No matter how much tahini you might add: hummus, falafel and shawarma will never taste good so long as Israel continues to serve it alongside the violation of Palestinian dignity.
At first glance, the fury Palestinians feel when seeing hummus labelled “Israeli” on a tub in the store, or “Israeli falafel” being sold in food trucks at music festivals, may seem disproportionate and unjustified. But our fury is neither disproportionate nor unjustified, rather a reaction to a culmination of violence inflicted on Palestinian communities by settler colonial forces.
The question has never been about whether or not Israeli citizens today consume hummus, falafel or shawarma in large quantities — it is an undeniable fact that these are foods widely eaten across the lands of historic Palestine, the Levant and North Africa — but the real problem lies in the insertion of Israeli presence into regional history, the normalising of the Israeli state, and the violence of cultural theft and appropriation.
I had the pleasure to interview Sarah Shaweesh, owner of Khamsa, a Palestinian plant-based cafe in Newtown. She shares my fury over the fuckery that is “Israeli hummus”.
How does it make you feel when you see other businesses selling and marketing hummus and falafel as Israeli?
“It makes me feel angry, on so many layers. You have this choking feeling when you see an Israeli restaurant selling Palestinian food. They are trying to erase us. Pretending like we don’t exist and that they’ve always been there — this is an attempt to rewrite history.”
She called this all a depressing affair.
“I’d love to see an Israeli restaurant have Israeli food, not Palestinian food labelled as Israeli.
Article is in Honi Soit.
[Editor: Written anonymously to protect the cowardly author is this snide tripe about hummus, which has no particular Palestinian origins anyway.]