A 1936 Zionist cookbook threatens Palestinian culture according to the morons at @Mondoweiss ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

A 1936 Zionist cookbook threatens Palestinian culture according to the morons at @Mondoweiss

We've all seen (and debunked) the absurd narrative of Israelis "stealing" so-called Palestinian food and cuisine.

The accusers aren't tethered by facts, however. And a most absurd example comes from a recent video by Mondoweiss, where they use a Jewish Palestinian cookbook from 1936 as a launching pad for another tiresome article accusing Israel of "food colonialism," whatever that is.

The cookbook is called "How to Cook in Palestine" by Dr. Erna Meyer. Here is how Laila El-Haddad describes the cookbook in the video: "It just read to me like a very typical, you know, sort of what would a colonizer say or advise if you were coming somewhere else to a country where you wanted to establish roots and make it your own and uh completely reject uh and erase and invisibilize you know the local population."

I don't know what cookbook she was reading, because you can read the cookbook online, and it doesn't appear to have a single recipe or mention of Levantine food. No hummus, no falafel, no chickpeas.

The entire point of the cookbook was to adapt European recipes to a new land where the available ingredients are different, and traditional ingredients are expensive. Vegetable oil replaces butter, and vegetarian dishes replace meat, and local spices are introduced to flavor known dishes. Ketchup becomes a staple in cooking. How to cook with electricity is a significant topic. None of this is taken from Palestinian cuisine - rather, it is simply adapting cooking techniques to a new environment and new ingredients, like eggplant.

We housewives must take an attempt to free our kitchens from European customs which are not applicable to Palestine. We should wholeheartedly stand in favour of healthy Palestine cooking. We should foster these ideas not merely because we are compelled to do so, but because we realize that this will help us more than anything else in becoming acclimatised to our old-new homeland. Once we learn how to take advantage of the natural products of Palestine and in addition utilize our knowledge of European cooking we will bring about great changes in our method of cooking and will be able to vary our dishes — an important detail, often underestimated.

According to the haters, apparently, vegetarian chopped liver made of eggplants is somehow Palestinian. And so are sandwiches, which take up a large final chapter.

Notice also that the title of the book mentioning "Palestine," which seems to be the main point of consternation for Palestinian Arabs and those who fetishize them, does not carry over to the Hebrew and German titles which recognize that "Palestine" was historically simply the English translation of "Eretz Yisrael."

This video is another example of ascribing to Jews the worst possible motivations in every conceivable vector. The cookbook doesn't say anything negative about Arabs, but the obsession with interpreting Jews creating their own cuisine based on existing Levantine and other Arab dishes as "theft" and "colonialism" and "cultural genocide" proves that the only bigotry here is against Jews, not Arabs.