A cooking class in the home of Palestinian chef Aziza Yaseer Al Manasrah in Edmonton, on Oct. 23.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
During Aziza Yaseer Al Manasrah’s childhood in the 1980s and 1990s in the occupied West Bank, food was an ever-present worry.
There were seasons when the vegetables on her family’s farm in Hebron would go thirsty because an Israeli military order in 1967 prevented them from building new water infrastructure without a permit (that proved near-impossible to obtain) and so access to water was severely restricted. The livestock would sometimes go hungry because the Israeli military frequently set up roadblocks that kept food – for both humans and animals – from reaching her community.
Now, half a world away in Edmonton, Ms. Al Manasrah has watched the devastation of the last year in Gaza unfold on her news and social feeds, including aid organizations blocked from supplying water and food. She has re-evaluated her own history. She was lucky.
More than a year ago, an Israeli military campaign began after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, thousands more were injured and 250 people were taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. The Israeli Defense Forces have killed 44,000 Gazans in the yearlong war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The latest findings released in October by the international authority on hunger crises, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, warn the risk of famine in Gaza remains high as the conflict continues.
Even distributing foreign aid has proven difficult, and sometimes deadly. In February, more than 100 Gazans were killed by the Israeli military after gathering to collect flour. In April, seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen were killed when their convoy was targeted by Israeli drones while transporting food to a warehouse in Gaza. Distribution centres have opened, closed and relocated several times following evacuation orders. Thousands of kilograms of food sat in trucks, unable to cross into Gaza because border crossings have been closed or armed men have stopped deliveries.
Forming Ka’ak Asawer (date ring cookies).Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
For the first several months of the invasion, the spices and condiments Ms. Al Manasrah used to flavour her favourite Palestinian dishes tasted flat on her tongue. The stay-at-home mom, who aspires to open her own restaurant, stopped posting food videos on social media and hosting workshops. She was overcome with grief.
“When you see this stuff in the news, I cannot even cook for my kids,” she said. “I don’t taste anything.”
After Oct. 7, Ms. Al Manasrah and other Palestinian chefs struggled to reconcile their desire to promote Palestinian cuisine with the fact that their brethren in Gaza are starving. Was it appropriate to celebrate the stewed lamb dish mansaf when Gazans cannot? How could they rhapsodize about the olive oil from back home when people were being shot while trying to harvest olives in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office? They wanted to honour this food, but were wracked with survivors’ guilt.
On WhatsApp, Ms. Al Manasrah spoke to her friend Hani Elfar, a Palestinian chef, educator and food historian who lives in Jerusalem, confessing she was too distraught to continue doing the work she’d always done to showcase her native dishes. Mr. Elfar told her that now more than ever, she had a responsibility to keep cooking this indigenous cuisine, to preserve their culture.
Food is central in Palestinian life. Children are assigned responsibilities in kitchens at a young age, such as peeling and chopping garlic. The annual olive harvest is akin to a major holiday, where families gather to not only pick olives, but sing, dance and cook. To mark Eid al-Fitr, families prepare ma’amoul, a cookie stuffed with dates and walnuts. Ancestral recipes are some of the most valued heirlooms.
The summer before the military operation began, one of Mr. Elfar’s friends, whose home was in Gaza, came to visit. She gave him one of her most prized possessions, the handwritten family cookbook, and asked him to take photos of the pages to preserve the recipes. At the end of her trip, she stopped by to pick up the book.
Many months later, she called Mr. Elfar to ask about the photos. Her house had been bombed, the book destroyed. Mr. Elfar, devastated, had to tell her that he’d gotten busy and never took the photos. The experience reminded him how important it was to keep recipes alive through the act of cooking; bakeries, restaurants and kitchens could be bombed but as long as people kept making their beloved dishes, they would live on.
This year at his local market, there were no red carrots or strawberries, usually brought in by farmers in Northern Gaza. At Ramadan his search for fesikh, a fish that is caught off the coast of Gaza and preserved through salting, came up dry. He improvised, making do with what he could access.
Mr. Elfar took inspiration from watching videos of women standing in the ruins of homes in Northern Gaza, scrounging up the ingredients and the tools to cook. He was in awe of Yousef Abu Rabea, a farmer from the same area, who was displaced from his family farm where he grew the region’s famous red gold strawberries.
Before he was evacuated, Mr. Abu Rabea collected seeds and seedlings. When he returned to his community, he and a team planted tens of thousands of them – sometimes in the shadow of a bombed-out building – and successfully grew vegetables such as zucchini and the leafy green mulukhiyah, which fed the community.
“We, as Palestinians, we believe in life,” Mr. Elfar said. “We teach people how we must survive in our land.”
In October, Mr. Abu Rabea was killed by an Israeli air strike, according to Thamra, the food sovereignty organization he co-founded, and TRT World, a Turkish public broadcaster.
Ms. Al Manasrah and other Palestinian chefs struggled to reconcile their desire to promote Palestinian cuisine with the fact that their brethren in Gaza are starving.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
Learning of the deaths of farmers, seeing images of the crumbled ruins of places she’d visited only months earlier, made Ottawa chef and cookbook author Suzanne Husseini feel ill.
In May, 2023, she along with other Palestinian chefs had travelled to the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as part of a United Nations Development Programme-sponsored food tour. She visited farms, cooked meals with locals and sampled some of the indigenous vegetables her mother had told her about. Most memorable was the fakous, a small, pale green melon that Palestinians treat like a cucumber that she sampled in Deir Bal’lout in the West Bank.
Ms. Husseini, following her mother’s instructions, rubbed the peach-like fuzz off the skin of the fakous and took a bite, tears springing to her eyes.
Months later, in October, she cried seeing images of some of the communities she visited in Gaza now reduced to rubble, unrecognizable. People she had spoken with in May were now dead.
Ms. Husseini was scheduled to teach students how to make maqloubeh – a layered rice dish that is theatrically flipped before serving – in a virtual class for the Boston-based Milk Street Cooking School in late October, just weeks after the invasion. She cancelled it.
“I almost feel guilty to talk about food,” she explained. “It’s a battle between me and my conscience every day.”
She finally felt ready to teach the rescheduled class this past November. Her grief is still there, but it’s entwined with other things, including a spirit of resistance.
“Food is politics. And food is one of those things that is accessible to us all. Through it, we can resist in a way that is profound,” she said.
During her mother’s time and to this day, harvesting zaatar, the herb that grows wild in the West Bank and is blended with other herbs and spices, was an act of resistance. The Israeli government declared it a protected plant in the 1970s and banned its collection, which makes picking it risky.
Family visiting from the occupied territories often brought some, which Ms. Husseini’s mother decanted into a special jar. “It sat on the shelf like it was gold,” she said, and “it was presented at the table like caviar.”
This fall, at the end of grape season, Ms. Al Manasrah craved khabeesa, a grape and semolina pudding. Her social accounts had been quiet for the better part of the year but in the summer she’d finally felt ready to post again.
Ms. Al Manasrah’s family in Hebron also made khabeesa this year, but as violence escalates in the West Bank, she worries about what they’ll be able to cook as fall turns to winter.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
Her Edmonton backyard doesn’t offer the right conditions for grape cultivation so she bought some and, for a video, draped them on a vine in her garden so she could simulate harvesting them before preparing the dish.
Ms. Al Manasrah’s family in Hebron also made khabeesa this year, but as violence escalates in the West Bank, she worries about what they’ll be able to cook as fall turns to winter.
At the most recent workshop she hosted at a mosque in Edmonton, Ms. Al Manasrah said she felt a profound responsibility to speak about Palestinians, and not just their food.
“I talked about what’s happening and how they’re suffering,” she said. “The material is not there, they cannot cook, they cannot do their own recipe, but the culture is inside the people.”
