The painful irony of Israel’s Palestinian cultural appropriation

As we near the end of 2021, I look back at the attack on the West Bank city of Gaza that took place in May this year, and how it shifted the way the world perceives the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

As normalised as conflicts and Israeli airstrikes may be to the Palestinian people, for the first time since the establishment of the state of Israel, the rest of the world witnessed the reality and extent of the disproportionate deaths and destruction Palestinians were suffering in the name of Israeli self-defence.

This “a-woke-ning” can be attributed to the social media coverage, which exposed the decades-long biased mainstream narrative on the issue.

One of the more disturbing features of the events of 2021, however, is not the obvious death and destruction, but rather the subtle, yet deliberate, attempt by Israel to appropriate Palestinian/ Arabic culture and cuisine.

The most blatant of them was the recent “Visit Israel” experience arranged by the Israeli government for the contestants of the Miss Universe pageant.

The beauty queens posed in thawbs, traditional Palestinian Bedouin clothing, while making traditional Palestinian cuisine – warra’ ‘areesh/warra’ ‘enab – as part of living “a day in the life of a Bedouin”, as the Israeli government passed it off as part of the country’s cultural experience.

What may surprise many is the extent to which the Palestinian/Arabic cuisine and culture have already been misappropriated.

For example, what is now termed “Middle Eastern” cuisine in countries like South Africa, is understood to include – and even mean – Israeli cuisine.

Popular dishes and foods such as falafel, hummus (often mispronounced), labneh and zaa’tar are now passed off either as Israeli, or the more neutral, “Middle Eastern” food.

The irony, of course, is that Israel doesn’t even consider itself to be a Middle East country.

The “Jerusalem” dishes referenced in South African restaurants – by famous Israeli chefs – come from Palestinian or Arab-Israeli households and restaurants in Jerusalem.

After 73 years of occupation, and given that 40% of the population in Jerusalem currently remains Palestinian or Arab-Israeli, one would have thought this fact to be obvious to the rest of the world – specially given that most Jewish Israelis were Eastern European emigrants who brought with them a cuisine foreign to the Middle East.

The only Jews to have had exposure to Middle Eastern cuisine pre-1948 would be the Mizrahis (Arab Jews).

So what is the point? Why the cultural misappropriation?

In addition to the unlawful dispossession of Palestinian land in the ’40s to date – an illegal occupation of land in terms of international law – and the practice of the international crime of apartheid, Israel has sought to wipe out all traces of a Palestinian presence in its country.

Regardless of whether or not Zionists are willing to recognise the existence of a Palestinian state prior to 1948, the simple fact is that the Palestinian population in the state of Israel dropped by 88% from 1947 to 1948.

Their land was then seized by the Israeli government through a racially discriminatory law, which is still in force today.

Still, the map of the state of Israel continues to expand from what it was in the UN partition plan in 1947, through illegal settlements that encroach on the diminished Palestinian territories as set out in the Oslo Accords, signed 47 years later.

This project of expansion is facilitated by Israel’s Law of Return, which provides Israeli citizenship and land to the 30 000 Jews who immigrate to Israel annually.

Palestinian villages that once lay within the borders of the state of Israel are given Hebrew names to replace their once Arabic equivalent, and, if not occupied by Jewish Israeli settlers, are turned into forests, courtesy of the Jewish National Fund.

Life in the slowly diminishing Occupied Palestinian Territories mirrors that in South Africa pre-1994.

In fact, two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa have admitted to their government’s system of occupation being modelled on South Africa’s system of oppression.

Like Bantustans, the Occupied Palestinian Territories are disjointed and isolated pieces of scattered land.

Israel, like apartheid South Africa, supports a system of “separate development”, essentially resulting in Palestinian movement in the occupied territories being regulated by a “Berlin” wall, check points, and a dompas system – which, in the Israeli context, are permits arbitrarily issued by the Israeli government allowing Palestinians to leave their own territories.

Separate roads and queues at check points, detention without trial, arbitrary raids, forced evictions, and home demolitions are all reminiscent of South Africa’s dark past.

As was the case in apartheid South Africa, oppression is justified by the need to protect the oppressor against the imminent threat of the oppressed. Opposition is immediately labelled an ti-Semitic communist, and was, in South Africa’s case, terrorist-loving.

If nothing else, the ANC’s armed struggle wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, taught us that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Unlike South Africa, however, instead of looking to shame the oppressed out of their culture and heritage, Israel has sought to appropriate these while simultaneously removing traces of their original owners.

In addition to the “Visit Israel” mockery, the passing off of Middle Eastern food and the whitewashing of Palestinian history in a Jewish state that has not existed long enough to kill off living memories of that history, I recently witnessed the appropriation of a Zaffe, a traditional Levantine Arabic wedding troop, at a Jewish Israeli wedding in South Africa, where neither the wedding party, nor the guests understood the significance of it.

If the world is not yet prepared to mete out the same response to Israel as it once did to South Africa – bearing in mind that the South African apartheid system and the state of Israel were both established in the same year (1948) – then, at the very least, it should not be complicit in the erasure of the Palestinian identity through the misappropriation of their culture and cuisine.

So call it what it is: hummus with a deep “h” (the Palestinian way).

Germanos is a Lebanese-South African attorney and former law clerk of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, with a masters’ degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford