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| Hummus among us: A hummus restaurant in Abu Gosh serves up a plate of the savory spread. Josh Mitnick |
Hummus brings Israelis, Palestinians to the table
Foodies from both groups say that their love for the savory spread forces them to meet.
from the July 25, 2007 edition
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A dish that originated among the peoples of the Levant – Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan – hummus is ubiquitous because it's both cheap and filling.
Though contemporary hummus is thought to have been popularized by the Arabs of the eastern Mediterranean, evidence of chickpea cultivation stretching back to the 7th century BC has been found in excavations in the West Bank city of Jericho.
The first record in the region of a dish that resembles hummus dates to the Crusader occupation of the Holy Land. But an Israeli author, Meir Shalev, recently argued in an article titled "Hummus is Ours" that references to the food can be found in the Book of Ruth.
The irony of two conflicted peoples sharing the same cravings was the backdrop of Ari Sandel's Oscar-winning West Bank Story, about a cross-cultural romance amid the heated rivalry of Middle Eastern fast-food restaurants.
But for some Israelis, hummus actually symbolizes reconciliation. A team of researchers from Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University has concluded that the high levels of trytophan – an amino acid – in chickpeas stimulates the production of the "feel good" nerve reception agent serotonin.
Hummus is the one thing which unites everything around it," says Dudi Menovitz, chief executive at Tsabar Salads. "When a group of buddies is sitting in a restaurant, one person orders a beer, another a steak, a third, some fish, but everyone dips into the same plate of hummus. There's a lot of symbolism in that."
Habeeb Daoud, chef and owner of Ezba, a Palestinian-Lebanese restaurant in northern Israel , defines his culinary identity as Lebanese, his national identity as Palestinian, and his civic identity as Israeli. Mr. Daoud says he sees the food as a common denominator between the Jews and Arabs.
"It forces the two nations to cross boundaries," he says. "Because in the hummus restaurants, there is little room and Jews and Arabs must sit at the same tables. It forces people to meet."
But Liora Gvion, an Israeli author of a socio-political study of Palestinian food is less sanguine about the prospects for reconciliation over hummus.
"It's chutzpah to think about it as a meeting place between the two. Because it was appropriated by the Israelis, so now after they appropriated it, they want to return it and say 'let's call it a meeting place?' No self-respecting Palestinian would buy it," she says.
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