Falafel is not an “Israeli national dish”

Israel has appropriated much from Arab and Palestinian culinary culture, and dishes such as Falafel is declared as an “Israeli national dish.”

Israeli journalist, Ilan Baron, writes that “to appropriate another people’s food is to undermine their culture and is an act of violence.”

PP • 13 January 2016 •

The following is excerpt from Ilan Baron in Haaretz (12/6/15):

How Israeli Israel’s national dish really is. Has Israel appropriated Arab (and Palestinian) cuisine, or is the falafel ball just an immigrant in good standing?

Can falafel and other foods common to the region, like hummus, really be considered Israeli? And what does it mean to claim a food as your own?

Describing falafel as a prominent part of Israeli culinary culture may simply be an acknowledgement that Israelis eat and enjoy a lot of falafel, but it is also a way of appropriating the traditional foods of another people. Falafel is an Arab food. Lebanese and Palestinians lay claims to it, and some argue that its roots are actually in ancient Egypt.

To some extent, then, Israeli cuisine reflects the violence of the Israeli state and the appropriation of Arab and Palestinian foods. Regional foods are not so much integrated as taken over. Seemingly traditional Arab foods like falafel and hummus are written into the Israeli culinary narrative at the expense of erasing their status as Arab or Palestinian.

There is nothing trivial about being deprived of the ability to claim a food as your own. Food has important cultural meanings, and the ways in which we identify different foods both shape and reflect our understandings of each other. To appropriate another people’s food is to undermine their culture and is an act of violence. For Israel to claim regional dishes as its own serves a political process, and raises the question of whether or not any cuisine can legitimately be called Israeli.