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As scenes of Israel’s forced starvation in Gaza continue to spread worldwide, so do scenes of the severely limited food aid that is just about making it into the besieged enclave under the face of Israel's blockade.

But despite the occupation's atrocious acts to starve and oppress Palestinians, their resilience remains, and with the little aid they do receive, they ensure they make the most of it. Take 10-year-old  who creates simple recipes with a smile on her face from the food aid she is given, or Hamada Shaqoura, the Gaza food blogger who is nurturing displaced Palestinian children from his tent. 

For the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and all of Bilad al-Sham, culinary traditions represent a deep connection to the land and each other — whether they are the displaced or the diaspora. 

For the latter, food traditions are pivotal for their communities and activism.

Take Lebanese chef Roro Asmar of  and Jinan Deena, a Palestinian activist, Programme Director of the DC-based , and chef of the pop-up , two chefs who are pushing through the assaults on their homelands to help their people. 

'Speaking through our food' 

At their warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, which his father had purchased a few years after starting Asmar’s Mediterranean Foods, we first meet to discuss his family’s business and history.

Asmar’s is a popular hummus (and other mezze) brand across the East Coast of the US, turning out almost 100,000 pounds of hummus daily.

It even became one of Whole Foods’ first hummus providers, providing the popular Middle Eastern dip to various Arab-owned restaurants in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) area.

Roro Asmar, whose mother hailed from Beirut and father is from Jezzine, recounted the situation of his family in Lebanon as Israel’s full-on assault was ongoing.

“For my cousin and my family, the older members everybody was scared and worried. They did not know how to go about their day-to-day and were just hearing and seeing smoke and bombs going off all the time. I have a little one myself now, so you have got to keep your strength for them.”

One of Roro’s fondest memories in Lebanon was when he was 14, visiting Jezzine and the mountains nearby.

“I had one of those moments that made me look back and think about all the history and traditions that my Teta would tell me stories of, or my father would tell me stories of, or my mother would tell me stories of, and just for a brief moment, I got to capture that. I got to feel that pride and feel that calling of home.”

Roro relates this reflection on his heritage to his role as a chef. “I think in the culinary field, that's why so many of us try to do so much, try to speak through our food, use our food to raise money or funds to send back home, or raise awareness. More than just feeding and nourishing someone's body, we want to also feed and nourish their minds about our heritage and culture.”

Roro has known the Lebanese people to be more united than the sectarianism often emphasised in Western media.

“Our people are, and have been, dealing with a lot. But I think the pride and love of our people will keep shining here.”

Resisting cultural erasure

I next meet Roro Asmar and Jinan Deena together at Palestinian chef and restauranter , in Georgetown.

Jinan notes that the systemic makes the rise of more Palestinian restaurants like Yellow all the more welcome.

“You see our food finally being recognised because for so long it's been appropriated. A lot of these restaurants that call themselves ‘Israeli’ are actually serving our food and North African food,” Jinan tells ������. 

“Specifically for Palestinians, our food is tied to our land. As we have the spike for our land at this moment, just like we have for the last 76 years, blending us in with other countries and making our food as one is a deliberate form of identity theft and erasure," she adds. 

“As a Palestinian, I view that to be the most violent type of erasure attempt because, as you see, a lot of the work that the occupation does is to separate us from the land; be it theft of the land, chemicals on our plants and our vegetation, denying people the right to access their land, to harvest, uprooting and burning Palestinian farmers' olive trees or contaminating the water wells. All of these things are a way for them to force us apart from our land and our food, all of which are tied to who we are as people.”

Both Jinan and Roro agree that jealousy factors into the appropriation.

“They see how passionate we are about who we are,” Jinan says, explaining how certain cookbooks were made for European settlers in Palestine to teach them how to cook the native Palestinian ingredients.

“It's just so very interesting how they were given actual frameworks on appropriation and stealing our culture. It's very obvious.”

Roro elaborates, “What better way to colonise or overtake a land than adapt its principles, its history, its practices as your own, and continue them forward?

"If you come to my Lebanese restaurant, we don't say Lebanese hummus, we don't say Lebanese salad. But more commonly, if you go to an Israeli place or a place serving ‘Israeli’ food, they will add the word ‘Israeli’ to the start of each item on the menu. It's kind of redundant at that point.”

Roro further notes the community events his family would hold to donate to Lebanese people in need, as well as the continued protests.

“At my family restaurant, , we just hosted a fundraiser for the Lebanese Red Cross last weekend, as there were protests in DC on the 7 October anniversary.”

He also relays the overall community that continues to build in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area.

“In our area, there's a lot of beauty and connectivity among us as well as shared misery. And in that, we have all come together and supported each other — whether that is by visiting restaurants, spending our money at businesses that are Lebanese, Palestinian or that support the cause. It's just about making these active and conscious choices.”

Jinan concurs, “The popup events that and I had in October 2023 were so amazing in terms of the support and the turnout; hundreds of people standing in line, not even caring whether or not they were able to get food because we were selling out so quickly. But just to be there together as a community, it was so nice to see how many people came out for Palestine. That was a testament to how well we've grown the community to support us in this area."

Jinan says she wouldn’t have expected that kind of a turnout three years ago. "They knew our food, they knew our culture, and I think that gave them a more personal tie to the cause.”

We next visited Jinan in her home kitchen as she made Palestinian maqluba.

Taking us back to Bayti’s origins, she relays how Green Zone, a popular Arab-owned restaurant bar in DC, approached her to do a pop-up event, which commenced during the lockdown of May 2021, making it an outdoor event, and incidentally during Ramadan.

“We sold out, and it was a success. Everybody loved it.”

Jinan's friend Rami further helped her develop the concept of Bayti, initially inspired by her family’s nightly dinners.

“I thought about how if I had ever opened a restaurant, I would call it Bayti because I wanted people to experience Palestinian home cooking, and Bayti means ‘My home.’ We worked out a menu and a bunch of things, and then I came up with my first event in August 2022 at the Grand Duchess. It was a full sit-down dinner served family-style. And it was going to bring traditional dishes that we ate growing up. So that was the beginning of it.”

She further elaborates on her camaraderie with her fellow Palestinian chefs.

“Both Marcelle and Danny of have been very supportive of me and my work and have given me a lot of advice. Danny has supplied all of my spices and a lot of the items that I use in my events. And my next event was my olive harvest in October of that year. The month after, I did my first taco pop-up with La Tejana. And then in December of 2022 Marcelle and I ended up doing our first Christmas pop-up together.”

Overall, 2022 was a seminal year for Jinan and Bayti.

Za'atar, olive harvests, and the fight for land

Jinan has visited Palestine every summer since she was six months old, living there as a teenager for a few years before moving back to the US.

Among her fondest memories is drinking mint tea under the grapevines in her grandmother's courtyard, cooling off in the summer heat.

Along with the beauty of Palestine, Jinan relays the oppression she saw everyday living there, and their struggles with the Israeli checkpoints.

“My brother was very ill and used to have to go to the doctors a lot, and sometimes they wouldn't let you go, even with specific paperwork that would allow you to," she tells ������. 

"You see raids on homes in the middle of the night, waking up and just hearing the tanks with their megaphones saying, ‘We're looking for so and so from this family, please come out of your house.’ I really don't think they said, ‘please,’” she adds.

Jinan elaborates on the visceral connection Palestinians have to their land, and how indigenous Palestinians nurture their land and vice versa, “That is like, the core part of being Palestinian. The further we stay away, the more it hurts us overall."

Despite the consistent oppression, Jinan notes the consistent resistance. “That's why you have groups like the and other groups who go there during that time, specifically to act as a barrier with nonviolent resistance, to help protect the farmers," she continues.

"But there are things like harvesting za’atar, mint and other wild herbs that have been illegal to do so for decades.”

Jinan describes further how the occupation hampers daily agricultural life in Palestine, such as the attacks on the olive harvest and laws that prohibit picking wild thyme and fennel. But Palestinians would of course persist, including with their vineyards and grape leaves for warak dawali (dolma).

She elaborates on one Bethlehem-based winery, , started by Italian monks, that uses Hamdani and Jandali grapes, and how despite the occupation’s efforts to shut them down, they persevered with the land itself resisting.

“One of my friends who works for Terra Sancta wine distributors in DC has told me that the bottle of wine comes from a vineyard that occupation forces tried to pave over, and it still grew through the cement. So, when you talk about resistance, if it's going to grow, if it's from that land, it's going to come out, whether or not you want it to.”

With Bayti, Jinan has fundraised and worked with several organisations that resist the Israeli occupation and protect Palestinian food sovereignty.

“One of them is based here in Virginia, called , which is connected to a group in Palestine that works with farmers to help preserve agricultural sovereignty. It has a seed programme where they preserve the seeds of indigenous plants and vegetables, and the Growing Palestine chapter here basically does a lot of informational events, but also fundraises to send money," Jinan shares. 

“The work they do in Palestine is incredible because they have come up with ways to actually grow certain types of vegetables without water as it is not constant there. Sometimes Israeli forces contaminate the water wells, destroy them or simply don't allow the trucks to come in to refill the tanks. So, they have had to become a little bit more innovative."

Jinan also mentions an organization she fundraised for with her recent Olive Harvest pop-up, the (UAWC), based out of Ramallah.

“They protect the farmers and the villagers when they are harvesting and working on their land. They have also been doing a lot of work around providing food and water for people in Gaza. I did a fundraiser with Marcelle back in March during Ramadan. That is also like a really good organisation because I feel like they do a broad spectrum of things that help the people on the ground there.”

We take a break for some black sage tea from Palestine that Jinan’s friend bought for her a few months ago. “There's nothing like it, it's the best,” she says about it. 

Jinan describes how there has been a visual upswell in speaking up publicly among Palestinian chefs. “You started having Michael being more vocal at Yellow and Albi, you had Marcelle, who has always been vocal; Marcelle is a superstar in their own right in DC."

Importance of visible support

On Palestinian restaurants in the DMV area to support, Jinan highlights Albi, Yellow, La Shukran, Mama Ayesha’s, Nabiha, Marcelle's pop-up Shababi, Hilana Falafel, Z&Z, Bawadi, Jerusalem, Haifa Grill, Olive Lounge, and Al Basha Grill Shawarma — the last of which she recalled giving her a helping hand.

“They saved me one day when I needed some flatbread; one of the Arabic markets ran out... They're really, really wonderful people. There's also a whole bunch of other Palestinian restaurants that are .”

She emphasises the importance of Palestine-allied restaurants, like , that take a risk when supporting the cause, including with their own profits, and the need to support them as well.

She also elaborates that it is crucial not only to support Palestinian restaurants because they donate to the crises in Palestine but also to ensure their business success.

“We need to make sure we invest in our community because that strengthens us economically; makes us better people and puts us in a better position for the future to be able to continue to thrive and carry on our traditions and culture.”

Concluding our conversations, I asked Roro and Jinan what gives them hope. For them both, community is the main wellspring of hope. The advocacy of Palestinian and Lebanese people, particularly in the last year, has been heartwarming for Roro.

“I think it's beautiful to see,” he says. “We’ve just shared misery at this point, unfortunately, but I hope in the future, because of this, and because there are so many voices out there now as so many people are speaking up, that we will hopefully impact or create change. And that gives me a lot of hope.”

Jinan elaborates on how the Palestinian community, both here and back in Palestine, has held her up when watching the genocide unfold.

“A lot of times I feel down and lose hope after watching the news day after day, seeing the destruction of our homeland, knowing that olive groves are being destroyed or that there are no more strawberry fields in Gaza, that people are starving and no aid coming in, it is truly heartbreaking," she says. 

“But at the same time, then you see the resilience of the people in Gaza who are finding ways to replant and grow things. There's this little boy that I watch who grew leaves, and it was like the cutest video, because he's like, ‘Look at my baby plants, and I'm gonna water them every day, and then in a few months, where they're going to be big leaves, and then I'll be able to make a for you guys.’ That, to me, really just shows the resilience of who we are as a people. And it gives me hope amidst all that destruction.”

Away from her homeland, the success of Bayti and other Palestinian businesses also bolsters the hope for Jinan.

"The amount of people who come to events to celebrate our culture and the fact that our culture and the word Palestine is no longer a taboo, that in itself is such a big deal to me," she says. 

"It is wonderful to know that the community stands behind us and has always been very supportive.”

To see the Palestinian solidarity on the streets of DC uplifts her spirits. “The days that I'm down, and then I walk out into the street and I see someone wearing a keffiyeh, or I go to a protest, and there are thousands of people all marching, even if they are not Palestinian and understand that what is happening in Gaza and beyond is wrong, that's what gives me hope: the united humanity.”

Swara Salih is a writer and podcaster who writes for several outlets, including , , and . He co-hosts  podcast, which covers all things SWANA/MENA representation.

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