The clamor of pots and pans, the rise and fall of a dozen voices laughing and talking, the neat clack of knives, the splatter of hot oil: This is the kitchen at the Olive Roots Cooperative in the Zeitoun neighborhood of old Gaza City. The tiny concrete-block room is dense with the warm, wheaty scent of steaming maftool, offset by the bright tang of lemon and fresh dill and the velvety perfume of cinnamon. Heedless of the 100-degree heat and the power outage, the cooperative’s members peel pumpkins and marinate chickens, fry eggplants and crush garlic in a whir of activity. While all hands are at work, the conversation ranges from thyroid troubles to daughters-in-law, from the ravages of the most recent war to the correct candying of carrots.
And there we are in the midst of this savory maelstrom, with our camera and voice recorder, trying to take it all in.
We went to Gaza for these kitchen conversations because we intuited that they would allow us to tell the story of the place in a very special way. Nearly everyone in Gaza to whom we explained the project understood it immediately: To talk about food and cooking is to talk about the dignity of daily life, about history and heritage, in a place where these very things have often been disparaged or actively erased. Approached for an interview, Gazans braced themselves to explain one more time—gently, patiently—the impossible political situation of the Strip. When they discovered we did not want to talk about political parties or border crossings but about lentil dishes, there was a moment of astonished delight before they launched into the topic. Passersby crowded around, each proffering a hometown recipe: “No, no, it’s much better if you add the onions at the end….” Food is a passionate subject.
We visited cooks—mostly women—of all different regions and social classes, prepared meals together, and listened to their stories. The conversations that take place in the kitchen are different from conversations anywhere else: more intimate, more leisurely. These conversations, and the recipes we learned through them, form the backbone of this book.
Additional context on the food system in Gaza is provided by interviews with economists, farmers, aid workers, nutritionists, and others. Learning where food comes from and what it costs reveals much about Gaza’s labyrinthine economy, just as learning where recipes come from and how people learned to cook them reveals much about family histories and social structures. The recipes themselves, with their broad spectrum of tastes and techniques, provide a glimpse into the long and tumultuous history of this place.
The ones we have collected here range from the elaborate and luxurious rice dishes served on special occasions to simple family suppers made with the humblest of ingredients. In general, we have opted to present “home food,” the traditional meals and preparations that are passed through families from generation to generation and are often very locally specific, rather than “restaurant food,” which is much more uniform throughout the region. The recipes stand out for their bright and piquant tastes and their lavish use of the hot peppers, citrus, and aromatic herbs that so exuberantly grow throughout the Strip.
A sliver of green between the desert and the sea, Gaza and its environs have prospered since antiquity as a hub along essential transit routes—on the one hand, between the Levant and Egypt, and on the other hand, between Arabia and Europe. As well as its role in trade, most notably in spices, historic Gaza was a garden district, famous particularly for its orchards.
Today when we speak of Gaza we refer to the Gaza Strip, a miniscule enclave some twenty-five miles long and two and a half to five miles wide, within borders set in 1967. Historically, however, the greater Gaza District—one of the administrative districts of British Mandate Palestine and, before that, the Ottoman Empire—comprised a much larger region to the north and east.
The founding of Israel in 1948 changed the map radically and abruptly. A massive influx of Palestinian refugees displaced from neighboring towns and villages flooded into Gaza, their land and their homes suddenly inaccessible to them. What is now known as the Gaza Strip was carved out and separated from the rest of the Gaza District and historic Palestine under the Israel-Egypt armistice agreement. The enclave fell under Egyptian administrative rule until 1967, when Israel occupied the territory and cut it off from Egypt. In 2005, Israel dismantled its settlement-colonies within Gaza while still maintaining control over all the territory’s effective markers of sovereignty: its borders, its commerce, its population registry, its airspace, and its maritime access.
This geopolitical ping-pong, as well as the frequent closure of Gaza’s borders, has isolated the Strip, obliging Gazans to adapt their cuisine—as well as all other aspects of their lives—to wildly uncertain economic and political circumstances.
In culinary terms, too, Gaza’s location places it at a crossroads: While it forms part of the greater Mediterranean food universe of olives, fish, chickpeas, and garden vegetables, it is also a bridge to the desert culinary worlds of Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Nile Valley. Within the region, the cuisine of the urban coast—noted for its sophisticated seafood dishes—is clearly distinguishable from that of the farming interior, rich in vegetables and legumes.
The intense concentration of refugees from other parts of historic Palestine (80 percent of the current population of Gaza) makes Gaza an extraordinary place to encounter culinary traditions from hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages that now exist only in memory—having been depopulated and destroyed during the Palestinian exodus of 1948—as well as from Gaza itself.
Gaza’s cuisine—like its culture and its political reality—is both inseparably linked to the rest of Palestine and very specific to local conditions. Our focus on Gaza should in no way be taken as participation in efforts to tear Gaza politically, economically, and symbolically from the rest of Palestine, deliberately fragmenting the Palestinian legacy. By focusing on Gaza, we hope to contribute to the larger Palestinian narrative, as Gaza is often left out from anthropological and other studies of Palestine. We also like to think of Gaza as a case study of sorts: Understanding what happens to Gaza is key to understanding the conflict as a whole. In the words of the late Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, “Gaza equals the history of an entire homeland…it is the brutal lesson, and the shining example, for enemies and friends alike.”
Gazans are consistently shown either as hapless objects of pity or as vicious objects of fear, but seldom as singular lives in a complex environment. The near-complete closure of the Strip has succeeded in isolating them, making it difficult to correct this misrepresentation. As for Gazan women, they’re seldom represented at all, and their daily struggles to keep their families fed, clothed, healthy, and educated are almost entirely invisible from outside. One of the goals of this project is to give readers some sense of what households, families, and daily activities look like in Gaza, simply in order to recognize the humanity of those lives.
We would also like to suggest that Gaza can be seen as a hothouse laboratory for the kind of violent de-development that is occurring in many parts of the world. Gaza has been transformed from a fertile, productive, and sustainable territory into a radically impoverished political powder keg, with no autonomy and at the brink of ecological disaster, through a combination of physical violence and economic destabilization. While similar dynamics are at work in many parts of the formerly colonized world, Gaza is so tiny and its circumstances so extreme that it serves as an extraordinary illustration for understanding phenomena like agricultural dumping, aid dependence, and cash-crop farming. Its people have essentially been discarded as an exploitable work force; the Strip has been transformed into a cage full of consumers. A full development of this idea may be beyond the scope of a cookbook, but we try to offer a few key insights.
In conclusion, this is a hybrid sort of book. It is mostly a cookbook that recovers and compiles both traditional and contemporary elements of a rich and little-known cuisine. But it also attempts to do a little ethnography, a little history, a little political analysis. Cuisine always lies somewhere at the intersection of geography, history, and economy. What makes it such a compelling subject is that it serves as a cultural record of daily life for ordinary people—traces of a history from below made palpable in something as evocative and delicious as a steaming plate of stew. Our hope in this book is to share this food with you and, in so doing, share something of the indefatigable spirit of the people we interviewed.
A lot has changed in Gaza since we did the fieldwork for this book in 2010.
Readers should take this work as a snapshot of what Gaza was like three years into the suffocating economic blockade—at perhaps its most intense moment—and a year after the terrible attacks of 2008 and 2009 (“Operation Cast Lead”). Since then the inhabitants of Gaza have suffered two more major attacks, in 2012 (“Operation Defensive Pillar”) and in the devastating summer of 2014 (“Operation Protective Shield”). Meanwhile, the blockade goes on, now in its ninth year, with parameters that have shifted slightly but not enough to permit any real economic recovery—much less prosperity.
Several of the individuals we interviewed in 2010 now form part of the 30 percent of the population displaced due to the destruction of homes in 2014. If agricultural land was scarce when we did our fieldwork, it has now been reduced by half due to the systematic targeting of farms and infrastructure. And if access to water and basic sanitation was already a crisis, after the destruction of some 80 percent of Gaza’s water network, it is now a calamity. The burden of everyday survival in Gaza has multiplied in the years since this work was first published. Disenchantment with political actors on all sides is even more acute, and it is hard to imagine how ordinary people in Gaza avoid succumbing to despair.
Yet, somehow, they press on: By telephone and email, we hear from our protagonists who, like so many other Gazans, are rebuilding as best they can. They regroup, replant, and continue living and cooking, buoyed by the care and support of their families, their faith, and the importance of the legacy they bear. While some of the specific circumstances described here have changed, the stories and traditions at the heart of this book continue unaltered. For us, that is precisely the virtue of writing about food in so volatile a place.
For the 2016 edition of this book, we have updated general information about conditions in Gaza, but the near-total closure of the territory has prevented us from going back to visit our informants and provide a more extensive update. Laila did manage to return to Gaza in 2013 for one very brief visit, to guide chef Anthony Bourdain around the territory for his Israel/Palestine episode of Parts Unknown, but for the most part this edition’s updates reflect statistics published by various NGOs and UN bodies rather than original fieldwork.
We have provided several new recipes, including some that were not included in the first edition due to space limitations and many others given to us by diaspora Gazans whom we met while presenting the first edition of this book in the United States and Europe. It was a tremendous honor for us to see the enthusiasm with which the book was received, especially by Palestinians from Gaza who felt the book provided—finally!—a nuanced and faithful portrait of a place they knew and loved and a record of the recipes that they grew up with. We started this project with no funding, no support, not even knowing each other personally; we just shared an idea and an intuition that it might work. The many and varied conversations this book has generated since its publication in 2012, including with individuals who would not have otherwise been inclined to learn about Gaza, have confirmed that intuition a hundredfold.
Again and again we have been asked whether food can somehow bridge differences and smooth asperities between what are perceived to be two sides in a conflict, a doctrine we have come to refer to as “Hummus Kumbaya.” We laugh about it, but it’s not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, the idea seems premised upon the mistaken notion that between Palestinians and Israelis (or Arabs and Jews) lies some essential, intractable, centuries-long enmity: that it is a matter of peoples who just can’t get along, and that maybe food might span this unbridgeable gap. But this whole premise is false. Most Palestinian and Sephardic/Mizrahi families—including Laila’s own—have fond memories of their Jewish, Christian, and Muslim neighbors before 1948. So it is not exactly a problem of “getting along.” There are a lot of very real material things at stake: access to the land, to rights, to natural resources, to a future. Will a shared love of hummus solve this political problem? Not if it fails to confront the real bones of contention. The dispossession of the Palestinian people and the erasure of their history has become—over these few short generations—much more material than simple goodwill can remedy.
That said, our hope—because hope we must—is that understanding how people live, what they cherish, the stories they tell, and the sense they make of their lives may serve as a first step in a long and arduous process of change for the better, toward building a place where all can share the land and its resources—equally. That starts by re-engaging. Here, we do feel like food might make a modest contribution. Change is not a distant political horizon to be negotiated at faraway summits but a daily practice, weaving connections, creating solidarity, and a shared sense of the possible. We turn to the kitchen for these stories precisely because this is what happens in kitchens: Stories are transmitted, dignity is crafted, life is sustained. If hope is to be found anywhere, it is in the dogged persistence of ordinary people to continue living, loving, and supporting each other irrespective of the circumstances: in short, to stay human.
June 2016
