Stephen Satterfield (00:00):
Welcome back to Wetstone Audio Dispatch. I'm Stephen Satterfield. As we share this latest dispatch, the unrelenting assault in Gaza is now in its fifth month, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered, more than 15,000 children and babies, and over 2 million people made refugees in the West Bank. Some 60 miles is an ongoing occupation that has grown more brutal and more deadly in the vengeful aftermath of October 7th. Most recently, what was supposed to be a safe haven in Rafa in the South, is now also under siege. And where refugees were seeking refuge, they have now met bombardment. When you are a refugee only, what is essential comes with you. So clothed and hygiene are in short supply, but flour to make bread or water to make it another day are an even shorter supply. In our corner of the world of food media, there have been far too few stories that have reported on the atrocities of what can now credibly be called a genocide, but unquestionably an ethnic cleansing in Gaza. When women and children are killed by the thousands, when there is an armed occupation that forces you out of your home into the streets with no way to eat,
(01:56)
when hospitals with pregnant mothers and fragile elders are targeted and left to die, then ambiguity is nowhere to be found. US citizens, which I am one, are underwriting this massacre, and so only our voices, the voices of the privileged underwriters can turn the tide. I spoke to Nader Muaddi, the owner of Muaddi Distillery who produces a grape based spirit. I also spoke with Nasser Abufarha, who is the owner of Canaan Palestine. Canaan works with over a thousand families, spanning 43 different villages. The livelihoods of a hundred thousand Palestinian families depend on the crop and have for centuries. It is therefore even more gutting, and also no coincidence that the Israeli army and settlers have not only banned Palestinian families and farmers from accessing their land, but they have also systematically burned these farmers' crops and harvest to the ground. We will hear more about the situation on the ground from Nader who is Beit Jala, in Bethlehem
Nader Muaddi (03:33):
Since essentially 1948, our land, we've not only been at risk of being forcibly displaced from our land, but the objective has always been to displace and to replace us with colonial settlers. So it's not just about appropriating the land per se, but expropriate everything that comes with the land. So it's to replace and create a narrative that the colonizers are indigenous to the land while the indigenous population is driven out. So it's a lot of, in addition to physical appropriation of the actual land, comes the expropriation of the culture of the land. And that comes with things like dance, music, food, and of course drink. For me, I mean we've had a whole series of our Palestinian cuisine be expropriate into what Israel calls their own cuisine, and it's been things like the homeless wars. There's been things about tahini, kna, a whole sort of things.
(04:29)
And I mean for me, I would say, I mean that's one element of why I'm doing what I do. I mean, for me, cultural preservation, it's just something that I'm enthusiastic about. I'm out enthusiasts. I mean, first and foremost, I was making out for the sake of the craft. And the craft has been driven out of Palestine due to colonization, but not only Israeli colonization. I mean it began back in the British mandate of Palestine before the state of Israel existed. When we essentially got cut off from the craft, I was born and raised in the states, but when I first came to Palestine in 2007, it was almost impossible for me to find authentic God in the market. And I began inquiring into why that is, and I realized that the craft was essentially dead. So I began making atak first for the sake of wanting atak.
(05:18)
And second, because when I learned more about the history of atak and it being the oldest distilled spirit in the world, our region is really being the cradle or birthplace of alcoholic beverages, whether fermented or distilled. And at coming from this region, I felt more passionate to distill it. And in recent years, there's also been an effort by Israel to expropriate at to become their national spear. And if you want to safeguard what's yours, you need to continue to produce it in the nuanced traditional ways and celebrate it on a daily basis. That's what I'm trying to embody by using all local indigenous natural ingredients and doing it the way our forefathers have made for centuries.
Stephen Satterfield (06:00):
Absolutely. And food as the unifying theme of all cultures or any culture in which their own cultural awareness, self-awareness as a people is almost always formed over the table or over a meal or some other eating and convening tradition. So the erasure of those cultures, of those stories, of those opportunities, of those landmarks with food in particular is uniquely, in my view, sinister, but unfortunately effective as well.
Nader Muaddi (06:39):
I agree. I mean, food is an essential element of culture, and culture is one's identity and our identity has constantly been under attack. Israel denies that the Palestinians are a unique nation. They say that you're Arabs and there's no difference between you and the 21 other Arab countries, even though there's vast differences. And basically what you're asking for is a 22nd Arab country, and you should go live in Jordan, you should go live in Egypt, you should go live in exiles, refugees. And we say no, we are very much unique as Palestinians. We're different from Lebanese, Syrian Jordanians, and our culture and our culinary heritage really is rooted in the land and the flora and the fond of the land and the species of plants that we have available. And that's really how we've thrived on the land through centuries from the natural abundance that we've had.
(07:37)
And that's how we've developed our recipes and how we've developed our traditions. And with Atak in particular, being in this area, we've essentially been under occupation for about 500 years by different colonizers. And atak has always been a way to escape the reality. And it's sort of like when someone invites you out for a glass of attic, they're not necessarily inviting you out to drink atak. What they're doing is they're inviting you out to either develop a new friendship or new relationship with you or to deepen an existing relationship. And usually the tradition of consuming attic starts around sunset and goes on until the early morning and we put a whole bunch of dishes on the table, they called me kind of like tapas. And each one has a different flavor profile. And what we do is that keeps it interesting. And adak is the drink that we consume while transitioning from one dish to the other, so as to reset and refresh the palette so as to get the most out of the dishes on the table at the same time. Of course, it helps you unwind and relax and forget the daily stresses of life and to really connect with people on a deeper level and to forget everything that's going around in life, to slow down and to focus on the simple pleasures of being around good company and good food and good environment, and just basking in the pleasures that we do have and not taking for granted what we have or not being, let's say, overburdened with the political situation and forgetting the blessings that we have. So yeah.
Stephen Satterfield (09:12):
Wow. Just from a logistical perspective, can you help us understand what it takes for you to actually produce a rock under the current environment in terms of procuring the grape, moving the product? Kind of bring us into your world.
Nader Muaddi (09:31):
Yeah. I mean this year with the grape harvest, we were lucky because the grape harvest was before October 7th. We finished post October 7th. It would've been impossible to harvest the grapes to when October 7th happened. It was the beginning of all of harvest. And for us in Palestine, the most abundant fruit tree is the olive trees. It's our number one crop that we cultivate. Number two is the grapevine, essentially. I mean, during the harvest, people haven't been able to reach their trees or olive groves simply because either you're going to run into Israeli soldiers who have a license to kill, they can commit extra judicial killings and no one is held accountable. Or you have Israeli settler lynch mobs who are outright proactively seeking Palestinians to basically kill and to drive off their land and so has to steal their land. And in this all of harvest, basically settlers have launched a campaign of going out and basically they're using things like Telegram and WhatsApp and they have their own groups.
(10:36)
So it's become very organized. It's not at all random, it's very systematic and very much the state turns a blind eye to it. They want to have a lack of accountability to create an environment of impunity because the settlers, in essence, what they're doing is they're creating plausible deniability for the state. They serve as a private military contractor to drive people off their land without the state necessarily being held for their actions. The state can only say these are the acts of a few individuals. They don't represent the state. But what they've been doing is they've been carrying out a campaign of essentially terrorizing people, cutting down their olive trees, burning their olive trees, getting bulldozers and uprooting their olive trees, harvesting their olive trees and stealing their crops, which fits an annual harvest. You lost one year's income in that harvest. And yeah, thousands of trees were either damaged or thousands of trees were either their crop was or yield was looted. I mean, I don't want to say luckily, but I mean in our case, I mean because we harvest the grapes in September, we got by. It's not at all the land of opportunity. It's the land of obstacles and it's not easy to run a business here.
Stephen Satterfield (11:44):
So you're saying that essentially there are settler lynch mobs who are intentionally and strategically running farmers and Palestinians off of their land with complete impunity from the government?
Nader Muaddi (12:05):
Correct. And it's even worse now because since October 7th, while the international community has been focused and all their attention is focused on Gaza and rightfully so, settlers in the West Bank saw it as an opportunity to basically run amok and carry out a bunch of strategic initiatives that they've wanted to carry out for years but have been unable to because of diplomatic pressure on the state. But now, while international attention has been focused on Gaza, they've actually, since October 7th, completely wiped out 21 Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Basically just wiped them off the map by running into these villages, pulling the men out of their houses, stripping them naked brutally, beating them in front of their wives and children burning their houses while they're inside it, burning their property, damaging their property, and basically threatening them saying that if you don't leave within 24 hours, we will kill you all. And since October 7th, 21, Palestinian villages in the West Bank have been completely erased. And the longer this worst protracted, the longer that will continue to happen. Initially OS three, then it was seven, then it was 15, now it's 21, and every week there's another two or three that are being added to the list.
Stephen Satterfield (13:16):
Just for scale, how large are these villages and what can you say, if anything at all, about the displacement as in where do they go? They've lost their homes, their ways of life. As you say, all of our attention right now is on Gaza. Where are Palestinians in the West Bank who are being run off of their land? Where are they running to in this moment?
Nader Muaddi (13:38):
So basically, I mean, the West Bank and Gaza constitute 22% of historic Palestine. In 1948, we lost 78% of our historic homeland. And then in 1967, Israel occupied the remaining 22% in West Bank and Gaza of the 22% in the West Bank, there's three areas. There is areas A, B, and C. 62% of the West Bank is area C. Area C is under full Israeli military control, security control and administrative control. So they're in charge of things like issuing building permits, which they never do. They're constantly demolishing Palestinian homes on the premise of Palestinians not having building permits even though they refuse to issue them. And essentially what Israel's trying to do is to annex area C because if they're successful in annexing area C, they will seize 62% of the West Bank, but at the same time, they will kill the viability of the establishment of the Palestinian state.
(14:36)
They don't want the Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They don't want a two state solution because they rather take the land because they're power hungry. And at the same time, they don't want a one state solution because they us Palestinians to be a cancer. They call us a demographic threat. If we were to be incorporated into their state and given equal rights, then we would become equal citizens. They would be afraid that we would take control of government. Zionism is all about the creation of a Jewish state. So they decide that since there is no two state, there is no one state, they want to create an apartheid system where we have these ban tostan. Gaza is an open air prison, but there's a bunch of open air prisons in the West Bank, and basically they want to drive us out of area C into areas A and B, into these isolated camps where if you were to remove area C, it would look like an archipelago of islands isolated from one another.
(15:29)
And essentially since October 7th, for the last eight and a half weeks, we've been stuck in these camps. I haven't left Behan for eight weeks. I can't leave Behan. If I do, I have to take some really sketchy roads. And there's always a risk of running into Israeli settlers or soldiers that could be a deadly run. So one chooses to avoid it. And now because post-OC October 7th, Israel has an army of conscripts and they've called up 360,000 reservists. Many of the people who've been called up for active duty are these ideologically fanatical, fundamental Israeli settlers. And they were given now uniforms and tactical vests and M sixteens to basically serve in the army, but they haven't been deployed in Gaza, they're still in the West Bank now they're carrying out the same hate crimes, but now they have all the military tactical gear to make those eight crimes even that much more worse.
Stephen Satterfield (16:22):
I know this is probably not easy for you to talk about, it's not easy to listen to, but I do want to make sure that your story, that your circumstance is heard because as you know, we know particular in Gaza right now, it is just so difficult and increasingly not safe for media to be transmitted or any kind of presence at all in this moment. I'm listening to what you're saying and it sounds so similar to me, to the stories that I heard growing up in the South, growing up as the son of a plantation here in Georgia that was cleared to plant cotton and eradicated Muskogee Creek people eradicated Cherokee Creek people in order to steal Africans and grow cotton and my ancestors and our native ancestors, and those stories are all in the soil that made me and raised me. And it is part of why it does inform a unique kind of sympathy that I possess with respect to not only this situation with Palestine, but with any oppressed people in populations in which the dynamics of power and force and violence and occupation are so unforgivable.
(17:59)
There is no world in which what is happening is justified. And I believe that because I recognized the language and the tactics from how I was raised, and part of what we did, our tradition as black Americans was to create a kind of green book, a kind of whisper network underground railroad. When you were talking about moving through these sketchy back roads, it kind of reminded me of how we had to move here as black people. Do you have your own community networks and resources that afford you all in intelligence or protection as you're trying to make it through the situation?
Nader Muaddi (18:44):
We're resilient people. This is nothing new. The situation gets worse, I would say, in terms of frequency and intensity of the attacks, but the attacks have always been there. This isn't the first war in Gaza. I would say there's at least been five wars in the past, maybe decade, I don't know off hand right now. Settler violence, it's always been a thing. Killings and arrests and detentions by the Israeli army have always been around. I mean, essentially we try just to live. Everyone tries to care for their own, essentially. That's what we're doing. But I mean, the community is very closely knit. People look out for one another. For us, we say this concept of Sam, we call it, which is like steadfastness, and it means to exist as to resist. They consider us a demographic threat and they want to push us off the land because they want to seize it.
(19:26)
So as long as we can remain on the land and continue to thrive off the land and preserve our culture and live the way our forefathers have lived on this land and help provide as much as we can for the generation to come for us, I mean that's in its own essentially resisting to the whole concept of the Zionist agenda. So I mean, we essentially just try to look out for our kids, just try to make sure that they can go to school, make sure they try to isolate them as much as possible. The other day there were fighter jets flying around in the sky. My daughter's asking what it is I was telling you about Santa Claus. He's coming soon. So it's things like that, just trying to isolate them from what's happening, not letting them know and trying to preserve their innocence and within this abnormal situation to give them a normal childhood and to give them good memories so that way they can love this place as we do and continue to want to stay here and live here and resist this very coercive environment, aim to push us off the land.
Stephen Satterfield (20:29):
Yeah. And how are you feeling right now?
Nader Muaddi (20:33):
I mean, for me, I feel fortunate. Yeah, I feel like I'm locked up in a cage. I can't leave Bethlehem. You ask me about how it's to run a business here. I can't distribute locally at all, leave my city so mean. The business is a complete standstill. But I mean for me, that's nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza, what's happening in these communities, these small villages and area C, at least I don't have soldiers busting down my doors. I don't have to worry about if I go to bed tonight while I wake up without a house tomorrow or while I die. My sleep am avoiding situations where I can potentially be targeted by settlers. So I mean, for me, I feel fortunate. I feel I'm in a much better situation than others. So yeah, it's a very depressing situation. I mean, I feel like we've always been on this trajectory from bad to worse.
(21:22)
For me, I've sort of come to terms with that. That's how it is here. I don't see peace on the horizons, not in my lifetime unfortunately. And I've come to terms with that. This is the reality of the situation. This is I guess the curse of the land. If you want to live here, you got to deal with it. And that's how I've come to grips with it. I take it as something normal, something that comes as a given. If you constantly think about it, it's very depressing, and your mind will take you places you don't want to go. So you'd rather just live life, go out, have a cup of coffee with your friend, take your kids to go play football or something. Just try and pretend it's not there. And at the end of the night you catch up with the news, you see what's happening if something happens in area where you just want to call them up and check up on it, make sure they're okay, see if they need anything. But yeah, there's not much we can do. We're not in a situation of power by any means to do something. More often than not, those who try to do something end up being killed.
Stephen Satterfield (22:48):
As Nasser mentioned in our conversation, the grape growing season had just finished prior to October 7th. However, the olive season was only just beginning. I spoke with Nasser Abufarha, the owner of Canaan Palestine, to learn more about how he was dealing both personally and managing as a business owner.
Nasser Abufarha (23:19):
Olive oil is one of the agricultural products that we have surplus abundant in our health in Palestine, and it's a very important crop for Palestinian communities. And number one, it's a life source. It's food security, very important economically in that the most distributed crop, more than 200,000 families actually cultivate olives. Probably half of that make substantial parts of their income from the olive orchard. So it's a very significant grassroots, I would say, crop that's very well distributed in its ownership and it's culturally significant. These olive trees are ancient and there is a lot of our culture have grew and developed through agricultural activities. And the health of the West Bank are all olive orchard and terraces, and a lot of our cultural life has been intertwined with agriculture. So there is parallels in the farming activities and our cultural heritage in a way. They mirror our rootedness in the land and especially we have olive trees that are thousands of years old.
(24:32)
These have been planted by past generations killed for and have fed multiple generations over millennia. So they connect us with our past, with our cultural heritage, and we maintain them in the same ways. The lifeline that connect us with the land, they occupy a very important space in our cultural life and their preservation is very important. And without the economic viability for the farmers to continue to serve them, that preservation will not be viable. Strength of the olive tree is in part its relationship to the Palestinian farm. It's that service that the farming communities, these sustainable traditions of caring for the trees and the land and pruning the trees every year and every few years, an aggressive pruning to make the tree youth again, what allows the tree to live this long? So to me, it was a huge threat to see some farmers are not capable to sustain their life and caring for these olive trees because the markets are not there. The way to market is being hindered and blocked.
Stephen Satterfield (25:44):
I was really struck by the volume, the number of farmers who are growing olives, 200,000 families or farmers, which is really an astonishing amount in my mind as someone from the states and knowing how unfortunately disconnected so many of us are from our agrarian heritage, our agrarian roots. And so understanding its role not only as a way of life, but the cultural importance as well. And as you're talking about the need for preservation, it should also be made clear what the greatest threats to these olive orchards, these olive trees, some of which are thousands of years old. What is the greatest threat to the tradition and way of life?
Nasser Abufarha (26:41):
Well, a direct threat from political expansion of the state of Israel through Iraq. Israeli settlements in the midst of our orchard, Israeli settlements are surrounding Jerusalem. These are olive countries. They are throughout the concentrated between NA and Ramah and area Cal area. These are all olive country. We don't have intense farming, but all you can see, because we have biodiversity and it's extensive farming, but where these settlements are erected, a lot of olive trees being chopped and destroyed beyond the erection of the settlements. There are settler roads, bypass roads that are made through the olive orchard. And there are security zones for the settlements where farmers are barred from servicing olive trees in their traditional means because it's those sustainable traditional means that allow the olive trees to sustain their life for this long. So that's the direct threat of the occupation. And another threat is the modern move towards agro industry rather than agriculture.
(27:56)
And the agro industry go into monoculture intensive farming, and we have plantations of olives in Spain and Turkey, in Tunisia and other parts of the world in Australia. And those are run by capitalized and subsidized companies that mechanized totally and produced olive oil at a lower price point that makes it difficult for family farming to survive. And this is one other aspect in themselves. They are human legacy that are still there, alive and feeding us, and we should preserve them to learn from them. And the cultural carriers of the traditions that cared for them all these years are the communities that serves them. And now with the conflict with the occupation, both are under threat. The trees and the cultural communities that have this cultural heritage of allowing these trees to live this long. So it's multidimensional threat really, that we are hoping to shed light on and empower through market access,
Stephen Satterfield (29:07):
Multidimensional threats. Gosh, it's just so hard to imagine even being capable of destroying a 5,000 year old tree, as you're saying, such a testament to all of the many, many generations of humans who have been in relationship with nature, with the ways of life. You said you were born in Janine. At what point did your hometown become occupied and what has this experience been like for you over the course of your life because this is part of your life?
Nasser Abufarha (29:45):
Absolutely. I mean, I don't know life really without occupation. I was three years old when Israel occupied the West Bank. I'm at the edge of the West Bank. I experienced the last also through my father's eyes. My father lost half of his land in 1948 when Israel was founded in Palestine at the time. So half of our land was taken by Israel, and that loss was carried by my father and my mother, who are farmers who have lost half of their land across the fence with olive groves and citrus groves and vegetable farming. And while growing up here, I also suffered a lot of political dominations as boys going to the school. The soldiers are in the street of Janine and intimidating us and multiple times have suffered beatings and arrests by the Israeli army when I was youngster. And you probably hear in the news what's going on in ine, and these are episodes of RAID coming to the city and they interfere with people's life and the city life, the large scale, especially in the last couple of months during the Gaza War.
Stephen Satterfield (30:56):
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. And for people who may not understand specificity of what you're describing, when you talk about a raid coming into your town, what does that actually mean?
Nasser Abufarha (31:11):
Really it's difficult to understand their behavior because they supposedly come in to look for some people they call militant or resistance members, but they do occupy houses of random people. They hold the residents of the house in a room and they utilize the house as a sniper spot or planning spot, and they damage rates. They average some shops. They lately have been the first thing they come, they occupy and surround the entrances to all hospitals. If there are people who are in need of medical attention and service, they cannot reach the hospital. People are terrified and horrified with the experiences of fear, and people were totally horrified with the activities. In the last two months, every monument in Janine was destroyed. There was a watermelon, there was an arm hold in a stem of weight that was destroyed. So regardless of whether the monument is anything related to resistance or just for cultural life, they are destroyed.
(32:22)
There is a horse that was built after the Interfa in 2002 built utilizing scrub metal from the destruction of the Janine refugee camps, some European Danish I believe. Artists built a horse with the youth of the camp as a symbol of overcoming, and they took that horse away with them. They took it out of the circle where it was erected and they took it away. So these kinds of behavior, I think they are in a way trying to break the people as the spirits of the people, our survival as a nation, this it as a threat. That's the problem.
Stephen Satterfield (33:03):
Wow. So what you're saying is while the world's attention is rightfully and understandably focused on what's happening in Gaza, what is happening in long occupied West Bank is violent and horrific, presumably lethal.
Nasser Abufarha (33:26):
Absolutely. So Stephen, you are correct. It's very lethal, of course, what's happening in Gaza. To me, the savagery beyond imagination, we wouldn't have thought in modern day life something like this can happen, but also what's happening all over domination of Palestinian communities, regardless where they are. There was bank in Gaza or some of it even in Palestinian villages in Israel, the campaigns to corrupt and demoralize and break the will of people and deform the people. These are campaigns. They're not haphazard. They are sometimes implemented through state planning and sometimes implemented through policies of restrictions and sometimes implemented through rates and demoralization, and I think they're very lethal because the strongest thing is societal being together. The breakdown of society is the end game that they're after, and that's the most lethal I think.
Stephen Satterfield (34:26):
Thank you for sharing this. I really can't imagine where you are right now mentally and emotionally, and as I said, having this reality be such a prominent part of your life, really, truly my heart goes out to you, Nasser and your entire family. Thank you. Round the story part in particular, one of the most heartbreaking parts of what's happening right now is that even the word Palestine has been made to be a bad word, and that symbol of the watermelon, as you say, being the thing that is under threat really does say so much in the name of power and story and erasure and resilience. So from lived experience and anthropological perspective, do you have any thoughts about how story is being used to either erase your people or your culture or how story has been used to obfuscate or consolidate power?
Nasser Abufarha (35:37):
Certainly Stephen. I mean, this is a big topic in Palestine and Israel, violent warfare. We also have been undergoing a very violent cultural warfare. Symbiotic warfare of symbols, denying our history, deleting our history and our presence and as you said, attaching negative intonation to the word Palestine and Palestinian and capturing our cultural heritage in food and embroidery, in symbols and in names of towns and making kingdom them their own. That's all part of cultural warfare, I would say. We are disenfranchised in Israel, we're disenfranchised in Palestine. That denial of a space for Palestinians to express themselves, to be able to tell their stories freely to the world or to themselves even. We are all constantly being bombarded by impulses from the occupation to respond. So we can't live our own experience to articulate our life. It's a very difficult struggle to, nevertheless, that's why I see the work that we do focus on life and investing in life and the life of the farmers. We can't pretend that the occupation isn't there, but invest in life and preserve our cultural heritage and our land, our relationship to the land through the olives and other crops. We have multiple crops that we now have expanded to in order to mitigate this multi-front threats that we are facing through the occupation.
Stephen Satterfield (37:27):
So what are some of those other crops that you're growing?
Nasser Abufarha (37:30):
We reintroduced land raised wheats, ancient wheats of Palestine, and we produce maul and freaky and burgle from these wheats. These are ingredients, meals from Palestine, traditional from wheat products. We also grow almonds. Our farmers grow a whole range of grains aside from what we work with. They grow a lot of legumes and other fruit trees in between the olive trees. You see, our olive trees are like permaculture, so we have multiple crops in the olive trees like apricots, almonds and plums and apples and carrots and even spice like sumac.
Stephen Satterfield (38:09):
Nasser, you're making me so hungry right now. I'm imagining all of this on a spread on a table and wow, what an elite food culture.
Nasser Abufarha (38:22):
Absolutely. It's a very, very rich food culture here. Of course, the flagship of it is the olives and the olive trees, but we do say in Palestinian culture, wheat and olive oil are the fix of the house. So for us, if we have wheat and olive oil, we have our food security, we have our main stables. Palestine is a very rich agricultural region. Also, today we're looking at regenerative agriculture and sustainability, and we have questions about the viability of planet earth to continue to sustain our lives. I look at these examples and ecosystems and relations between the vegetations, the animals, and the community of farmers that live on them. I find these are cultural treasures for the human community, just for Palestine to preserve and draw from and learn from.
Stephen Satterfield (39:13):
No question. No question. I completely agree with that. I'm very curious as a Palestinian American working in food and agriculture, what your thoughts are not just around cultural appropriation broadly, but specifically with Palestinian cuisine, with the state of Israel, we don't really see Palestinian restaurants per se, in the US especially over the last, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years or so, a suite of Israeli restaurants, extremely prominent cookbooks, which everyone knows
Nasser Abufarha (39:52):
A projection of fear on Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans to actually express their culture. And you cannot see Palestine or Palestinian cuisine, and that's the fear of the market or some people who are offended by the word Palestine and might give you a bad review or a hard time as a restaurateur, a restaurant owner. I see a little bit, this is changing in America, and I'm hopeful especially see a lot of change in young America, in the young voices in America where they acknowledge things for the way they are and they are seeking to know the information themselves. And that's promising because I think Israel in many ways, hiding by capturing the narrative in America and capturing the narrative in America excluding us, and it's a narrative that basically puts the Palestinians only as political agents, political actors, and for the most part in a negative sense, hardly Palestinians are introduced, are artisan producers, are crafters or alone or producers of cultural acts or cultural heritage. And without having the freedom, share our product, share our art, share our cuisine and cultural heritage and the stories that come with all of this, how every meal developed, I looked at our culture all stems from growing food and making food, and that's life, and that has been missing because there wasn't a room for it to be even shared in America. It was pushed down.
Stephen Satterfield (41:40):
It's just so wild to me that you can put the name of a nation in front of a dish and be like, boom, now it's American. Yeah, I really appreciate your insight on that. Could not agree more. It's so overt that it ought to be studied, and this is why I want to raise it. You're right. The only relationship that I can just speak from the perspective of the US that we really have to Palestine is through a politicized lens. There is no real humanity. They're either terrorists or refugees and what is lost and what is erased in the taking of land, first and foremost, then food is about the erasure of the humanity of Palestinian people, dehumanization of a subjugated people. And that the story really plays such a critical role in dehumanizing people. And so when you erase Palestinians or black people or indigenous people, it makes the violence more palpable because we weren't humans to begin with.
(43:00)
And so around matters of cultural appropriation, literally since we started Wetstone, this has been something that we've talked explicitly about, but often in a way that either the public or even sometimes other journalists have not really taken seriously. They have taken it in a way that is flippant. Oh, who has permission to cook? Who's food? You're overreacting. And we've always maintained that this erasure of culture has a cost in the real world. And I think that your story and you making that connection and us collectively making Palestine a bad word, is really just a very clear example of that.
Nasser Abufarha (43:45):
Absolutely. She couldn't agree more. I just want to say in spite of all the HEROs that we are seeing on our TV screens today, I think we take strength from this continuation of life with its cultural heritage in Palestine, and we have a lot to share in knowledge in cultural heritage and food and products. And I think the more we are connected to nature and our food source, the more content we'll be for our life. And I hope we can share these experiences with people across America, around the world when we have better times for people to visit Palestine.
Stephen Satterfield (44:27):
You are a huge inspiration for me on a personal and I'm sure to many others and really appreciate your work and your fight to live. Thank you for listening to this episode. To support these businesses, which I hope you do, you can follow MUI Distillery on Instagram at Muaddi Craft Distillery. That's MUADDI Distillery. You can also purchase olive oil from Nasser and follow them on Instagram at Canaan Palestine. That's C-A-N-A-A-N Palestine. Thank you for listening to Wetstone Audio Dispatch. I'm Stephen Satterfield. We'll see you back here soon.