Linda Dayan challenged participants in the online "Hummus Wars" this week for routinely erasing the lived experience of Jews from Middle Eastern countries who've eaten hummus for generations alongside their Palestinian neighbors. The Haaretz opinion piece, published at 03:56 PM on July 23, 2026 IDT, confronted a debate that's become a proxy battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one where Mizrahi Jewish identity often disappears entirely.
Dayan wrote that over the weekend, a post on Haaretz's X account received over a million views, was reposted more than a thousand times and drew almost 500 comments. The subject wasn't the war between the U.S. and Iran, the missiles falling across the Middle East, or Israel's upcoming crucial election. It was hummus.
The Erasure Problem
The piece is tagged Israel food, Mizrahi, Jewish Diaspora and anti-Israel. Dayan's core argument addresses a pattern in Western discourse about Middle Eastern food culture: the narrative that treats hummus as exclusively Palestinian erases the reality that Mizrahi Jews — those from Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Egypt and across the Arab world — have been making and eating hummus as part of their own indigenous culture for centuries. These aren't European colonizers adopting local cuisine. They're Middle Eastern Jews whose families never left the region.
The online hummus debate has become a microcosm of a larger problem in how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is framed internationally. When activists claim Israeli hummus is "cultural appropriation," they're operating from a framework that assumes all Israelis are Ashkenazi Europeans with no legitimate connection to Middle Eastern foodways. That framework doesn't just misunderstand Israeli demographics — it actively erases the majority of Israeli Jews whose families came from Arab countries, often as refugees fleeing persecution after 1948.
What Gets Lost
Dayan's intervention comes at a moment when simplistic narratives dominate social media discourse about the conflict. The hummus wars aren't really about chickpeas. They're about who gets to claim indigenous status in the Middle East, whose history is acknowledged, and whose family stories are dismissed as inconvenient to prevailing political narratives.
Mizrahi Jews complicate the colonial settler framework that dominates much anti-Israel activism in the West. Their families didn't arrive from Europe in the 20th century. Many were expelled from Arab countries where they'd lived for millennia — often in direct retaliation for Israel's creation. Iraq's Jewish community, which dated back to the Babylonian exile 2,600 years ago, was virtually eliminated between 1948 and 1951. Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya — each saw ancient Jewish populations forced out, their property confiscated, their synagogues destroyed.
Those refugees and their descendants now make up the majority of Israel's Jewish population. When they eat hummus, they're eating food their grandmothers made in Baghdad, Cairo, and Sana'a. Treating that as appropriation doesn't just misread history. It denies their existence.
The Broader Context
The timing of Dayan's piece is notable. She wrote it as the U.S. and Iran are at war, as missiles fall across the Middle East, and as Israel heads toward a crucial election. The fact that a hummus post generated over a million views while these crises unfold says something about how the conflict is consumed internationally — as a morality play where food, language, and culture become weapons in an identity war that often has little connection to the region's actual complexity.
The piece challenges readers to recognize that Middle Eastern Jewish identity isn't a political inconvenience to be explained away. It's a historical reality that predates modern nation-states, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and certainly the recent invention of food-based activism on social media platforms.
Why This Matters:
The erasure of Mizrahi Jewish identity in discussions about Israeli culture has consequences beyond hurt feelings. It feeds a narrative framework that treats all Israelis as foreign colonizers with no legitimate historical connection to the region — a framework that makes compromise harder by denying half the population's indigenous status. When Western activists reduce the conflict to European settlers versus native Palestinians, they're not just getting history wrong. They're making peace harder by invalidating the lived experience of millions of Middle Eastern Jews whose families were driven from Arab countries and who see Israel as their refuge, not their colonial project. The hummus wars reveal how even food becomes a battlefield when one side's existence is treated as inherently illegitimate. Dayan's pushback matters because it insists that any honest reckoning with the conflict must acknowledge all the region's indigenous peoples — including the Jews who never left.