If you want to spark an absolute inferno of geopolitical passion over Palestine, you do not need to see the odious Benjamin Netanyahu swagger into the UN waving his map of a Greater Israel with expanded borders, trashed treaties and stolen lands. You simply need to walk into a kitchen and ask who owns the hummus. Food is the ultimate archive of identity. There is a specific type of cultural larceny that occurs when Israelis brazenly attempt to claim indigenous Levantine staples like hummus, falafel or couscous as their own national creations. It is a soft-power effort to consume the culture of the very people they are actively displacing and ethnically cleansing from the land. This cultural appropriation is visible […]
