When you read about Italian food, they seldom mention whose side that nation fought on in the war. Similarly, you rarely find a Siamese restaurant, not cos the food’s shit but just because they call it ‘Thai’. In reviews of American diners or purveyors of vast quantities of smoked meats (America doesn’t really do ‘cuisine’ as such, more ‘obscene’), its unlikely to mention the slaughter and dispossession of any native Americans. Same with Australia. Not the quantities, just the attitude, talk about their food (prawns… barby….) but don’t mention the Aborigines.

And yet if you write about Palestinian food (Times Magazine, today), you are perfectly at liberty to throw in as many political statements as a bowl of hummus, 100 grams of za’atar and some delicious flat bread, soaked in olive oil, can stand. And most of the comments, discreetly but potently used in throw-away manner whilst extolling the virtues of the perfect falafel, are wrong. Just over-used tropes. Just a load of bollocks, purporting to be a ‘right on’ understanding of the world, by some quasi-leftish (leftish? In The Times???) tart(e) jumping on some perceived PC bandwagon.

Who visited ‘Palestine’, (which doesn’t exist), ate like a pig and missed no opportunity to mention walls, deprivation, refugees, impossible border crossings and the unfairness of life. Which is fine. If you’re writing an informed political piece on the middle-east and balance it with mention perhaps of Hamas? Without whom there’d be no need for a fucking wall and before whom there in fact wasn’t one. No mention that all these ‘refugees’ are so at their own choice, all having been offered life as Israeli citizens in 1948 in the same houses they’d lived in for all their lives. And finally lost what remained of Palestine in 1967 after a war that they initiated.

But its not the accuracy or stupidity that galls me. It’s the assumption that you can’t write about Palestinian (works as an adjective, just not as a noun) food without criticising Israel but in no other area of the world would such comment be in any way acceptable. Slagging off Israel, good or bad, is in fact acceptable. It’s when you ONLY slag off Israel that people like me start setting fire to newspaper magazine articles.

Happy fucking Sunday; grrrrrrrrr…

A xxxx