Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli food culture

Abstract

This article sets out to study the role that Palestine and the Arab-Palestinians have had on Israeli national identity through the examination of Israeli food culture. Food culture played an important part not only in the emancipation of European Zionist-Jews who immigrated to Palestine before 1948 but also in the creation of the Israeli national identity, including its collective memory, national psyche and desired political aspirations. However, it is impossible to understand Israeli food culture, and Israeli identity and popular culture, without taking into account the environment in which and the people among whom it developed. In that respect, and as argued hereafter, for political and ideological reasons the Palestinian direct contribution to Israeli food culture, and by extension national identity, has been expunged or overlooked. Early Zionist encounter with the Arab-Palestinian people and their culture contained a mixture of romanticisation, admiration and imitation. However, with the Zionist aim of substituting the Arab-Palestinian people by creating a separate political and economic society, the process of encounter changed to replacement, appropriation and deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the past. In relation to Israeli food culture, the Arab-Palestinian food element was marginalised, blurred and reinterpreted as belonging to the Zionist settlers, or as being brought to Israel by the Mizrahi-Jews. In other words, Israeli food culture ‘needed’ the Arab-Palestinian culture as a source of imitation and localisation, but at the same time desired its de-Palestinianisation, together with the general idea of a separate Jewish state.

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“…Instead, they are situated within specific spatiotemporalities and historical moments (Klumbytė, 2010; O'Connor, 2008; Ries, 2009) and are constantly evolving to weave into the everyday practices of those who cook and eat them (Avieli, 2016). It is for this reason that many scholars (e.g., Ranta & Mendel, 2014) refer to these food processes as food cultures or foodways instead of cuisines.…”

“…The rendering of Arabic food as a proxy for the Israeli–Arab conflict has been discussed widely in what has come to be known as the “hummus wars” (Avieli, 2016). Scholars have discussed how the appropriation of Indigenous Arabic food cultures and its reinterpretation as belonging to Israel has played an instrumental role in Israeli nation‐building and reflects a form of hegemonic control and “culinary Zionism” (Bessen, 2016; Ranta & Mendel, 2014). In the context of the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, Bascuñan‐Wiley (2019) analyzed how the production and consumption of Palestinian food by the Palestinian diaspora in Chile “constitutes an engagement with the local context and a form of diasporic sumud (steadfastness)—a long‐term and long‐distance connection to Palestine and a quotidian resistance to symbolic erasure” (p. 100).…”

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“…Yet Israeli culture has worked in tandem to appropriate Palestinian scents into its own national mythology (say, the smell of freshly made hummus, or even za'atar ). The state has rebranded Palestinian smells while working to eliminate Palestinians themselves (Ranta & Mendel, 2014). In this way, smells have become repositories of dis‐ and repossession in Palestine.…”

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“…Thus, Palestinians in Israel often perceive themselves as affiliated with three identities, all of which are simultaneously practiced and negotiated: Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli (Ghanem, 2001). In relation to the culinary sphere, it should be noted that food repertoires of Palestinians -whose political and cultural identity was shaped by civil limitations and institutionalized discrimination -were erased, overlooked and, in some cases, appropriated (see Hirsch, 2011;Ranta and Mendel, 2014). 7.…”