‘Israeli’ hummus is theft, not appropriation by Steven Salaita

State involvement in the pilfer of Palestinian food illustrates that we shouldn’t reduce the issue to individual consumption. It’s a systematic effort to validate settler colonisation.

It’s no shock, then, that Palestinians and their neighbours get salty whenever hearing the phrase “Israeli hummus.” Using Arabic food as a symbol of Zionist identity hands over the day-to-day victuals of the native to the coloniser. It’s a project of erasure, a portent of nonexistence, a promise of genocide.

No state that destroys olive groves and poisons the environment has a right to claim the objects of sustenance harvested for centuries by other people.