My Home is Not Your Property:
Enough with Culinary Appropriation

If I were to show my grandmother this TikTok video explaining how to make hummus from beans, she would probably yell at me for being disrespectful and idiotic. She would be just as nauseated if I suggested she try chocolate hummus. I will therefore spare myself from such criticism and protect my grandmother from this ridiculousness. Instead, through this article, I hope to shed light on a terrifying phenomenon — the appropriation of indigenous Levantine cuisine.

Hummus, My Heart

Hummus is authentically prepared by blending chickpeas, lemon juice, olive oil, tahini, garlic and salt. So the only major difference in the TikTok video criticized is the replacement of chickpeas with beans. From the outside, this may be positively viewed as the evolution and adaptation of recipes. But this is not about open-mindedness and the widening of culinary horizons — it is about the abuse of indigenous cuisine.

In Arabic, Hummus means chickpeas (حمّص). In other words, when you make "hummus" with beans, you are quite literally not making hummus. Rather, you are spreading a recipe inspired by my traditional cuisine, incorrectly under its name, with zero respect for its origins. 

But I can survive in spite of the horrendous appropriation of scrumptious food cooked and enjoyed alongside family and friends in Lebanon. I can live — though in disgust and frustration — with the fact that my cuisine is ignorantly and insensitively being insulted. 

On the other hand, my Palestinian brothers and sisters cannot. Their food — like many of their other indigenous cultural practices — is constantly used for colonial domination. My Palestinian neighbors cannot, should not, and will not accept nor live with their indigenous food being increasingly appropriated by their occupiers. And nor should we — all of us reading this article today, studying on this campus and aware of the occupation of Palestine.

The Occupation of Palestinian Cuisine 

Chef Kattan recalls in a L'Orient Le Jour article that Hummus "was the very first dish appropriated by the Israelis as early as 1948." Originally, he says, "the Zionist project was marked by European-style colonialism that denied the Arabness of Palestine and its land. But when they went to eat at the homes of Palestinians who survived the Nakba — during which 580 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground — they said to themselves, 'This chickpea puree is not bad!'" 

Today, multiple other dishes have fallen victims of appropriation. If you walk on the streets of occupied Palestine, unlawfully recognized as the state of Israel, you will find non-Arab Jewish Israeli street vendors claiming that Levantine Arabic cuisines like falafel, baba ganoush, and Arabic salad (سلطة عربيّة), also known as rural fallahi (farmer) salad, to be their own. Kunafa Nabulsia (كنافة نابلسيّة) — quite literally in the name showcasing that the cheese is from Nablus, West Bank — is also sold disrespectfully by Pizza Hut Israel as Israeli. 

While it is true that recipes develop and cross temporal and spatial boundaries, there is a strict difference between the deliberate theft from another culture for the purpose of a political agenda, as opposed to the inevitable integration of populations and their cultural influences. For instance, kafta is a common dish today that has become traditional to Lebanese, Syrian and other previous subjects of the Ottoman Empire. These countries did not steal Ottoman cuisine, but rather have inevitably integrated the customs adopted under the Empire into their own. Moreover, though it is true that Middle Eastern Jews used to eat Levantine indigenous cuisines before the creation of the apartheid Israeli state, so did the Christians and Muslims of the region. Hence, all three groups have every right to claim this food as their own on a national or regional basis, but neither one has the right to appropriate it and market it as their own at the expense of the others. Unfortunately, this is precisely what Israel does today — it appropriates and brands indigenous Palestinian Levantine cuisine as Jewish/Israeli.

Denied Their Own Heritage

Even more worrying is the denial of Palestinians' claim to their own food. As "hummus and other dishes that Palestinians share with their Levantine neighbors [are] gradually relabeled as Israeli," Palestinians are subject to harassment when they rightfully share their own food and heritage in the West — as is evident by the experience of this Palestinian restaurant in New York. Yet, restaurants claiming to be Israeli seem to have no objections, as can be seen with the thriving Israeli restaurant in Nice, which does a great job at stealing my cuisine and advertising it as "Israeli/ Mediterranean."

Not only is food being branded to deny its Arab origins, but Palestinians also face heavy impediments with regards to exporting their agricultural products. In 2021, after a roughly 40-day suspension of all exports out of Gaza, "new restrictions were then imposed, including the demand that the green stem, the sprig, be removed from every single tomato before exiting Gaza," reducing the product's "quality and shelf life." The primary purpose of this mockery was to make Palestinian exports less desirable and profitable, further damaging their economy. In August of that year, 9,000 Palestinian olive trees were illegally bulldozed, contributing to the over 800,000 that have fallen victim to Israeli occupation since the second major ethnic cleansing moment of 1967. The production of olive oil from Palestinian trees is another cultural tradition that Israel is not happy about. 

In 2022, Amnesty International published a 277-page report explaining the Israeli system of apartheid against Palestinian Arabs — Muslims and Christians alike, living in or outside of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with or without an Israeli passport. Here are just some of the atrocities with regards to agriculture and farming highlighted in the report:

"According to OCHA, between 1 January and 19 October 2020, many of the 42 Israeli military incursions into the Gaza Strip included bulldozing agricultural land and destroying crops." (p.182)

"Since 2014, the Israeli military has aerial-sprayed herbicides over Palestinian crops alongside the fence between Gaza and Israel." (p.184)

"Palestinian farmers are forced to neglect their farmland or switch to less water-intensive crops because of Israel's discriminatory policies on Palestinians' access to water in the Jordan valley." (p.190)

Therefore, Israel's occupation of Palestinians includes not only the appropriation of their land, property and cuisine, but equally their fundamental right to plant, cultivate and harvest their own crops to be self-sufficient and preserve their cultural practices. And it does not end there; Israel attempts to erase all and any aspects of Palestinian identity. Tatreez — Palestinian embroidery, traditionally taught by grandmothers to their granddaughters and daughters — is the art of "an exceptional amount of patience, dedication and precision" in the creation of artisanal goods, such as the traditional Palestinian apparel, the thobe, bags, shoes, and accessories. Disdainfully, organizers of Miss Universe Israel 2021 distributed this integral aspect of Palestinian heritage across the beauty pageant contestants, who wore Palestinian thobes that they claimed as Israeli and prepared wara' aanab (ورق عنب) stuffed grape leaves, a dish of Levantine Ottoman origin. They essentially all had a party of identity theft and heritage slander at the expense of Palestinians, negatively impacted in their day-to-day life by Israeli forces. A tweet by Palestinian-American rights activist Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison expresses, "it's horrible to participate and ignore the ethnic cleansing being committed by the host of the pageant, but it's another kind of ugly to promote the apartheid regime while wearing the traditional clothes of those being ethnically cleansed. Disgraceful, shameless and honestly painful." 

Reclaiming Identity

Palestinian journalist Alhelou asserts that "Palestinian culture and life revolve around food in every aspect, whether it is an ordinary day or a special occasion. Food and national identity are tied together." Unfortunately, the theft of Palestinian cuisine by Israel continues and amplifies by the day. Palestinian culinary appropriation is just one manifestation, product and tool of the Israeli colonial project and apartheid against Palestinians. It is also an insult to my cuisine and my people, as we have Levantine dishes in common with our regional neighbors. 

In Salma Serry's online library committed to historical knowledge of indigenous cuisines to modern Southwest Asia and North Africa, she emphasizes the necessity of "remembering and re-patching traditions when they are in danger of erasure," to "decolonize Palestinian food." Haya's Kitchen — defining herself as "a tribute to Palestine, Tetas, and Traditions" — does precisely that.

It is our duty to support the decolonization of Palestinians from Israel-imposed and Western-backed injustice by taking the steps we can. This starts by supporting such initiatives, denouncing "Israeli salad", differentiating between "hummus" and beans, donating to our campus' SciencesPalestine, writing about the Palestinian identity, and hearing the voices of Palestinians who must be given the space to express themselves, especially here, in Europe, where they are majorly silenced. 

As Alhelou rightfully states, "cultural appropriation is a denial to the existence and heritage of the owners of the land — the Palestinians in their millions inside the occupied Palestinian territories, in refugee camps in some Arab countries or in the diaspora worldwide." For justice to be served, we must normalize the reclamation of Palestinian identity and defeat those who want to see it wiped off the face of the Earth.