Perhaps it's idealistic to look at food, but people from the region have a shared heritage and cuisine is a lingering reminder of that
Let's just leapfrog the logistics for a minute, and get to what happened: a Lebanese blogger and her friends visited an Iraqi-Jewish restaurant in Dubai. It was, by her account, a powerful experience – not just because of the unsurprising excellence of the food, but because it triggered an association with Lebanese home-cooking, and hence a thoughtful examination of collective Arab identity.
Tasting a subtle riff on her own cuisine, the blogger, Sophie Chamas, noted: "I am relieved. I did not come here to taste difference. I came here to reclaim a morsel of the collective memories that politics and history have denied me. I came here to reconstruct the Arab, long ago butchered and broken down like an animal carcass into individual, limp parts." She refers not just to the imposed unravelling of a hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity that emptied the Middle East of its centuries-old Jewish population, but also about a worrying and current sectarianism that might further desiccate the region.
This all came about in May, when Dubai played host to a sort of living art exhibition, a pop-up Iraqi-Jewish restaurant created by artist Michael Rakowitz and the Moving Museum (as described, with tantalising food pics, here)
The Iraqi-Jewish Rakowitz served up his grandmother's recipes on plates that this community managed to take with them when they left in the early 1950s. The Moving Museum described this cuisine as "an endangered species, as many of these dishes were specific to the Jewish population and are no longer served in Iraq today".
I share Chamas's strong reaction to Middle Eastern food: tasting fasoolia (green beans in tomato sauce) in Palestine, or a Lebanese friend's kousa mahshi (stuffed courgettes) or Egyptian street-side plates of ful medames triggers powerful associations with my parents' kitchen: their anchoring, self-defining passion for Iraqi-Jewish cooking – their persistent quest for Middle Eastern ingredients during the culinary, er, challenge that was 1970s Britain. It is an instant reminder of Arab roots, a shared preoccupation, a tendency to discuss food for hours: ways of cooking dishes, different ingredients and recipe twists and, of course, which nation comes up with the best versions (usually Iraq – this is not a bias-free conversation – or, inevitably if a tiny bit begrudgingly, the Lebanese).
Obviously, food is evocative – and more so for migrants and exiles. It is the bit of culture that lingers even when language and other markers have long faded. Like Italians, Indians, the Chinese and many others, Middle Easterners can be especially emotional about cuisine because it is such a core part of culture. "It is intrinsic to the way of life and upbringing," says Middle Eastern food writer and legend, Anissa Helou. "It's part of our life, from childhood. There is no question of nursery food for any Arab child: as soon as I started chewing, I was eating mashed chicken livers, tabouleh, all adult food." Helou says that cooking is as critical as consuming it; Middle Eastern men and women alike will know how dishes are made – or should be.
More often, we hear about the politics of Middle Eastern food in the context of nationalistic battles over ownership. Israel sparks fury with its ubiquitous postcards of falafel skewered with an Israeli flag and a strapline declaring the pitta-nestled chickpea balls to be their "national snack". President Obama unwittingly picked that barely-covered scab when it was revealed that he'd be served falafel by the Israeli president on a recent regional trip. Back in 2008 (though it's a recurring issue) Lebanon accused Israel of draining the Cedar economy by appropriating hummus – which the Lebanese claim as their invention.
But what's striking about Chamas's beautiful write-up of Iraqi-Jewish dining in Dubai is that it turns this standard battle on its head. This Lebanese blogger asks: "Will our palettes save us? They, it seems, have not forgotten. They have been spared the amnesiac touch of nationalism(s). We can still recognise ourselves in the cuisines of those we are taught to despise."
Could food really unite rather than divide? What if this strong culinary attachment were actually a way to bring Arab-Jews back into the Middle Eastern family, rather than used as a frontier barrier to ensure that animosity and exclusion persist? As I write that, it feels mawkishly idealistic in the face of a terrible political conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians but involving the whole region, to do with land, occupation and dispossession – a conflict that insists nationalism should trump every other component of identity.
And yet on a personal level, it persists, stubborn and deep-seated: that overwhelming triumph of palate over politics, an instinctive and wonderful connection to a shared culture – one that, like it or not, irreversibly binds Arab-Jews to the Middle East.