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 widely in global food branding, with major commercial brands like the US-based Sabra hummus company — co-owned by an Israeli corporation — marketing hummus in Western supermarkets using Israeli branding and themes, prompting fierce regional pushback.

Similarly, Israeli tourism campaigns and international lifestyle media routinely introduce hummus as a staple element of modern Israeli cuisine, rather than explicitly contextualising it within its broader Levantine and ancient Middle Eastern history. This nationalised rivalry even boiled over into the high-profile Hummus Wars, when Israeli and Lebanese chefs vied for Guinness World Records to cook the largest serving of the dish, highlighting the deep political struggle over ownership of the land’s culinary roots.

I was reminded about all of this recently when I picked up probably one of the most innocuous-looking books on Palestine I’ve ever seen, written by Ian Wellens, a fromager of fine West Country cheeses.

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Within its pages the battle lines over language and lineage run so deep that the linguistic pronunciation of a dish alone can trigger immediate exclusion. In a striking real-world manifestation of these tensions, a public lawsuit recently emerged in Berlin where an Israeli citizen sued a local Palestinian establishment, claiming that he was thrown out of the building simply for ordering the dish using an Israeli accent rather than the traditional Arabic pronunciation.

While the customer lamented that food should build bridges, the incident underscores how deeply weaponised culinary inheritance has become in the shadow of the ongoing conflicts across the region. An even larger, international controversy erupted when American television chef Rachael Ray sparked a major geopolitical backlash online.

Ray........

© Middle East Monitor