Culinary larceny: Why the true history of Palestine belongs to the soil, not the Israeli kitchen

If you want to spark an absolute inferno of geopolitical passion over Palestine, you do not need to see the odious Benjamin Netanyahu swagger into the UN waving his map of a Greater Israel with expanded borders, trashed treaties and stolen lands. You simply need to walk into a kitchen and ask who owns the hummus.

Food is the ultimate archive of identity. There is a specific type of cultural larceny that occurs when Israelis brazenly attempt to claim indigenous Levantine staples like hummus, falafel or couscous as their own national creations. It is a soft-power effort to consume the culture of the very people they are actively displacing and ethnically cleansing from the land.

This cultural appropriation is visible widely in global food branding, with major commercial brands like the US-based Sabra hummus company — co-owned by an Israeli corporation — marketing hummus in Western supermarkets using Israeli branding and themes, prompting fierce regional pushback.

Similarly, Israeli tourism campaigns and international lifestyle media routinely introduce hummus as a staple element of modern Israeli cuisine, rather than explicitly contextualising it within its broader Levantine and ancient Middle Eastern history. This nationalised rivalry even boiled over into the high-profile Hummus Wars, when Israeli and Lebanese chefs vied for Guinness World Records to cook the largest serving of the dish, highlighting the deep political struggle over ownership of the land’s culinary roots.

I was reminded about all of this recently when I picked up probably one of the most innocuous-looking books on Palestine I’ve ever seen, written by Ian Wellens, a fromager of fine West Country cheeses.

Within its pages the battle lines over language and lineage run so deep that the linguistic pronunciation of a dish alone can trigger immediate exclusion. In a striking real-world manifestation of these tensions, a public lawsuit recently emerged in Berlin where an Israeli citizen sued a local Palestinian establishment, claiming that he was thrown out of the building simply for ordering the dish using an Israeli accent rather than the traditional Arabic pronunciation.

While the customer lamented that food should build bridges, the incident underscores how deeply weaponised culinary inheritance has become in the shadow of the ongoing conflicts across the region. An even larger, international controversy erupted when American television chef Rachael Ray sparked a major geopolitical backlash online.

Ray shared a picture of a holiday feast, calling hummus, falafel, stuffed grape leaves and tabbouleh part of an “Israeli night” menu. The post went viral and drew intense criticism from Middle Eastern food advocates, Palestinians and organisations like the Arab American Institute. Critics accused her of cultural appropriation and attempting to erase the Arab and Levantine origins of dishes that predate the modern state of Israel by centuries.

I do not think that Wellens realises fully just how delightfully, uproariously controversial his book is going to be. With the detached precision of a seasoned chef, he effectively ends the absurd debate over who made hummus, rescuing it from the clutches of geopolitical identity theft. Better yet, his exploration of the fruit motif provides the perfect historical context to understand why even a slice of watermelon is enough to induce cold sweats within the politicised ranks of London’s Metropolitan Police. In recent times, we have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of British law enforcement treating the humble watermelon as an existential threat to national security, viewing the fruit as basically “anti-Semitic” simply because its red, black, green and white colours mirror perfectly the Palestinian flag. Wellens grounds this modern comedy of policing errors in its true, historical gravity: when Israel banned the Palestinian flag after the 1967 war, Palestinians adapted, using the watermelon as a silent, natural symbol of defiance. By taking nature as his witness, Wellens proves that you cannot censor the soil. But while kitchens and police lines can be modern battlegrounds for identity theft and cultural friction, the true, unyielding history of Palestine belongs to the soil itself.

In the stunningly fresh and stylish A History of Palestine in Five Fruits, author Wellens achieves something miraculous: he steps back and lets the land of Palestine speak for itself. Born out of twenty years of deep reading, rigorous research and profound thinking, this unique work is part streamlined history homing in on the core issues of the crisis, part poetic reflection on place, and part an impassioned, unyielding cry for justice. By weaving these three distinct threads into one text, Wellens has created something genuinely new.

Just as a food critic might dissect a masterpiece menu to understand the soul of a chef, Wellens takes nature as his primary witness. He strips away layer upon layer of deliberate political fog to tell the story of a settler-colonial tragedy through the eyes of five distinct fruits: the olive, the date, the orange, the aubergine and the watermelon. What emerges is an account both poetic and substantial, and, taking testament from the seemingly neutral natural world, irrefutable.

The inspiration for this structural journey begins at the magnificent Tree of Life mosaic in the ruins of Hisham’s Palace in Jericho. This ancient artwork, beautifully preserved across centuries, depicts a rich, flourishing tree representing deep-rootedness and perpetual rejuvenation. Using that ancient mosaic as his compass, Wellens structures a book that is refreshingly clear-cut, completely accessible, and stunningly forthright. On the one hand, it works perfectly for newcomers to the issue, laying out the baseline facts with razor-sharp clarity. On the other hand, its five dedicated fruit sections zoom in on specific historical events in a way that profoundly illuminates the narrative, bringing imagination, a deep emotional response, and the exact moral perspective that the Palestinian story deserves.

There is an exquisite sense of glee in imagining a casual reader picking up this book expecting a gentle, pastoral, countryside read about agriculture, only to run headfirst into Wellens’ incisive, uncompromising dismantling of Zionist expansion.

The book actually originated from a conversation Wellens had with his 13-year-old grandson in the summer of 2024, trying to explain the roots of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Because it began as a grandfather trying to make sense of horror for a child, the prose completely bypasses academic pretension. Reading it feels like having a gentle conversation on a long walk with a deeply knowledgeable, trusted friend. Each section opens with beautiful verse before deftly sliding into the hard, political reality.

Wellens cuts straight to the bone of settler-colonialism: early Zionists wanted the land, but without the people. And to achieve that, the state of Israel has consistently targeted both the Palestinian people and the natural world as one unified enemy. Land, people and trees are entirely inseparable. Controlling the first required the brutal removal of the second.

And perhaps, as Wellens’ striking verse reflects, it was always going to become impossible for the newcomers to tolerate the continued presence of the third. Perhaps it was always inevitable that, sooner or later, the olive trees would become a problem, and would have to go.

Consider those olive trees. They are the very emblem of Palestinian sumud, the steadfastness to remain on their land. These trees have ancestral roots that have flourished for millennia, long before modern colonial borders were ever drawn in the sand. Under the occupation, these trees are under constant, passive and actual threat. They are denied water; their farmers are blocked from the harvest. They are hacked down and burned to ashes by brazen illegal Israeli settlers operating under the protection of the genocidal army. They are targeted because they sustain the people, because they are loved, and above all, just because they were there first.

The book exposes how Israel has weaponised the environment quite literally in order to cover up the crime of the 1948 Nakba. After forcibly ethnically cleansing over 500 Palestinian towns and villages, the state demolished the stone homes and deliberately planted non-indigenous, fast-growing Northern European pine trees over the ruins.

It was an ecological and historical erasure, masquerading as conservation. Across the Jordan Valley, industrial-scale illegal settler date farms have drained the ancient water tables, replacing centuries of regenerative Palestinian farming with an intensive corporate grid that is active desertification of the precious earth before our eyes. As Wellens punches it home: “the dates replaced the people.” It is this environmental destruction that underpins the urgent global call to boycott Israeli dates and ban all trade with these illegal settlements.

Yet, despite this generalised drought and violence, the land remains the ultimate site of Palestinian resistance. By continuing to tend the soil, by harvesting the aubergine, the pomegranate and the fig, the Palestinian people are committing a daily act of defiance. They are maintaining the oneness of the people and the land that Zionism desperately tries to prize apart.

According to Lynne Segal, Professor Emerita at Birkbeck, University of London, A History of Palestine in Five Fruits is “a beautiful, poetic, wonderful text.” I agree. For anyone looking for a flawless, passionate and incredibly clear introduction to the story of Palestine, its deep injustices, and its beautiful resilience, look no further than this book. Ian Wellens reminds us that long after the concrete walls, the watchtowers and the illegal checkpoints have crumbled into history, the fruits of Palestine will still be growing from the soil, bearing witness to the truth.

*A History of Palestine in Five Fruits by Ian Wellens. Published by Annea Press. £10.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.