Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry

Recently, reading through the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in their introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider preparing meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.

I was flipping through rather than scrolling through news updates about the Middle East. I found comfort in the co-authors’ attitude of community, especially when many conversations on social media, in mainstream U.S. coverage, and in real life threaten to turn the lost lives of the Israel-Hamas war into abstractions.I quietly leave the room whenever the is casually discussed at work or among friends, because I do not want to treat death as a watercooler topic of conversation. I am the son of Palestinian immigrants, and I