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July 2nd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
A “Taste of Home” food festival to be held in Philadelphia on June 20th initially included a truck for Israeli food, but the invitation was withdrawn after Palestinian solidarity activists objected to its inclusion. A furor followed from pro-Israel advocates, and organizers decided to cancel the event in its entirety.
Philadelphia’s “Taste of Home” food festival disinvited Moshava, an Israeli-owned food truck, and all manner of condemnation, doxing, harassment, death threats, has been unleashed on the festival’s organizers who dared to take a moral stand against cultural appropriation.
The word Moshava refers to Jewish settlements in Palestine, representing the first wave of European colonizers who eventually conquered Palestine through violent campaigns of ethnic cleansing that continue until this day, with the latest expulsions taking place as this is written, in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, where the Israeli military is literally removing Palestinian residents from their homes where they’ve lived for generations, in order to replace them with Jewish settlers, a shocking number of whom are actually American Jews.
Naming a food truck after a colonial tradition is appropriate considering that its menu is predominantly Arab food, appropriated by Israel much the same as they’ve appropriated Palestinian lands, home, and heritage. There is nothing Israeli about shawarma, hummus, falafel, or arayes, all of which predate the state of Israel by a few dozen centuries. The fact that Arab Jews brought Arabic culinary traditions from their native Arab countries to Israel does not make those foods Israeli, any more than pizza or tacos can become American cuisine no matter how much they’re served and consumed here.
At the same time that Israel demolishes Palestinian villages, razes ancient Palestinian cemeteries and destroys non-Jewish Palestinian archeology to remove traces of indigenous Palestinian life, it employs cultural appropriation as another form of erasure. It is simply not okay for Israelis to claim the heritage of indigenous Palestinians at the same time they’re trying to displace and remove them. But it is particularly egregious when one considers all the ways that Israel has weaponized food against Palestinians. Here are just a few examples:
- Israel implemented a policy of counting calories allowed into Gaza in order to severely limit Palestinian nutrition intake, designed “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
- In addition to taking over Palestinian farms outright, Israel has been systematically bulldozing agricultural lands, especially in Gaza, coupled with continued aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides that render huge swaths of arable farmland as useless and toxic.
- Since Israel conquered the rest of Palestine in 1967, it has uprooted more than one million olive trees, with terrible nutritional, ecological, and economic consequences for Palestinians. This is coupled with systematic paramilitary settlers burning of Palestinian olive and fruit-bearing trees, particularly during harvest season.
- Israel diverts water from Palestinian villages to illegal Israeli settlements, prevents Palestinians from accessing their own water, and generally employs a myriad of protocols that effectively steal Palestinian water, creating an apartheid reality where Palestinians live a parched life, while Israeli settlers in the same area enjoy unlimited water, with green lawns and swimming pools.
- Israel enforces laws that ban traditional herb foraging of indigenous Palestinian foodways
Finally, it is worth noting that the owner of the Moshava food truck served in the same Israeli military that has been engaged in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians, which has been called a system of apartheid by leading Israeli and international human rights organizations.
We applaud the organizers for canceling this blatant attempt at Palestinian erasure, cultural appropriation, and food-washing of apartheid. They have nothing to apologize for.
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