Abstract
This article is the first in a series in which I propose to draw on the emergent and poly/trans disciplinary field of Food Studies in order to pursue questions of national identity, political struggle, cultural resistance and psychological survival in Palestine. There are several perspectives from which this connection between food and territoriality may be theorised. At first instance, for the purposes of this paper, I ask whether it is appropriate to draw on the cultural property paradigm in order to spotlight the possibilities and significance of claiming their cuisine as the intangible cultural heritage of Palestinians. This essay is a rhetorical cry for the repatriation and rehabilitation of regional specialties. The need to acknowledge, safeguard and celebrate Palestinian culture, its distinctive genius and the abundance and refinement of its traditions is part of the struggle for meaningful political change. The Palestinian ethnographic research included in this paper was conducted in collaboration with Bait al Karama, a local (Nablus based) NGO founded and run entirely by women, for local women. My methodology is rooted in the relationship between activism and academia.
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Notes
My emphasis.
Once again, my emphasis.
In case it is not clear, this is my emphasis.
See Brubeck (2007) for an example of how the French government has institutionalised and regulated the link between place and “gout du terroir” (the taste of the soil).
For example, a group of British Jews living in the United Kingdom formed Independent Jewish Voices in 2007 to express the opinions of the growing number of dissident Jewry. Similar groups also operate in the United States, Canada and in Europe. IVJ was formed “because successive Israeli governments claim to represent Jews in general, a claim that is as groundless as it is injurious” (Karpf et al. 2008, viii).
C.f. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983, 7): “Plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups—not least in nationalism—were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented.”
For a discussion on the link between the authenticity / provenance of a product as a marker of its quality and political hegemony, see Roberts (2007).
I risk arguing against myself. However, the most convincing challenge to the deployment of legal language under such circumstances, and to the idea that extra governmental normativity could be called law, comes from Roberts (2005).
Brand Israel is a propaganda campaign launched by the Israeli government to divert international attention from their own military aggression. Enthused by the endless possibilities of this approach, Brand Israel has been extended to embrace gay rights; this is known as ‘pinkwashing’ (Elia 2012, 56–57).
You can judge a book by its cover: the unappealing politics of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s book is intimated in the positioning of the authors’ names, one above the other, separated by the word ‘Jerusalem’. I will let you guess whose name comes first. See, in contrast, the cover of The Gaza kitchen (El-Haddad and Schmitt 2012), another cross cultural collaborative effort with a non-appropriative political agenda, at www.gazakitchen.com.
See the photo in Raviv (2003, 24). See also www.ziongifts.com/israel-falafel-postcard.html.
The physical, political and epistemological violence of colonialist enterprises is nothing if not masculine. Colonial culture is self consciously gendered. There is a plenitude of literature which invokes colonialism’s own associations with the qualities of manliness, youth, vigour, science, light, truth and rationality, particularly with a view to establishing its culture’s superiority over the redolent, receptive, dark, weak, instinctive and feminine Other. Feminising and thereby othering natives and their culture is necessary for their domination (see Ghandour 2010; Thobani 2003; Razack 1998; Tidrick 1990).
The orange itself: present in Palestine since the eleventh century, and prior to that originated in Southern or South-eastern Asia.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGzf1ss_80Y, 12 November 2010.
See the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of 9 March 2012 (www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD.C.ISR.CO.14-16.pdf) for violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The report details institutional segregation both de facto and de jure, discriminatory socio-economic practices targeting Palestinians both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories, a state policy of house demolitions, an “increase in racist and xenophobic acts”, the administrative detention of Palestinian children and adults, and the impunity enjoyed by Jewish “terrorist groups such as Price Tag” who target Palestinians. See also Goldberg (2008) for an exploration of Israel’s race-ology, ethnic purging and disappearing of Palestinian bodies from the internal and external Israeli landscape.
My emphasis.
My emphasis. In Soans (2004, 26).
This point is also helpfully elucidated by Claudia Roden, who has written extensively on Middle Eastern, Jewish, Mediterranean and Levantine cookery, in an interview with the New York Times (see in Kantor 2002).
For a more detailed historical account of the dissociation of falafel from its Arab roots, see Raviv (2003).
One example: part cookbook, part historical ethnography, the Stavroulakis’s Cookbook of the Jews of Greece (1986) contains recipes and life stories gathered from survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in Salonika.
Supra n 10. See also the slogan adopted by Hummus Bros, a Hummus restaurant in central London: “Give peas a chance.” (www.hbros.co.uk).
Audi (2007, 132–133).
I am tempted to draft the entire indictment against Israel here and now. On the other hand, I want to avoid mechanical reference to evidence of Israeli oppression of, crimes against and belligerence towards Palestinians in order to support the charges. This is a deliberate device and one that I hope will become widespread. Eventually, the concept of conflict (which supposes equipoise between the parties) must be abandoned, and replaced by mainstream acknowledgement of the situation as an ongoing neo-colonial one, with the corresponding deficit of moral and legal legitimacy that such an arrangement entails. Nonetheless, the cultural dispossession of Palestinians is perhaps the least documented consequence of Israeli violence. See Amit (2011) for a literary dimension of its “catastrophic” effect, and Nadia Abu El-Haj (2001) for a critical exposition of the role of archaeology in Israel’s self-invention.
Ilan Pappe calls this “the erasure of the native”—(Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine—7th Annual Conference, SOAS March 2011).
Flessas explains: “‘Cultural nationalism’ is the position taken in the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which the UK government signed in May 2003. ‘Cultural internationalism’ is the position taken in the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which the UK government is presently considering signing. The International Council of Museums and other international heritage organizations subscribe to this view.” (Flessas 2008, n 9) For a discussion of the principles at stake, see for example Merryman (1985), who is a proponent of the internationalist stance.
See also Dirks (1992): nationalism is “the most salient demonstration of the power of colonialism to reproduce itself, spawning myriad clones in new nations throughout the postcolonial world.” (15).
For examples of courageous but doomed-to-fail anti imperial “lawfare”, see Comaroff and Comaroff (2009, 56–58).
Chanock (1991) illustrates this trend in relation to land in colonial Africa. He points out that the classic, private ownership versus communal tenure dichotomy which has emerged to talk about land in Africa is not an authentic one, or one that reflects, respectively, European and African concepts of land use. Instead, he argues, it is at the very least a speculative conjecture if not an outright fabrication imposed on the natives to legitimate their dispossession.
“Trapped in purity, you come to a standstill” (at a seminar at Birkbeck College, 26th April 2012).
Adopted by UNESCO at a General Conference in Paris, 17th October 2003.
The selection criteria were revised by the General Assembly in June 2010.
For a description of the siege on Nablus, and restrictions on freedom of movement, see the 1st January 2012 update by B’tselem—The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement/siege.
“Khirbat Lid” was an Arab village in the District of Haifa, historic Palestine.
I shamefully left the Salehis’ home without asking Khamis’s wife her name. In my defence, I had not anticipated her presence at our interview, and the significance of her interjections only struck me once I was back in London, transcribing and translating my interviews. I also left rather quickly at the end of our interview, having sensed that I was perhaps overstaying my welcome, and that the elderly couple needed to rest.
Known in English as ‘Turkish delight’.
Khamis said ‘toffee’ in English.
Greater Syria or the Levant.
Fava beans, traditionally an early morning breakfast dish presented in similar variations to the ubiquitous and more prosaic Hummus.
This means ‘accounts’ in Arabic.
Syria and Al Sham may be used interchangeably when talking about Greater Syria / the Levant.
May God protect you.
Kenafa Palace is my epithet for the Kenafa shop called “Al-Aqsa Sweets”. Kenafa is a sweet made with semolina, unsalted white cheese and drenched in scented syrup. Nablus is famous for its Kenafa.
Al Aqsa is a mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. The term Al Aqsa is also used to refer to the area in which this mosque stands and which is characterised by the golden domed Dome of the Rock.
Underground water cisterns.
Bassel said ‘fast food’ and ‘take-away’ in English.
Pancake stuffed with chopped nuts or clotted cream, drizzled with flower-scented syrup.
Bassel is referring to Israeli tourists. It took me a while to understand this, and several rewinds and replays of that section of the interview.
Once again, the reference is to Israeli tourists.
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Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without Bait Al Karama, part of Nablus Old City Charity Society (an officially registered charity), and the first Slow Food Convivium in Nablus. I was able to conduct my research as a guest of and in collaboration with Bait Al Karama, whilst attending a 10-day cookery course run by them. Thanks in particular to Fatima Kaddoumi (director and co-founder), for her invaluable guidance around Nablus, and to Beatrice Catanzaro and Cristiana Bottigella (co-founders) for organising my stay and for making so much effort to make my time there as fruitful and enjoyable as possible. Thank you to the friends and colleagues for their comments on earlier drafts and general helpful insights into the subject. Thank you to the editors for their patience and vigilance.
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Ghandour, Z.B. Falafel King: Culinary Customs and National Narratives in Palestine (I). Fem Leg Stud 21, 281–301 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-013-9250-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-013-9250-0