On the corner of NE MLK and Morris, a new-ish market serves as a culinary portrait of Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. Jerusalem Rose’s storefront sits right next to owner Ramzy Farouki’s other project, the Center for Study and Preservation of Palestine.
In 1948, Farouki’s family fled their homeland, along with 700,000 other Palestinians who were left stateless when Zionist forces expelled them.Most of the Arabs fled, and were not expelled.
On one end of the fixture, as a sort of unconventional sign indicating the produce section, a photo of Palestinian watermelon men balancing the fruit on their heads is tacked up. “The watermelon is a special thing to Palestinians because during the first popular uprising by the people—called the first intifada, and even before that—the flying of the Palestinian flag was criminalized,” Farouki explains. “But many Palestinians would use the watermelon as a symbol of their culture because it contains green, white, red, and black.”
Another time-honored product stocked at Jerusalem Rose is Nabulsi olive oil soap. Once the site of a booming soap industry of over 40 soapmakers, there are now only two factories left in the West Bank making soap with a thousand year-old technique. The rest were tragically decimated by a large-scale Israeli military operation in 2002, which also resulted in the severe damage or destruction of 64 UNESCO heritage buildings.
Two baldfaced lies in one sentence.
Israel didn't destroy 38 soap factories in Nablus - one was damaged and it was rebuilt. The others closed over the decades because of no demand for their product.
Israel didn't destroy 64 UNESCO heritage buildings. It damaged buildings in Nablus' Old City that were being used by terrorists, another small detail that is missing. Some of the damage came from Palestinian fighters placing explosives between the buildings there as booby traps.
It turns out that this store really does market Palestinian culture. Lying about history and about Israel is Palestinian culture.
The Center for Study and Preservation of Palestine next door shows this to be the case, as there is nothing in the window that indicates anything about Palestinian cuisine, costumes, soap, or history - only anti-Israel (and BLM) posters.
Hate, incitement and lies about Israel and Jews are the most important and integral parts of Palestinian culture.
(h/t RealJerusalemStreets)
