Recipes Coming Soon!

As a child I watched my grandmother spend every waking hour making food. By the time I woke up every morning she would already have a bowl of dough that she was fashioning into bread or stuffed mini-pies. In a single day my grandmother would produce breakfast, lunch, dinner, in-between snacks, goodies to share with friends, dishes to send to the neighbors, desserts, on-the-go cookies, juices, teas, etc.

It was so delicious, and she may be the reason I love to eat so much and can immediately detect the flavor in anything. It may also be the reason why I’ve hated cooking for so long. Feared it really…

I always had the idea that cooking is a day-long endeavor that consumes every waking hour, as it did my grandmother. Of course I am learning that she was special and did very special things for us because of her endless love. That was one way that she expressed it to us, and for that I am forever grateful (RIP grandma, you’re always on my mind). I am also grateful because I did spend all my time smelling, tasting, poking, and watching. So now that I try to cook I generally know something is done by its taste, color, or smell.

I am using this space to share my recipes with you all, who also think cooking is daunting or impossible. I’m shocked to hear myself say that IT’S NOT! Let me know when you try any of these and send me your feedback/photos.

Thanks again grandma! This is for you.

Haifa, My City

This past weekend Haneen and I headed up to Haifa for the weekend. We caught a ride with some friends we made in Ramallah. As soon as we entered the ’48 territories (Israel) I told Haneen to look closely under any forests she sees to find destroyed homes that mark the presence of a destroyed Palestinian village. And before I even finished my sentence a forest appeared on our right and sure enough destroyed Palestinian homes lay at the bottom of the trees. These forests were planted by the Jewish National Fund through the 1950s after the Palestinians were ethnically cleaned and their villages destroyed to erase any trace of their existence. So in reality this was not a ecological contribution but the erasing of a people. The absurdity is how can Israelis see these houses today and continue to believe that no one lived and built this land before they dispossessed them?

When we got to Haifa we asked to be dropped off at a street near the Baha’i Temple, which is full of Arab owned restaurants and cafes. We sat down for coffee and chatted with the wait staff until a friend I made in Haifa a few weeks before came by to pick us up. He was taking us to the home of another friend I made in Haifa whose family he wanted us to meet. The father prepared an AMAZING meal and while I got into a long and heavy political and literary (Palestinian) conversation with the parents, Haneen and our five new friends sat outside talking, smoking argileh, and drinking beer. Haneen and I both felt like we had known this family for years. It was a strange yet welcome feeling and I really felt at home.

We stayed with them in Hallisa– my grandparents’ neighborhood in Haifa. Before 1948 when my grandparents lived there, Hallisa was a middle class neighborhood. Today it is a predominantly Arab neighborhood, it is poor and run down. Our friends called it a slum and it is burdened by drugs and violence. Walking to the house we were staying in we saw a car with someone’s name on it, and our friends told us that this car belonged to a young man who was shot dead outside of his home. It is rough here and the residents were facing eviction by the Israeli government a few months ago.

The following day Haneen and I woke up early to go to the beach where we spent half of our day. At the beach I sat in the water and became lost in my thoughts, particularly thinking about the dispossession of my people from this land and my grandmother’s stories about the beach and about the view of the ocean from their house. But every time I got lost in my thoughts I would be awakened suddenly by my surroundings and the realization that this is not the same Haifa. Here the Palestinians who remained are living in slums at worst and at best attending university where they are forced to study in Hebrew– not their native tongue. This while they are indigenous to this land and in a few year’s time will make up the majority of people living in this country again.

And then there was the bus incident. On our way back from the beach to Hallisa we took the bus that would drop us off walking distance from our destination. I spoke to the driver in English because he was obviously not Arab and I cannot speak Hebrew. I told him we would like to be dropped off at Hallisa. “Hallisa you say? Not Khallisa? So you are Aravim (Arab)?” Yes, we are Arab. “And you don’t speak Hebrew?” No, we only speak Arabic and English. “And you go to Hallisa of course you are Arab. Only Arabs go to Hallisa.” OK– so can you tell us when we get there? “Yes, I will tell you when I get there.”

The boys in the back of the bus got very rowdy and loud and began bothering the passengers. The same bus driver assumed that they were Arab and in a derogatory tone he started to yell at them: “Ahmad! Ahmad!” Then broken Arabic to tell them to shut up. Haneen and I were confused because the boys were Jewish, not Arab, but it was assumption he made and refused to back down. Another Jewish passenger, male in his early forties, came to the front of the bus and told the bus driver to do something about those kids. The bus driver said, again in broken Arabic, “Can you speak Arabic? Tell them in Arabic, Ahmad! Shut up!” The passenger argued with the bus driver that the kids were Jewish, not Arab, but the bus driver insisted that they were Arab. Haneen leaned over and told me that for the first time in her life she believed that the way she feels must come close to being Black on a White bus.

After the loud kids in the back got off the bus, the driver told us he was pulling up to Hallisa. He went off route (we know this because the women on the bus started to yell at him about making a wrong turn) and told us that if we got off here we are to make a quick left and quick right and we would find ourselves in Hallisa. When we got off the bus, we asked and found out that we were lied to but the bus actually goes all the way to Hallisa. It was an odd type of racism that inspired that bus driver to kick us off the bus, but the Palestinians there understood. They were appalled by the story, but they understood the situation nonetheless. The responses we heard were, “Yes, that is how it is here”. We got on another bus (incidentally the same bus route) with an Arab driver and he got us to Hallisa.

When we got to Hallisa we washed up, ate, and went back out to explore the neighborhood and see my grandparents’ house. On a hilltop in Hallisa is a mosque called the Mosque of Hajj Abdullah. Hajj Abdullah was my grandmother’s uncle– he built the mosque and it is one of the few mosques in the ’48 territories that remains a mosque. Most were either destroyed or turned into bars or animal barns. Directly behind the mosque is the house my grandmother used to live in with her family. In 1948 she would have been 14 years old. Her sister and my grandfather’s brother were married, and my great grandfather rented a room in their building and the first floor as a grocery store from them. My grandfather was 18 in 1948. My grandmother and grandfather would not get married until my grandmother was 19 and they were refugees in Damascus. I will write more about them in a later post.

That day as we were going to see the old house on the hilltop in the Hallisa neighborhood in Haifa we met two of my distant cousins: one from my grandmother’s family and one from my grandfather’s. This is the Diaspora, and I have experienced it many ways before but this face of the Diaspora I have just experienced for the first time. The Diaspora is young enough for you to see your family, but old enough for you not to know them. Some photos below:

Reads “Masjid al-Hajj Abdullah”.

View from my grandparents’ house– just like my grandmother used to tell me

Walking up to search for the house

My grandparents’ home before the ethnic cleansing. The ground floor was a corner store.

View of old ground level grocery store from an opening in the outside wall.

Dome of my great great uncle’s mosque.

Umm el Zeinat and Haifa

As planned, yesterday we returned to my ancestral village, Umm el Zeinat, near Daliyat al Karmel, on Mount Karmel, in Haifa.  Of course when I say “return” this is much greater than my brother and me.  This return is about my family, about an oppression that they, along with all the people of Umm el Zeinat and the people of the other 500 destroyed villages of Palestine had to endure.  What we undertook is the greatest act of resistance against the Zionist movement.  Three generations later we remember, and though not under our own conditions, we return to a village from which they hoped to erase our traces.

On our way into the village we met a man and his wife, picking cactus fruit with their four children.  My uncle pulled over to ask then how well they knew the village.  As it turns out they are from the Fahmawi family of Umm el Zeinat.  We told them we were returning and they offered to guide us through the village.  Of course all that is left of the village is rubble from demolished homes, overgrown shrubbery, and trees– both indigenous and those planted by the state in an attempt to make it seem as though no one ever lived there.

I discovered that the state of Israel grants permission to Jewish families every year to enter my village and harvest the olives.  The family that guided us through the village still lives off of the good of our land, however.  They have been trimming the fruit trees for years and eating pomagranates, cactus fruit, and they sneek around at night to harvest the olives, which they press for oil and pickle to eat.  They cannot harvest the olives in the day because it is illegal– the State sanctions the harvest for Jews only.  I was so happy to meet this couple and their kids, knowing that our people are still taking care of the land.  We picked and ate pomegranates, they gave us a bucket full of cactus fruit that they cleaned out, we drank well water from the only remaining working well in the village, we visited the grave yard where I read the fatiha for my great grandparents, and we explored some caves where its assumed that the fighters used to hide and store their weapons in 1936 and 1948.

I have never felt a more bizarre sensation for intense saddness and simultaneous ecstacy.  I was a returnee, and having eaten from the fruits of the land felt like I was taking back what was mine.  I also completely put down my guard and found myself laughing while tears rolled down my eyes.  I always said I would return to Umm el Zeinat and rebuild, but now I know I will.  I’ve had lots of thoughts that I need to comb through and understand.  I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life, and now that its happened I cannot wait for it to happen again.  My village is there and it still exists, with a few folks left behind to take care of it until we can all reunite.

In the grand Zionist plan my brother and I were supposed to have forgotten this land.  We should not have known that we are from Umm el Zeinat, we should not have stepped foot on it ever again.  But in some small way we– and millions like us– have punched a very large hole in the Zionist plan.  I had a wonderful conversation today about this with Amin Mohammad Ali, shop owner and brother of Palestinian poet Taha Mohammad Ali in Nazareth.  I will write more about this conversation, but I realized that although I am in the “green line” and what is known as Israel proper, the Palestinians here are me and I am the Palestinians here.

Preparing for a Voyage

I skyped with a great friend of mine yesterday, Jacob, who is currently tracing his family’s escape from Belgrade after the Nazis invaded and bombed Yugoslavia.  Having exchanged ideas, I’ve been inspired to collect the stories of those who have returned: my grandfather, my aunt, and my aunt’s memories of my grandmother’s return.  I want to seek ways of sharing the physical and visual perspectives of their exile.

This was also inspired by a scene from my new favorite Palestinian film Salt of This Sea.  Thurayya, the main character who is a third generation Palestinian refugee from Brooklyn, swims in the Mediterranean Sea and looks back at Yaffa, her family’s city of origin now within the green line or Palestinian lands occupied by Israel in 1948.  She looks back at Yaffa while swimming in the sea and we see the city fading away.  In the next scene she is on land and says, “انا بكره البحر,” or “I hate the sea.”  Although before looking back at Yaffa from the sea she was enjoying her time there.

It is all about perspective, physical and visual.  I want to know where my grandparents looked back from and take in their perspective, to witness, in the smallest degree what they witnessed as they were exiled.  Of course when they were exiled they did not know that they would never return to Palestine.  Now three of my grandparents have passed, and my mother’s father is the only one who remains.  I will be recording interviews with him to guide my travels.

If you have suggestions and other ideas, please contact me.