Does the Denver Post proofread for errors in content?
What a lost opportunity: food as a unifier. Food as an element of peace in the Middle East. The Middle East’s cucumber-and-tomato salad is a unifier. It crosses all regional and political boundaries. It knows no exclusive, ethnic, national or religious identity.
Yet, a food writer in the Denver Post, wasted the opportunity. Worse, she used food as a club to push a political agenda and committed an error of omission and of commission along the way. What a shame.
We have to believe that the Denver Post does not believe that the State of Israel should be destroyed. We have to believe that the Denver Post does not favor a Palestinian state “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” We have to believe that the Denver Post knows that “the State of Israel” exists and “the State of Palestine” does not. We have to believe that the Denver Post does believe that food in the “Middle East” includes food in the State of Israel. Yet, the following appeared in the Denver Post on Wednesday, March 10, under the headline, “An easy Middle Eastern salad,” by Blanche Shaheen:
“This refreshing cucumber-tomato salad is ubiquitous on breakfast tables, as well as lunch or dinner spreads, across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt and beyond.”
Blanche Shaheen slides geographically from Lebanon to Egypt but does not mention what lays between Lebanon and Egypt: the State of Israel. Replacing the State of Israel in Shaheen’s world, and recipe, is “Palestine.”
The particular salad that Shaheen highlighted is eaten in Israel every day. The same is true in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This salad is a point of contact between Israel and the Palestinians
Does anyone at the Denver Post proofread for errors in content? Does anyone detect an effort to divide, rather than to unify — an effort that includes errors of fact? The errors in Shaheen’s recipe are an error of omission, “State of Israel,” and an error of commission, “Palestine.”
Perhaps more dangerous than the rantings of Iranian ayatollahs who demand the destruction of Israel are the normal, hardly noticed, easy, natural insinuations of the idea of Israel’s non-existence into daily — and pervasive — discourse, such as recipes in food columns. We expect the Denver Post to demonstrate more knowledge of basic facts — and more sensitivity to the potential for cross-cultural peacemaking. This could have been achieved merely by adding a single fact, “State of Israel,” and a single title, the Hebrew title of a salad.
Had the author objected to an editor making these suggestions, then the agenda-driven nature of this seemingly innocent recipe would have been blatant and affirmed.
Perhaps Blanche Shaheen thinks there already is a State of Palestine. In fact, this is what the Palestinians have tried to create since the Camp David peace accords in 1979. The diplomatic history of the Palestinians for more than 40 years has been the story of their attempt to create their own state. In 1979, when Egypt and Israel signed the first Israel-Arab peace treaty, it envisioned future negotiations over the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, an idea that has evolved into negotiations (or envisioned negotiations) over a Palestinian state. One does not try to negotiate the existence of what already exists. Virtually every member of the US Congress would not call for a “two state solution” if the solution were already in place; if Shaheen’s “Palestine” were on par with the nation states she cites, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
There is no salad in Shaheen’s “Palestine” because there is no nation state of Palestine. There is a Palestinian people, and there is a salad popular with the Palestinian people. Shaheen tries to elide the distinction between the Palestinian people and a nation state she calls “Palestine.” Her column was as much a biased political tract, not based on fact, as a food column.
Irony abounds. Shaheen, as best as we can tell, emigrated to the US in 1948 from a Palestinian area. No doubt, she would resent cultural appropriation if it applied to her background — if this Middle East salad were deemed to be “Israeli” but not “Palestinian.” Yet, she does the same in reverse, excluding one country where this salad is, to use her own word, ubiquitous.
Shaheen also tells us the Arabic name for the salad, but not the Hebrew name. It’s OK to rob Israelis of their culture, but not OKto rob Arabs of theirs?
Other Arabs, such as those in the United Arab Emirates, are overjoyed at their formal peace with Israel. They embrace it. They invest in it. Palestinian supporters like Blanche Shaheen are still afraid to take down the barriers between themselves and Israel, preferring to erect barriers, even where none exist, such as in recipes. Isn’t it time for a change? Pretending Israel does not exist, or thinking it will cease to exist, has gotten the Palestinians absolutely nothing.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
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March 18, 2021 at 11:42PM
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