Reem Kassis, the author of cookbooks including “The Arabesque Table,” hosts a dinner party for Palestinian college students and considers whether food can be a tool of diplomacy amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Hannah Goldfield writes.
The students arrived in a caravan of cars, shepherded by Atshan, and piled onto couches in the living room, laughing, starting sentences in Arabic and finishing them in English. When dinner was ready, they gathered around the kitchen island, where Kassis had arranged a buffet, and introduced themselves, sharing their names and where in Palestine they or their parents had grown up: Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza. “I missed this so much,” a young woman named Noor said happily as she filled a plate.
But this past fall, after Israel launched a military campaign that has since taken tens of thousands of lives in Gaza, in retaliation for the vicious attack on civilians by Hamas, Kassis wrote on Instagram that she was losing faith in the idea of food as a diplomatic tool. She described feeling “heartbroken to see how many people who have accepted our generosity, our food . . . have remained silent.” Kassis considers the notion of unfettered hospitality inherent to her identity as a Palestinian.
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