Hi, I recently read the Falastin cookbook by Sami Tamimi, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Tara Wigley, but I ended up feeling deeply disappointed. As a Palestinian-American woman, I was excited to connect with my heritage through this cookbook, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that i felt they used Sami Tamimi’s involvement to appropriate Palestinian cuisine while failing to genuinely support Palestine.

It left me so upset that I ended up tearing out several pages where Israel was painted as a savior to Palestinians. The book now feels tainted to me.

I’m looking for authentic Palestinian cookbooks and resources that truly honor our culture and people, without any “both sides” narratives or compromises. If anyone has recommendations, I’d really appreciate it.

P.S. I called out Tara Wigley for her appropriation on Instagram and she blocked me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Please be advised: This content forms a segment of the "What Every Palestinian Should Know" series, presented by Handala on Palestine Today.

A spring 1939 conference in London’s St. James’s Palace involving representatives of Palestinians, Zionists, and Arab states resulted in abject failure; thus, in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion, Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper. This document advocated for a significant reduction in Britain’s ties to the Zionist movement. It proposed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration and land sales (two major Arab demands) and committed to establishing representative institutions within five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). While immigration was indeed restricted, none of the other provisions were ever implemented.65 Furthermore, representative institutions and self-determination were made conditional on the agreement of all parties, which the Jewish Agency would never consent to for an arrangement that would preclude the establishment of a Jewish state. The minutes of the February 23, 1939, cabinet meeting make it abundantly clear that Britain intended to withhold the substance of these two critical concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have an effective veto power, which it would undoubtedly exercise.66

In any case, it was already past the point of no return. When the Chamberlain government issued the White Paper, it had only a few months remaining in office; Britain was soon at war; and Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister, was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life. More importantly, as World War II grew into a truly global conflict as a result of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the United States’ entry into the conflict following Pearl Harbor, a new world was about to be born in which Britain would be a second-class power at best. Palestine’s fate would be no longer in its hands. Britain had already exceeded its obligations to its Zionist protege. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 49.).

Even if British officials in Palestine became convinced of the unsustainable multiplication of costs associated with maintaining the iron wall to protect the Zionist project (whose leaders were frequently ungrateful for everything done for them), their recommendations were almost always rejected in London. Until 1939, Zionists were able to position their supporters, and occasionally their leaders, such as the formidable Chaim Weizmann, at the elbow of key British decisionmakers in Whitehall, many of whom were also devoutly Zionist. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 50.).

Two additional points must be made in conclusion regarding the revolt and Britain’s suppression of it. The first is that it established Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s foresight and the self-delusion of numerous British officials. The colonial enterprise of the Zionists, which aimed to take over the country, was inevitably going to generate resistance. “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 45.) At least initially, only the armed forces supplied by Britain could overcome the colonized people’s natural resistance.

Much earlier, President Woodrow Wilson’s King-Crane Commission, established in 1919 to ascertain the wishes of the region’s peoples, had reached similar conclusions to those of Jabotinsky. After being informed by representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the process of transforming Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms,” and that a force of “not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to achieve this goal. In the end, it took more than double that number of troops for the British to defeat the Palestinians from 1936 to 1939. The commissioners forewarned Wilson in a cover letter that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, **since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”**67 Thus, the commission accurately predicted the subsequent century’s course.

The 2nd point is that both the revolt and its repression, as well as the subsequent successful implementation of the Zionist project, were direct, inescapable consequences of the Balfour Declaration’s policies and the belated implementation of the declaration of war contained in Balfour’s words. Balfour did “not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs,” and initially appeared to believe that there would be little reaction to the Zionists seizing control of their country.

However, as George Orwell put it, **“sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield,”**68 which is precisely what happened on the battlefield during the Great Revolt, to the lasting detriment of the Palestinians.

After 1917, the Palestinians were caught in a triple bind that may have been unprecedented in the history of resistance to colonial-settler movements. Unlike the majority of other colonized peoples, they had to contend not only with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a unique colonial-settler movement that, while dependent on Britain, was self-sufficient, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing. According to a British official in charge of “Migration and Statistics,” the British government was **not “the colonizing power here; the Jewish people are the colonizing power.”**69 Making matters worse, Britain did not rule Palestine directly; it did so as a League of Nations mandatory power. It was thus bound not only by the Balfour Declaration, but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Palestine Mandate.

Protests and disturbances have repeatedly prompted British administrators on the ground and in London to recommend policy changes. However, Palestine was not a crown colony or other type of colonial possession in which the British government exercised complete autonomy. If it appeared as though Palestinian pressure would compel Britain to violate the letter or spirit of the Mandate, there was **intense lobbying in the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva to remind the League of its overarching obligations to the Zionists.**70 Due to Britain’s adherence to these obligations, it was too late to reverse the country’s transformation or to alter the lopsided balance of forces that had developed between the two sides by the end of the 1930s.

The Palestinians’ great initial disadvantage was exacerbated by the Zionist organization’s massive capital investments, strenuous labor, sophisticated legal maneuvers, intensive lobbying, effective propaganda, and covert and overt military means. Armed units of the Jewish colonists developed semi-secretly until the British permitted the Zionist movement to operate military formations openly in response to the Arab revolt. The Jewish Agency’s collusion with the mandatory authorities reached a zenith at this point. Objective historians agree that this collusion, facilitated by the League of Nations, severely undermined the Palestinians’ struggle for representative institutions, self-determination, and independence.71

When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, there was no need to re-establish the apparatus of a Jewish state. Indeed, that apparatus had been operating under British auspices for decades. All that remained to fulfill Herzl’s foresight was for this pre-existing para-state to flex its military muscle against the weakened Palestinians while achieving formal sovereignty, which it did in May 1948. Thus, the fate of Palestine had been decided thirty years earlier, though the denouement did not occur until the end of the Mandate, when the indigenous Palestinian majority was finally ejected by force and only Jews were granted access to the land and its resources.(Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 53-54.).

Footnotes:

1. de Waart, 1994, p. 223. Referencing Article 9 of The Palestinian National Charter of 1968.
2. Smith, Anthony D. “Gastronomy or geology? The role of nationalism in the reconstruction of nations.” Nations and Nationalism 1, no.1 (1994): 3–23. p. 18.
3. Jerusalem, the Old City: An Introduction, Al-Quds University homepage.
4. Gerber, Haim (1998). “Palestine” and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century”. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 30 (4): 563–572.
5. Philipp, ed. Bosworth, “Ẓāhir al- ʿUmar al-Zaydānī”.
6. Joudah, Ahmad (2015). “Zahir al-‘Umar and the First Autonomous Regime in Ottoman Palestine (1744-1775)”. Jerusalem Quarterly. Institute for Palestine Studies (63–64): 84–85.).
7. D. Crecelius: “Egypt’s Reawakening Interest in Palestine During the Regimes of Ali Bey al-Kabir and Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dahab: 1760–1775”. In Kushner, 1986, pp. 247-248.
8. Philipp, 2001, pp. 42–43.
9. Joudah, 1987, pp. 37-38, p. 123.
10. Philipp, 1992, pp. 38, 94.
11. Hitti, 1951, p. 688.
12. Lehmann, 2014, p. 31.
13. Joudah, 1987, pp. 38-39.
14. Barnay, 1992, p. 15.
15. Scholch, 1984, p. 474.
16. Srouji, 2003, p. 187.
17. Joudah, 1987, p. 118.
18. Baram, 2007, p. 28.
19. LeBor, Adam (2006-06-02). “Land of My Father”. The Guardian.
20. Philipp, 2001, p. 39.
21. Joudah,1987, p. 118.
22. Moammar, 1990, preface.
23. Joudah, Ahmad (2015). “Zahir al-‘Umar and the First Autonomous Regime in Ottoman Palestine (1744-1775)”Jerusalem Quarterly. Institute for Palestine Studies (63–64): 84–85.
24. Kimmerling, Baruch, and Migdal, Joel S, (2003) The Palestinian People: A History, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 6–11.
25. Zachary Foster, “What’s a Palestinian, Foreign Affairs,’ 11 March 2015.
26. Zachary Foster,“Who Was The First Palestinian in Modern History” Archived 2016-02-29 at the Wayback Machine The Palestine Square 18 February 2016.
27. Rashid Khalidi (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press pp. 18-21, 32, 149.
28. Provence, Michael (2005) The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, University of Texas Press, p. 158.
29. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, and Muhammad Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.
30. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
31. Gudrun Krämer and Graham Harman (2008) A history of Palestine: from the ottoman conquest to the founding of the state of Israel Princeton University Press, p. 123.
32. Kayyālī,ʻAbd al-Wahhāb (1978) Palestine: a modern history Routledge, p. 33.
33. The alternative modernization of Palestine is superbly explored in the collection of articles by Salim Tamari, The Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
34. Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Rise of the Sanjaq of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 40–50.
35. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 14–60.
36. For British goals and ambitions, see Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine, vol. 1, 1799–1922: L’invention de la Terre sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1999); and James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914–1918 (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). See also A. L. Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–1921 (London: Luzac, 1977), 196-239; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1961); and Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers,” Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1970): 416–42.
37. British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914: A Study of the Antecedents of the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, St.Antony’s College Middle East Monographs (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1980).
38. The statement of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar for Foreign Affairs, after he had opened up the Tsarist diplomatic archives and revealed these secret wartime Anglo-French-Russian arrangements on this occasion, is reproduced in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917–1924, ed. Jane Degras, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).
39. Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 356–57.
40. Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937). The memoirs of Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, mention the strict control the British exercised over the press and over all forms of Arab political activity in Palestine: 327ff. Storrs had previously worked as Oriental secretary to the British high commissioner in Egypt, where he served as censor of the local press.
41. Al-Kayyali, Watha’iq al-muqawama al-filistiniyya al-‘arabiyya did al-ihtilal al-britani wal-sihyuniyya 1918-1939 [Documents of the Palestinian Arab resistance to the British occupation and to Zionism, 1918-1939] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), 1–3.
42. Special issue of Filastin, May 19, 1914, 1.
43. For details of these land purchases and the resulting armed clashes, see R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 89–117. See also Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
44. For more details, see R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, especially chapter 7, 145–76.
45. “Ghuraba ’fi biladina: Ghaflatuna wa yaqthatuhum” [Strangers in our own land: Our drowsiness and their alertness], Filastin, March 5, 1929, 1.
46. Since 2005, the Institute for Palestine Studies has published a total of 9 autobiographical memoirs and diaries in Arabic.: Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hadi Sharruf, 2017; Mahmud al-Atrash, 2016; Gabby Baramki, 2015; Hanna Naqqara, 2011; Turjuman and Fasih, 2008; Khalil Sakakini, 8 vols., 2005–2010; Rashid Hajj Ibrahim, 2005; Wasif Jawhariyya, 2005. The institute also published the memoirs of Reja-i Busailah in English in 2017. Among them, those of Sharruf, a policeman; al-Maghribi, a worker and communist organizer; and Turjuman and Fasih, enlisted men in the Ottoman army in World War I, represent non-elite points of view. Additionally, see the significant memoirs of a central Mandate-era political figure., Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, Mudhakkirat, 1887-1984 (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1993).
47. Storrs, Orientations, 341. Among those present were both the mufti and the mayor of Jerusalem , as well as several other prominent Palestinian political and religious figures.
48. 2 great articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2017) deal with this topic: Lauren Banko, “Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality Under the Mandate,” 26–43; and Nadim Bawalsa, “Legislating Exclusion: Palestinian Migrants and Interwar Citizenship,” 44–59.
49. George Antonius, in The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), was the 1st to divulge the specifics of Britain’s wartime promises to the Arabs, as well as the documents that contained them. As a result, the British government was obligated to disclose the full communication.: Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 5974, Report of a Committee Set Up to Consider Certain Correspondence Between Sir Henry McMahon [His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Egypt] and the Sharif of Mecca in 1915 and 1916 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939).
50. Balfour’s appointment to the senior post of chief secretary for Ireland, second only to the lord lieutenant, was widely attributed to his familial tiesto the prime minister, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, which led directly to the famous expression “Bob’s your uncle.”
51. E. L. Woodward and R. Butler, eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, first series, 1919–1929 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), 340–48.
52. George Antonius’s case was one of numerous egregious examples of this. Although he was clearly qualified and educated at Cambridge, he was repeatedly passed over for high office in the mandate administration in favor of mediocre British officials.: See Susan Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism, and the Palestinians (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 2.
53. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 210–11.
54. The ratio of capital inflow to Net Domestic Product (NDP) “ did not fall below 33 percent in any of the pre-world war 2 years.” Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, p. 217.
55. Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, appendix 1, pp. 842–43.
56. Speech to the English Zionist Federation, September 19, 1919, cited in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 41.
57. Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The untold story of the secret agreement between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.
58. For details of this repression, see Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (April 2009), 313–54.
59. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 119.
60. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 429–32, contains a chilling account of arbitrary summary executions of Palestinians by mixed units of British soldiers and Zionist militiamen under the command of Orde Wingate. Segev portrays Wingate as a murderous psychopath; he adds that some of his men privately considered him insane. Later, the Israeli Ministry of Defense stated about him: “The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force’s combat doctrine.”
61. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 425–26. Numerous Irish campaign veterans, including members of the infamous Black and Tans, were recruited into the British security forces in Palestine. See Richard Cahill, “‘Going Berserk’: ‘Black and Tans’ in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 38 (Summer 2009), 59–68.
62. For details on the vast Zionist-British collaboration during the revolt, see Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 381, 42632.
63. British National Archives, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/283, “Committee on Palestine: Report,” January 30, 1939, 24.
64. Ibid., 27.
65. This was Dr. Husayn’s bitter conclusion after the fact, as he recounted Britain’s broken promises in his memoir, Mada’ahd al-mujamalat, vol. 1, 280.
66. Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine, 13.
67. (“The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919,” Syria: Recommendations.)
68. George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose,” Tribune, March 22, 1946, reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 124.
69. The official was E. Mills, who was cited in Leila Parson for his secret testimony to the Peel Commission, “The Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission: A Preliminary Analysis,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 49, no. 1 (Fall 2019).
70. The most comprehensive examination of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission’s supervision of the Palestine Mandate is Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
71. Segev debunks the myth that the British were pro-Arab throughout the Mandate period, a myth cherished by Zionist historiography in One Palestine, Complete.

Diaspora American here. Considering applying to Birzeit as an international grad student. Just wondering if anyone on this sub went there and what they thought. I feel like it's a bit of an ethical dilemma given that I as a second-gen American can return when others can't, but I also feel like it would be extremely culturally fulfilling for me to use my studies to empower the homeland, etc.

shirt punching noises