target="_blank">tough neighborhood</a>” - essentially in the Middle East, but not of it. While famed Israeli historian Benny <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262428" target="_blank">Morris</a> has claimed that Israel is “Rome” and Arabs are the “barbarians” threatening it, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/jewish-majority-israel-villa-in-the-jungle" target="_blank">described </a>Israel as a “villa in the jungle”.</p>
<p>The former Israeli ambassador to Sweden and Egypt, Zvi Mazel, in turn <a href="https://forward.com/opinion/311900/is-israel-pivoting-from-west-too-woo-the-east/" target="_blank">asserted</a>:
“Israel is a western country, that, despite sometimes treacherous
behaviour by its western kin societies, still belongs in that slot
culturally, conceptually and economically.” </p>
<p>British Jewish cookbook writer Claudia Roden, nee Douek (whose Egyptian Jewish family is originally Syrian), has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html" target="_blank">asserted </a>that many European Jews who migrated to Palestine “wanted to forget their old food because it reminded them of persecution”. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/t-magazine/palestinian-food.html" target="_blank">According to an article</a>
in the New York Times: “In the food of their Palestinian neighbors,
[Israeli Jews] found a connection to the land and their ancestors.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<h3>Ownership of food</h3>
<p>Israeli chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi and his Palestinian coauthor, Sami Tamimi, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jerusalem-Cookbook-Yotam-Ottolenghi/dp/1607743949" target="_blank">want to dispense</a>
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.” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<div>
<p><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/ottolenghi%202014%20afp.jpg" alt="Chef Yotam Ottolenghi prepares food in New York City in 2014 (AFP)" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="301"></p>
Chef Yotam Ottolenghi prepares food in New York City in 2014 (AFP)</div>
<p>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? </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://ny.eater.com/2021/10/13/22724129/ayat-palestinian-restaurant-bay-ridge-online-harassment" target="_blank">complained </a>of
online harassment by people who had never been to the restaurant, but
were motivated by anti-Palestinian hostility. The owner <a href="https://ny.eater.com/2021/10/13/22724129/ayat-palestinian-restaurant-bay-ridge-online-harassment" target="_blank">said </a>in a media interview that even calling his restaurant “Palestinian” opened it up to potential harassment.</p>
<h3>Racist presumption</h3>
<p>Then there is the <a href="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" target="_blank">claim</a>
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<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Persistence_of_the_Palestinian_Quest/y_2SAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Morocco" target="_blank"> have their own regional cuisines</a>.</p>
<p>There are only a paltry number of Syrian and Lebanese Jews who live in Israel, <a href="https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/doi/abs/10.1080/13537129608719420" target="_blank">constituting</a> "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?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most Arabs are rightly outraged that their food and cuisine have become part and parcel of Israel’s overall colonising efforts</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/dining/claudia-roden-middle-eastern-cooking.html" target="_blank">Ottolenghi</a> credits Roden with paving the way for chefs like him. According to a recent article on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/dining/claudia-roden-middle-eastern-cooking.html" target="_blank">Roden</a>
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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.</i></p>
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