The German Zionist Who Founded Israeli Cuisine

In the mid-1930s, Erna Meyer, a Jewish physician recently arrived in the land of Israel from Nazi Germany, authored How to Cook in Palestine, the first such work to be published in the British Mandate. The book, written in Hebrew, English, and German, was geared to housewives raised in Europe who were unfamiliar with the local produce and climate and struggling to adjust to the harsh material conditions. Dana Kessler writes:

“We housewives must make an attempt to free our kitchens from European customs which are not applicable to Palestine. We should wholeheartedly stand in favor of healthy Palestine cooking,” writes Meyer, urging new Jewish immigrants to Palestine to shed their European identity and reinvent themselves according to the Zionist ideology. “We should foster these ideas not merely because we are compelled to do so, but because we realize that this will help us more than anything else in becoming acclimatized to our old-new homeland.” . . .

Meyer gives special attention in her book to local vegetables such as marrow (similar to zucchini), okra, and eggplant, giving us a glimpse into the roots of Israeli cuisine. Instead of liver, Meyer offers . . . a chopped eggplant dish, which tastes a lot like traditional Ashkenazi chopped liver. Eggplant “liver” was a big hit in the days of austerity, in which meat was scarce, and it can still be found in delis and supermarkets in Israel to this day.

Read more at Tablet

More about: British Mandate, Food, History & Ideas, Israeli agriculture, Israeli culture

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF