look, if someone starts describing the history of za'atar and conspicuously does not mention the words "palestine", "palestinians" or even "arabs", then that is bizarre, pointed and clearly malicious. but some of you will go "they stole all their food!!" as if anyone has ever done anything else.
It's a lot worse with Israeli food because it's based in the assumption that Mizrahi jews either don't exist or are not entitled to a their own culture and history
Don't get me started on hummus
if you live in the old world and eat tomatoes you are a coloniser by the same metric
Potatoes even. Now THAT one's spicy.
omg this guy thinks potatoes are sp- *single gunshot rings out*
Not as spicy as peppers
But potatoes and tomatoes are just material. What you do with them is a meal, which can then be national.
If you use chilli peppers in Asian food
It’s like béchamel on moussaka. Did the Greeks *steal* it from the French, or did the French *colonise* Greek cuisine? Who cares? It’s there, it’s good.
my hot take about zaatar is that the lebanese are wrong about sumac, it’s delicious but it doesn’t go in zaatar. just the palestine proper classic - hyssop and sesame for me. no sumac thanks
Now feeling slightly indefinably guilty as I decorate my zaatar veggies with a lil *extra* sumac ....
the word "levantine" would also be very useful for some people engaging in discourse about food in a historically very mixed region
a lot of 'they stole all their food!' is built around the misconception that Jews who lived in the arab world dont eat food similar to that of their neighbors
i mean let's be real here drey the misconception is even more banal and it is that they either believe mizrahim don't exist or that they somehow don't see themselves as israeli
The existence of Mizrahi Jews, never mind that they are a majority of Israeli Jews, is very inconvenient for a remarkable amount of narratives.
the latter myth annoys me even more than the former tbth because it's such pathetic vaguely decolonial wishful thinking
used the term mizrachi in class once and was told it was offensive because theyre arab Jews and like. i didnt want to cause a scene but i did want to go 'hey why not call one of these people arab and see how they react'
i'll have you know i have one (1) book by a completely statistically unrepresentative israeli writer that actually proves you completely wrong
nah but yeah something about it pisses me tf off because it's essentially a demand that mizrahim hold another identity than an absolute supermajority of them actually do just because that's politically convenient to certain one-stater ends
it's essentially the same problem as with all arab nationalism as an ideology, it's just this subvariant is nominally accepting of jews as plausibly part of the arab nation
behind zionism, arab nationalism, and a lot of other nationalisms of that sort is a 'look at what youre making me do to you' attitude towards the peripheral people unwilling to get with the program
I would suggest that the few nationalisms where this isn't true are the ones that had already done it to their peripheral peoples.
While there are some Mizrahi who are fine with also recognizing Arab connection, the sad reality is that so many Mizrahi Jews have suffered for so long under the Arab-Muslim colonial machine... There's a lot of anger and resentment.
** some Mizrahim