You have to write back, sometimes. Not from a mistaken belief that the pen is mightier than the sword (or the bomb or the sniper’s rifle), but from the place that Professor Refaat Alareer talked about, a place of desperation and desire and having nothing else to use to fight but a dry erase marker. You have to do SOMETHING and what you have is a pen and the truth.
Hareetz, an Israeli newspaper, published a ‘lifestyle cooking feature’ on Israeli soldiers ransacking Gazan kitchens to cook for themselves (credit to @gawanmac on Twitter for the translation thread). In it, the ones who shoot children and rain bombs on families are humanized through their cooking. Cooking that is done with the ingredients and kitchens they steal from the ones they have murdered and displaced.
Food, especially in Western mainstream media, has been seen as a ‘bridge’, a way to humanize ‘different cultures’ and ‘bring us together.’ And, in Hareetz, we see – exposed and laid bare – what this discourse does, its full potential.
Power is erased and normalized. Not just power, but the violence necessary to maintain that power. Stolen goods and ideas and foods, ‘included’ by those who have stolen them. Unaware self congratulations on top of literal corpses
The Hareetz piece echoes the exact wording of countless articles and books I have read: “food became a place of sanity” for the soldiers while the storm rages around them; “when we sat and ate, people smiled and forgot about the distress for a moment.”
We are asked to see the hardship and ‘stormy conditions’ of the soldiers. But, to do so, we are also asked to ignore what is missing: the people whose kitchens these were mere weeks ago, who now cook from a tent or not at all. We are asked to ignore the violence and the massacres, and focus on the food.
We are asked to focus on the ingredients: “In every home in Gaza we found olives, olive oil and lots of spices”; “there’s lots of lentils, so we did a lot of cooking with lentils.” We are asked to see the food and ignore the people whose ingredients these are, whose loving hands mixed them, whose families gathered around the table to eat them.
We are asked to focus on the soldier’s “mixed emotions,” the complexity of the situation, how everyone is struggling. We are asked to ignore how Palestinians are being systematically starved and displaced and these soldiers are cooking on their corpses. My feelings on genocide are clear, it is not complex, and any attempt to complicate genocide is a justification of it.
As someone who cooks, as someone who writes about food, this is the time to write (just as it has been for months…). If you have written or implied at any time that, “Food is political”: now is the time to see the politics and speak truth to the campaigns to obfuscate and erase it.
Essays like this one in Hareetz attempt to complicate genocide through food; they seek to humanize soldiers at the very time they are displacing and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
Say no! Speak out! Write your responses! Throw your dry erase markers! Refuse the politics of genocide! Choose the politics of freedom, choose against occupation and death, choose a world where we all are safe and thriving.
Let us write lifestyle features with politics that end apartheid and colonialism and genocide (if such writing is possible). But, most of all, let us do something. Because hopelessness and inaction are bad politics. I write, not from a mistaken belief that my words will hold back the tanks and stop the bombs, but because I believe in the power of connection and hope, I believe in using whatever is at my disposal, however meagre it is.
Rest in power Professor Refaat; thank you for the lessons. May we continue what you have taught us
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