Linda Dayan published an opinion piece in Haaretz on July 23, 2026, arguing that online debates over hummus too often erase the lived experience of Mizrahi Jews — Middle Eastern Jews who've been eating hummus for generations alongside their Palestinian neighbors. The piece comes as a viral social media post about hummus drew over a million views and nearly 500 comments, revealing how food becomes a proxy battlefield in a conflict where identity itself is contested.
When Food Becomes Politics
Dayan's argument centers on visibility. Over the weekend, a Haaretz X account post about hummus received more than a thousand reposts and sparked hundreds of comments. She noted the timing: the U.S. and Iran are at war, missiles are falling across the Middle East, and Israel's heading toward a crucial election. Yet the conversation that broke through was about hummus.
The so-called "Hummus Wars" reflect a broader erasure, Dayan wrote. When people debate whether hummus is Israeli or Palestinian, they often ignore the Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and Morocco who brought hummus recipes with them when they fled or were expelled from Arab countries in the mid-20th century. These aren't settlers or colonizers in the narrative some activists use — they're refugees whose families ate hummus long before the State of Israel existed.
Mizrahi Voices in a Binary Debate
The piece is tagged with Israel food, Mizrahi, Jewish Diaspora, and anti-Israel, reflecting how debates over cuisine intersect with debates over legitimacy and belonging. For Mizrahi Jews, the hummus debate isn't abstract. It's about whether their family histories — their grandmothers' recipes, their childhood meals, their connections to the Arab world — get acknowledged or erased in a conflict that's often framed in purely European colonial terms.
Dayan's intervention matters because it complicates the binary. Palestinian claims to hummus are real and rooted in centuries of culinary tradition. But so are Mizrahi Jewish claims. The two aren't mutually exclusive unless the goal is to delegitimize one side's presence entirely. When activists treat hummus as stolen rather than shared, they erase half the Jewish population of Israel — the half that came from the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe.
The Larger Context
The article was published at 3:56 PM Israel time on July 23, 2026, in the midst of a regional crisis and an Israeli election campaign. That a food debate went viral in this moment speaks to how identity and legitimacy are fought over symbols as much as borders. For Dayan, the hummus conversation isn't trivial. It's a microcosm of how Mizrahi Jews are often rendered invisible in a conflict where both sides claim exclusive ties to the land and its culture.
The opinion piece pushes back against that erasure. It asks readers to recognize that Jews from Arab countries aren't footnotes in Middle Eastern history — they're part of it. Their food, their language, their music, and their family stories connect them to the region in ways that complicate any narrative built on simple binaries of colonizer and colonized.
Why This Matters:
The hummus debate reveals how cultural erasure works in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Mizrahi Jewish history is ignored, it becomes easier to frame Israel as a purely European colonial project with no legitimate ties to the Middle East. That narrative erases the experience of more than half of Israel's Jewish population — people whose families were displaced from Arab countries and who carry Middle Eastern identity in their food, language, and memory. Recognizing Mizrahi Jews doesn't negate Palestinian claims to hummus or the land. It does, however, complicate the story in ways that make peace harder to dismiss and identity harder to weaponize. In a conflict where every symbol becomes a battleground, acknowledging complexity isn't a distraction from justice — it's a precondition for it.