(Photo by the Palestine Solidarity Project via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)
“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.” Mahmoud Darwis, Awraq al-Zaytun (Leaves of the Olive Trees), 1964.
Following the establishment of Israel in 1948, colonists began arriving in large numbers. They found themselves in a completely new environment, given that in those years more than 75% of the migrants arrived from Europe. This was accompanied by the mass displacment of 750,000 Palestinian’s from their homes in what is called the Nakba. While male settlers were obliged to serve in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), many of their wives, as a result of traditional marriages, found themselves in empty kitchens.
This is why Erna Meyer’s How To Cook In Palestine (1936) became so influential. Originally published in German and Hebrew, this cookbook served as a guide for Israeli housewives on how to cook with peculiar Palestinian ingredients. However, it lacked any historical and cultural acknowledgement of the food as Palestinian. In doing so, it helped naturalize settler presence and cultural ownership over the land through aggression.
Meyer’s cookbook shows us that food is anything but neutral. The stories behind food are often told through colonial powers, privileges, and ultimately an objectionable blindness to an earlier history within Indigenous cultures. This cultural appropriation, parallel with the ongoing violent expulsion of Palestinians from their land and the genocide in Gaza, has become more than normalized. If we listen to this older history of food, we become more aware of the Western privilege that often sees food as something self-evident, something culinary.
Gastronationalism as Nation Building
Young states that need to create a standard of national identity often do so by promoting food. This immense and strong form of generalizing identity by setting the norm for the most practiced form of cultural consumption, such as food, is called gastronationalism.
Throughout history, gastronationalism has been proven effective. Italy, for example, has succeeded in having its entire cuisine designated as cultural heritage by UNESCO. Since Italy was unified in 1861, the Italian government has pushed a culinary agenda over the years to “manufacture a shared identity, with food becoming the flag Italians rally around.”
Israel has cultivated a comparable nation-building strategy since its creation in 1948. But with a crucial distinction: rather than consolidating pre-existing internal traditions, it has largely drawn upon and rebranded foods originating from colonized Levantine Arab cultures. Particularly, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian cuisines. Yet, Palestinian ingredients and dishes have been intensively appropriated.
The Appropriation of Palestinian Foods
One of those peculiar Palestinian ingredients, za’atar, a herb mix of thyme, sesame, and sumac widely used on bread and dishes, is forbidden for Palestinians to pick as the Israeli government has labelled the plant protected. Even transporting the herb risks “confiscation and fines at checkpoints.” However, Israelis themselves are allowed to pick as much za’atar as they want.
Maqluba, for example, is a dish whose very name, meaning “upside-down”, reflects a shared communal practice. Traditionally prepared for families eating together, Maqluba is inseparable from Palestinian social life and hostility. Its ingredients, rice, seasonal vegetables, and meat, are tied to local agricultural and regional growing cycles. When Maqluba is rebranded as Israeli cuisine, it is detached from the land and traditions that give it meaning.
(Photo by Beth Kadlčíková Hanley via Spheres of Influence)
Or, Knafeh, which originates from Nablus in the West Bank, is a dessert that has deep roots in the land. The dessert’s ingredients are Nablusi cheese, clarified butter, and skilled artisanal techniques passed down through families. The global marketing of Knafeh as Israeli food erases this geographic specificity and transforms a deeply localized Palestinian tradition into a generalized national symbol for the occupying state.
Israeli Food as a Consuming Melting Pot
When Jewish immigrants arrived from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, they brought their own foods and traditions. In a new state, these diverse cuisines were merged into a shared national story. This is why Israeli food is often referred to as a “melting pot” rather than a single culinary lineage.
The creation of this national cuisine required a selective memory. Some foods were promoted as symbols of the new state, while others were ignored or absorbed without acknowledgement. The choice of which dishes were highlighted helped shape a narrative that the land had a new modern culinary identity.
However, not all Israeli cuisine is borrowed. Some dishes are linked to Jewish diasporic life and were carried into Israel by immigrants. Examples include challah, jachnun, malawach, and gefilte fish. These foods originated in Eastern European Jewish communities and reflect the lived traditions of Jewish families before they arrived in Palestine. These dishes show that Israeli cuisine is partly a mosaic of immigrant histories.
Olive Oil as the Backbone in Palestinian Cuisine
Chicken Msakhan, considered the national dish of Palestine, is a roast chicken dish served with onions, sumac, olive oil, and flatbread. Msakhan was born “as a celebration of the olive harvest, when fresh-pressed olive oil, sumac from the hills, and taboon bread baked in wood-fired ovens came together to form something truly special.” This celebratory relationship to olive oil has changed drastically over the years. Olive trees have become one of the main targets for Israeli settlers.
Recently, human rights organizations have estimated that over 800,000 to 1 million Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted or destroyed since 1967 by Israeli authorities and settlers. The situation in the West Bank has deteriorated to a point where international volunteering organizations now serve as witnesses to these blatant colonialistic practices. And in doing so, they provide a protective presence during olive harvests.
(Photo by Yuram Shorek via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
In destroying or taking over Palestinian olive trees, one has to understand the realities behind this. It can take up to 12 years for a newly planted olive tree to produce a consistent harvest. The destruction of olive trees, therefore, strikes at a core Palestinian symbol of resistance: trees that often outlive generations, passed down within families, and cultivated as acts of sumud (Arabic for “perseverance”).
The Privilege of Calling Food Universal
The appropriation of Palestinian food and the intensified tensions surrounding it have been identically embodied by the split between two chefs: Israeli Yotam Ottolenghi and Palestinian Sami Tamimi.
For a period, the two chefs worked together on two influential cookbooks, Ottolenghi (2008) and Jerusalem (2012). They both have stated in interviews that their roles in the company symbolized their personality and friendship. Ottolenghi was more in the foreground, selling over 5 million copies worldwide. Tamimi, on the other hand, was focused heavily on the food and the roles within the kitchen.
After some personal reflections due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tamimi decided to leave the Ottolenghi company in 2020 to tell a Palestine–focused narrative behind the dishes. As Tamimi states, “I wanted to do without being—although it is—under the Ottolenghi umbrella. Because I wanted it to be translated to Arabic. And if Ottolenghi is involved in it, then it won’t be”. He has now started his solo career with his celebrated books Fastini (2020) and Boustany (2025).
Their split reveals the underlying tension of their original partnership. While they had hoped to demonstrate that professional collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian could transcend the complex political situation, they consciously avoided discussing politics directly. Ultimately, the ongoing presence of these unspoken political realities led to their separation.
Ottolenghi has supported the idea that debates over cultural ownership of certain dishes are sometimes redundant. As he states, “Hummus is definitely an Arab dish, I don’t think anyone would deny that, but obviously it became the national dish of Israel as well. So you know, it belongs to everybody now.” This statement hits the core of cultural appropriation. When the consumption of food is mistaken for cultural ownership, the histories and lived realities behind it are flattened, revealing how claims of universality can quietly reproduce the very inequalities they claim to overcome.
“Nothing Tells the History like a Plate of Food”
Spheres of Influence had the grateful opportunity to speak to Salma, a Palestinian chef who left Palestine in 2018. In Gaza, she was a well-known midwife. She worked with Doctors Without Borders in Sudan after she fled Gaza, and through various twists and turns, she ended up in the Netherlands.
As a midwife she used to document “something small and personal with every baby I helped give birth to.” She stopped documenting when all her documentations were lost after the bombings during the 50 Day War in 2014, “a piece of chocolate compared to the genocide right now.” But ever since the ruthless barbarity of the last years, Salma realized “the main goal is not only to occupy the land but also to erase its history. I started to understand that I was wrong, documenting —and thus sharing these stories—is the only hope we still have.”
“I grew up as the eldest of 17 siblings in Rafah”, Salma recalls. She had the responsibility to help in the kitchen with preparing the food for her family, an obligation that traumatized her, as she was forced into it from the age of six. Her relationship with cooking changed when she raised her youngest sister as her only daughter and “started to cook for her with a mother’s heart.” Parallel to the revelation of her affection towards Palestinian cuisine she realized its cultural significance: “Nothing tells the history like a plate of food”.
Palestinian food is rooted in a culture of sharing. “In the afternoon the family would wait until everyone returns from their work while the food got cold”, Salma retells. The afternoon meal, especially on Fridays, is the most important meal of the day, a ritual of togetherness that defines daily life.
When she arrived in the Netherlands, and the genocide and expulsion of Palestinians in the West Bank intensified after October 7, she felt utterly hopeless. As she states, “I called my family in Palestine during the genocide and they told me that they were waiting for the bomb, as they wanted to be freed from their unbearable suffering.”
Confronted with this reality, she started to fundraise money for her family through selling Palestinian food and hosting workshops about the stories behind the cuisine. “With fundraised money I was able to pay € 8,000 to an Egyptian agency to get my daughter out of Gaza. She suffers from type 1 diabetes, and wasn’t able to get any medical care for 150 days.” With her eyes on the future, she wants to help evacuate more injured children out of Gaza and keep sharing her passion for Palestinian cuisine to younger generations of any culture. Salma’s story tells us how food is not only culture but survival.
An Equilibrium of Curiosity and Appetite
Food is not just a matter of taste but of history, power, and recognition. When Palestinian dishes are claimed without acknowledgement, cultural erasure becomes normalized under the disguise of universality. Although this cultural erasure is more hidden, it can be considered as more destructive than the physical expulsion and genocide of the Palestinians because it tries to demolish the pride and hope of the Palestinian identity and its connection to the land.
Claims that food is “universal ” only carry ethical weight in an unequal world. In the current reality of apartheid, occupation, and ongoing genocide, such statements risk flattening injustice rather than solving it. Consumption is not the same as appropriation. Appropriation begins when ownership is claimed, and origins are erased. Food still can be, as Ottolenghi sees it, “a way to connect people.”
Yet, responsibility does not rest solely with, in this case, the Israeli state and culture. Cultural erasure is also upheld by those in privileged positions who consume without curiosity, who enjoy food detached from its history, its land, and the people who carried it through generations. This willful unknowing is not neutral; it is a colonial position that allows erasure to continue unquestioned.
Edited by Khushi Mehta
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