A Haaretz post about hummus drew over a million views, was reposted more than a thousand times and pulled in almost 500 comments, even as the U.S. and Iran were at war, missiles were falling all over the Middle East and Israel was heading toward a crucial election. That’s the kind of civic spectacle the region keeps producing: states lobbing force, media platforms turning food into identity combat, and ordinary people getting dragged into the noise while the machinery of power keeps grinding.
Linda Dayan argued in the Haaretz opinion piece, published at 03:56 PM on July 23 2026 IDT, that participants in the online “Hummus Wars” too often ignore Jews from Middle Eastern countries who have been eating hummus for generations, just like Palestinian neighbors. The argument lands in a familiar place. National narratives love to claim food, memory and belonging when it suits them, then flatten the people who actually lived those histories.
The State Spectacle Keeps Rolling
Dayan’s framing sits inside a moment she described as anything but ordinary. The U.S. and Iran were at war. Missiles were falling all over the Middle East. Israel was heading toward a crucial election. And yet the post that caught fire was about hummus. That contrast says plenty about the public life of states: they produce war, elections and crisis, while the online arena turns even shared food into a proxy fight over who gets to speak for history.
The piece doesn’t describe a battlefield, a cabinet meeting or a military order. It describes a comment war. But the scale of attention matters. Over a million views. More than a thousand reposts. Almost 500 comments. The platform economy does what states do best: it sorts people into camps, rewards outrage and leaves the underlying structures untouched.
Who Gets Written Out
Dayan’s central point is about erasure. She said participants in the “Hummus Wars” too often ignore Jews from Middle Eastern countries who have been eating hummus for generations, just like Palestinian neighbors. That detail matters because it cuts against the neat nationalist scripts that try to assign every dish, memory and habit to a single flag.
The article places Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian neighbors in the same frame of everyday life, not as symbols in a state project. That’s the part the identity machines hate. Shared practice is messy. It doesn’t obey borders cleanly. It doesn’t sit still for official mythology, whether that mythology comes wrapped in state branding, diaspora nostalgia or anti-Israel posturing.
The piece is tagged Israel food, Mizrahi, Jewish Diaspora and anti-Israel. Even the tags show the pressure to turn a simple argument about historical memory into a political sorting exercise. The labels do the usual bureaucratic work: classify, contain, file away.
History, Food and the Election Machine
Dayan wrote at a moment when Israel was heading toward a crucial election, a reminder that electoral theater keeps running even when the region is already saturated with war. Elections promise choice. They also provide a neat way for power to renew itself while ordinary people are told to pick a side and call it participation.
The hummus debate sits far below the level of statecraft, and that’s exactly why it matters. It shows how public discourse gets pulled into the orbit of institutions that claim to represent everyone while erasing the people whose lives don’t fit the script. Mizrahi families, Palestinian neighbors, online commenters, media platforms — all of them get folded into a spectacle that’s loud, profitable and politically useful to someone.
Dayan’s complaint is simple enough. Don’t erase my Mizrahi family. Don’t erase the fact that Jews from Middle Eastern countries have been eating hummus for generations, just like Palestinian neighbors. In a region where states keep demanding exclusive ownership of land, memory and legitimacy, even a bowl of hummus becomes a battleground for the right to exist in the story at all.