Dipping Into Hummus, Again

By George S. Hishmeh

This commentary was published in the Jordan Times on 10/12/2010

 

Here we go again. Hummus is back in the news, and almost on the front pages of American newspapers.

My column titled “The Undeclared War on Arab Cuisine”, written more than two years ago, received more letters than most columns I have written. This is probably because I challenged the Israelis’ and their friends’ claims that this popular dip and couscous, among others, were misidentified as Israeli, another of the many unfounded claims of the Israelis.

This is how The New York Times led its news report (on page 7) on December 3: “Forget Hizbollah and Hamas. The latest chapter in the Israeli-Arab (not Arab-Israeli) conflict is all about hummus, the chickpea dip that is a staple of American college cafeterias.”

Well and good. But, this time around, the point of the story was that Palestinian students and their supporters at Princeton and DePaul universities challenged the sale at the university cafeterias of hummus under the brand-name Sabra, “in an effort to focus attention on accusations that Israeli military forces violated human rights”.

The point of the story is that the manufacturer of this brand of hummus - Sabra Dipping Company - has ties to an Israeli army brigade “notorious for allegations of human rights abuses”. And, more significantly, the students’ effort came against the backdrop of another expanding campaign known as boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, undertaken in order to make it comply with international law and the universal principles of human rights. This five-year-old movement, established by 171 non-governmental organisations, views Israel as analogous to South Africa in the apartheid era.

Although the Palestinian students and their supporters lost the Princeton referendum vote for another hummus brand - 1014 to 699, Yoel Bitran, the Jewish president of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP), told The Daily Princetonian that he was excited by the high amount of student support.

“The main goal of this initiative was to raise awareness about Sabra and its association to Israel’s human rights violations,” he said.

“In that sense we have been extremely successful.”

Bitran added that the PCP still hopes to convince the university to provide an alternative hummus.

PCP sponsored the referendum as part of a larger boycott campaign against the Strauss Group, an Israeli-held conglomerate that owns 50 per cent of Sabra Dipping Company and has financially and publicly supported the Golani Brigade of the Israeli army.

At DePaul, the Catholic university administration backtracked after initially agreeing to stop stocking the Sabra brand and issued a “clarification that it will reshelve the product while it awaits the results of an ethics review”.

Jonathan Corin, writing in The Socialist Worker, exposed the Golani brigade, revealing that it “has participated in nearly every IDF campaign involving the displacement and murder of Palestinian civilians since the Nakba in 1948, including Israel’s 2008-2009 assault on Gaza that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of whom were unarmed non-combatants, in just three weeks”.

He also quoted a woman student identified only by her first name, Shirien, as saying that “the temporary suspension of Sabra at DePaul is a small victory, but I think something like this gets people pumped up and ready for more .... When it comes to something like justice for Palestine, every little victory eats away at the monster of injustice and brings us one step closer to victory”.

Noura Erekat, a human rights attorney and adjunct professor of international human rights law at Georgetown University, believes that “any form of BDS movement on campuses, within institutions and communities is a positive one and a significant step in the solidarity movement for Palestinian freedom and self-determination”.

She went on to explain that “the reasons for, and thinking behind, the [student] campaign against Sabra are just as important, if not more so, than the outcome itself since BDS is meant to mobilise a grassroots solidarity movement to be stakeholders in ending Israeli colonialism and apartheid”.

Palestinians are nowadays sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Week in 40 cities worldwide and for the first time in Beirut, Lebanon, this year. As far as the US is concerned, a New York activist is quoted as saying that she has discovered that American audiences relate much more easily to narratives of institutionalised racial discrimination than those of occupation.

“Hence,” Erekat underlined, “they work to draw parallels between the civil rights movement and the Palestinian movement to achieve freedom and equality”.