by Hugh Fitzgerald
Is an Israeli food-truck operator who sells falafel committing “cultural genocide”?
As if stealing Palestinian land were not enough, those diabolical Israelis have been trying to appropriate a key component of the Palestinian identity: food. It turns out that Israelis have been making, and eating, and taking credit for, foods which the Palestinians claim belong to them.
More on this latest preposterous claim can be found here: “New York Times Joins the Food War Against Israel,” by Ricki Hollander, JNS.org, October 25, 2022:
One of the most absurd fronts in an ongoing Arab/Palestinian war on Israel’s legitimacy is the fight about food. Israelis are accused of food imperialism, i.e. appropriating Palestinian foods, with James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, going so far as to call it “cultural genocide” in a 2017 tweet.”
Yes, how true. If an Israeli food-truck operator sells felafel, tabbouleh, and shawarma, he’s committing “cultural genocide.” Who isn’t immediately put in mind, just as John Zogby was, of Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz?
This inane offensive over ownership of original recipes as part of a campaign against the Jewish state would not succeed without the assistance of the media. And the New York Times is the latest to join in.
In “Preserving a Palestinian Identity in the Kitchen,” New York Times contributor Aina J. Khan cites a Franco-Palestinian chef, Fadi Kattan, who created a cooking video series “aimed at reclaiming a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks.” She features and highlights his outlandish accusations:
“Food is being used to normalize the Israeli occupation by denying the origin of everything from hummus to falafel,” said Kattan. “The images of our grandmother’s hands working in the kitchen, rolling the vine leaves, dipping the bread of the mussakhan in oil,” he added, “These are images of beauty that are being stolen from us.”
For god’s sake, Fadi Kattan, food is just food. If Israelis eat Arab food, nothing political, no diabolical message, no “theft” is meant by this. Israelis, like the rest of us, will eat whatever tastes good, without thereby appropriating or “stealing” food that “belongs” to others. Israelis, just like the rest of us, also eat pizza, moussaka, goulash, and General Tso’s chicken. So what? If the Chinese eat hamburgers and hot dogs, are they “stealing” our foods? Aren’t they, rather, appreciating them? And that sentimental business by Fadi Kattan about “the images of our grandmother’s [Palestinian] hands working in the kitchen,” making those foods that belong to us, the Palestinians…well, you see, by preparing and eating those foods themselves, the Israelis have “stolen” those “images of beauty” (our Palestinian grandmothers rolling those Palestinian vine leaves). What an absurd litany of lament.
Let’s consider Kattan’s list of what he thinks are “Palestinian” foods that the Israelis are accused of appropriating:
Hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma. No one can be certain which people first used hummus. There is evidence that It was first prepared in ancient Egypt, before the Arabs arrived, so it can hardly be claimed to be a “Palestinian” or even an “Arab” dish. Early on, before the Arabs had swept out of Arabia in the seventh century, Grecian cuisine included hummus, and Greeks have continued through the centuries to claim hummus as a “Greek” dish. Nor did Israelis “steal” hummus from the Palestinians. Mizrahi Jews had been eating hummus for many centuries; when they arrived in Israel, they brought hummus recipes with them. They had no need to “steal” them from the Palestinians.
Falafel, which Israelis regard as their national dish, like hummus was eaten by Mizrahi Jews for centuries before they went to Israel. And again like hummus, falafel was never regarded as exclusively “Palestinian” or “Arab.” It was a dish belonging to all the peoples – Christian Copts, Mizrahi Jews, and Muslim Arabs – of the Middle East.
Tabbouleh originates not with the Palestinians, but with the Maronite Christians in northern Lebanon. Should the Maronites now accuse the Palestinians and other Muslim Arabs of ”stealing” a dish – tabbouleh – that belongs to them?
Like tabbouleh, fattoush is a dish that comes from the Christians in northern Lebanon. It is not a “Palestinian” nor even a Muslim, dish. That won’t stop Fadi Kattan from claiming it for the “Palestinians.”
Shawarma is Turkish in origin. It is better known in the West as döner kebab. It was never part of “Palestinian” cuisine.
While Israel is accused of “stealing” dishes that Fadi Kattan calls “Palestinian,” in truth, not one of the five foods he lists is “Palestinian” in origin. Two — tabbouleh and fattoush — are dishes first prepared by Christians in what is today northern Lebanon. One – shawarma – comes from Turkey; hummus originates in ancient Egypt, and felafel has been eaten for centuries all over the Middle East, not only by Arabs, but by Mizrahi Jews and Christian Copts, long before the “Palestinians” ever existed.
That the food angle is just an excuse to expand on the greater theme of an illegitimate Jewish state is soon made clear by the article’s author. In what is supposed to be a report on food the NYYTimes food writer writes:
“Before 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes or fled as the state of Israel was created, a mass displacement Palestinians call the nakba or ‘catastrophe,’ about three-quarters of the Palestinian population lived in villages centered around agriculture….”
In a column devoted to food, this uncalled-for diversion into politics, and special pleading for the Palestinians, is bizarre. Imagine a column ostensibly devoted to instruction in making French pastries that then went into French colonial policies in 19th century Haiti.
The New York Times has been increasingly showcasing the claims of anti-Israel activists and promoting their propaganda against the Jewish state, be it under the guise of a film review, and now, cuisine and food preparation. It is yet another entrée into the wholesale delegitimization of the Jewish state, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the general public.
The New York Times has much to answer for in its coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. Its failure to describe the fantastic corruption, the despotism, the murders of political opponents, by Mahmoud Abbas, is unacceptable. So is its failure to discuss the even greater corruption among Hamas leaders, just two of whom, Khaled Meshaal and Moussa bin Marzouk, have each amassed fortunes of $2.5 billion. You have never heard a word in the Times, either, about the $400 million that Mahmoud Abbas, with his two sons Tarek and Yasser, has socked away. The Times’ main reporter in Israel, Patrick Kingsley, routinely understates the terrorist threat, and exaggerates the harm Israel does to Palestinian civilians; he never mentions Israel’s determination to minimize that harm. He ascribes malevolent intent to Israel when there is none. He, like the many Times reporters in Israel before him, also fails to properly convey what the Palestine Mandate was intended to achieve, and how the British failed to carry out their Mandate responsibilities. He has yet to mention, even once, UN Resolution 242, and the gloss on its meaning provided by its author, Lord Caradon.
All of the New York Times’ regular columnists save one (Bret Stephens) – such as Nicholas Kristof and Tom Friedman — are unsympathetic to Israel, now scolding, and now telling the Jewish state “what it must do” to achieve that indispensable thing, a “two-state solution.” Other contributors to the NY Times include the proudly anti-Zionist Peter Beinart. Bari Weiss felt compelled to resign from the Times two years ago, in part because of the ideological straitjacket imposed by her fellow journalists, and an atmosphere of wokeism that included, unsurprisingly, deep hostility to Israel.
Now we see that an anti-Israel message even manages to infuse what should have been a straightforward report on Middle Eastern cuisine. Thanks to the Franco-Palestinian restaurateur, Fadi Kattan, even a food column provides one more way to bash the Jewish state. But readers of the food column will not bother finding out where the five foods he claims are “Palestinian” really came from; they will accept the claims of Fadi Kattan, and come away thinking that yes, indeed, those monstrous Israelis are even laying claim to “Palestinian” foods, and no one at the smug paper of record will bother to correct the malign Fadi Kattan.
Hugh Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/palestinian-food-fight/
No comments:
Post a Comment