Bread & Salt

Sitti Jamila’s crumbling stone barn exists in the architecture of my memories; while her infinitely wrinkled, smiling face surrounded with coins is immortalized in the one photo I have of her. It has been more than a few decades now, but I’ll never forget the desiccated furry skeleton of a white cat worn into the path to the almond orchard. I would leap over it as I ran past her long unused tabun, where it still sits shrouded in shadows, overgrown with weeds and indifference to its utility. Many early summers were spent climbing up onto rusted oil barrels with cousins, stretching our growing limbs towards fuzzy green capsules filled with smooth white baby almonds, hours of cracking and peeling, and peeling again. So much work for a morsel, as with many, most, (all?) things we homosapiens have deemed food throughout our very long yet brief timeline. 

It has been 14,000 years since the oldest bread (that we know of) was fire baked on hot stones by my Natufian ancestors, a remnant of which was found only recently in an ancient hearth in the area now called the Levant.¹ Archaeologists credit these hunter gatherers of pre-Abrahamic Palestine, with using primitive sickles to harvest wild cereals—the grass family predecessors to wheats and maize—as well as with developing mortars that allowed them to produce a finer flour that eventually led to the bread of today. As one evolutionary development tends to lead to another, these technological advancements laid the groundwork for their descendants, and what would go on to become more developed and stationary agricultural societies. Natufians are believed to have developed the semi-sedentary settlements that interwove the practices of hunting and gathering with the early agricultural economy.² This interweaving occurred a few thousand years before wheat was thoroughly domesticated to become the backbone of human consumption/civilization, and several thousand years before the invention of agriculture necessitated this restructuring of human relationship to movement and the land for its sustenance. First the Natufians, then the Ghassulians, then the Canaanites—all well before the times of Abraham and the monotheism that holds wheat in a most venerable position—were milling some form of wild wheats and mixing them with other plants and vegetables, then cooking the slurry on hot stones in the precursor to the tabun oven, which itself evolved into the communal oven and gathering space of Palestinian village society.

Emmer, Triticum dicoccum, is scientifically believed to be the sole contender for the wild prototype from which the majority of wheat grown and used for human consumption globally today evolved, with the assistance of our several thousand-year-old ancestors.³ Modern emmer is found to date back to the late Neolithic period, to the Fertile Crescent. This variety was selected and cultivated, co-evolving with ruminants, agriculture, and early civilization, paving the way for human diets thousands of years into the future, to become the foundation of human culture as we know it. Today, wheat fields occupy more land globally than any other crop.⁴

Reading through descriptions of Canaanite culture and customs, it is not difficult for me to see where my own family, members of today’s Palestinian fellaheen (loosely translated as ‘peasants’) inherited their culinary mannerisms, eating traditions, and relationships and practices around wheat and breadmaking. Planting, threshing, grinding, kneeling, kneading, shaping…though thousands of years separate Canaanites from fellaheen, not even the gestures and movements have changed. The people shaped the wheat, and in turn the wheat shaped the dough, the land and the people—changing life on earth forever more. zionist mythology that originated in the late 19th century claims that Palestinians are a newly nationalistic group of Arabs who originally migrated from the Gulf, yet our DNA and cultural practices clearly exhibit our inextricable ties to this land, in an undeniable manifestation of our indigeneity, thousands of years prior to the time of the Book, or socio-linguistic Arabization to the Levant in the 7th century. The only truth to be found in this colonially distorted narrative, is that prior to European colonization, our people didn’t see the need for nations and borders upon our lands. 

For thousands of years, bread has constituted the most important food of not only the fellaheen of the Levant, but the bedouin as well. Both cultural groups, considered to be the poor people of the land, were living primarily on bread, fresh spring water, and wild foraged greens. They supplemented with dairy products and meat when available, or on special occasions. In more recent history, prior to 1948, the most esteemed bread was made of emmer wheat flour, though many fellaheen prepared their dough of emmer flour mixed with barley, or for those of even lesser means, barley alone. Meanwhile the bedouin were known for their ‘black’ bread made of the seeds of samh (Mesembryanthemum forskalei Hochst), a succulent like plant found in desert areas where they lived and grazed their herds.⁵ Bread was of utmost importance for the people in the land before and during Biblical times, and it continues to be—the average contemporary Palestinian consumes around 120 kg of bread per year.⁶

Inclinations towards a communality of resources were codified not only into cultural and religious practices, but also in the hammulah systems used in the region pre-Ottoman occupation. Also known as the masha’a system, communally owned lands were shared and rotated amongst the villagers every few years, so that everyone could try their hand at different areas of the villages’ land, each with its own variables, creating a sort of equanimity within local society.⁷ A society that was built on and around mutual ownership and communality without exploiting one another, the resources, or the land itself, was done away with initially by the Ottomans with the introduction of public laws in 1858, later by the British, then by zionists.⁸ The commons continues to be erased by US-funded Imperialism, the true enemy of any life-giving system that offers an alternative to capitalist rape and exploitation of land, labor, and resources for the profit of few, and the oppression of many.

The two main ways of preparing bread historically in Palestine, both still used in some capacity to this day, are the clay tabun oven and the convex metal saj. Throughout contemporary Palestine, there are bakeries that use modern machinery and imported wheat to serve the needs of a large population whose diet centers around bread at every meal. The traditional saj and tabun, while less efficient at meeting those needs, are still very much in use. As one walks down main market streets of cities, it is a common sight to see a young baker flipping impossibly thin dough off of pillow forms and onto the dome of the hot saj. There are now machines that replicate the bubbly indentations of the tabun, like a bread printer. In some villages, women still bake in the traditional ways for their families, while others have harnessed the power of social media to create attractions out of ovens and culinary experiences for those who see our traditional cultural practices as novelty or tourism. In my village, there is only one woman baking bread in the somewhat traditional ways; her teenage sons kick around outside with his friends, as she pulls fresh rounds of flatbread out of her modernized version of a tabun, the wall behind her tagged with the words “Just Do It.”

In the post-1967 Palestine of my teta Subha, daily chores involved walking the hills to the spring and carrying water back for her family, a common task in every household until most springs were put behind walls, dried up, or poisoned by the zionist regime. My other teta Jamila used her tabun in that now crumbling stone barn behind the single room home, where she raised nine children, to bake the bread that she would take to Jerusalem. There she would sit along the wall under the majestic Damascus Gate to the Old City and sell her fresh bread along with balady eggs, foraged herbs, and fruits she gathered as the seasons provided. Two generations later, I am forbidden to visit this same place without a special permit. I have a green ID that only allows me to travel within the illegally militarily occupied-by-”Israel” West Bank regardless of my American passport. Because of these and other restrictions: checkpoints, the Segregation wall, loss of land, the ID system, and more, there are now far fewer of these traditional women selling their fresh breads and other products along the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The explicit implications that accelerated settler colonial cultural and dietary redesign has had on the Palestinian population, when viewed from the standpoint of nutrition, genetics, and public health data regarding chronic illness amongst the people, is easily tied to the forced degradation of land relationships that previously had supported proper nutrition acquired through traditional diets. Studies of ‘ancient grains’ have shown them to be more nutrient dense and higher in protein than the wheat that is now grown in other places and imported to provide for the populations in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Bread itself has changed significantly in Palestine over these last 80 years, due to these same human-made conditions. Today, 75% of the flour consumed in Gaza is heavily processed white pastry flour imported through the UNRWA, grown in places like Ukraine, hardly resembling the wheat native to the region. Scientific analysis has shown that the more highly refined a flour is, the lower the mineral content, on top of the already degraded (in comparison to older genotypes) mineral rates of hybrid varieties.⁹ The pita or kmaj bread that is most commonly consumed in Palestine now is very different in appearance, texture, and nutritional composition than the breads being consumed only three generations ago. Emmer grains have been shown to have the highest concentrations of protein, zinc, potassium, and calcium, amongst other minerals, compared with other wheats used for flour today.

In other ways, the impulse to live life communally is still reflected in aspects of modern Palestinian society, though as settler colonialism continues to wound the land and the people, capitalism infects and amplifies the primal need for survival and acquiescence to a system that doesn’t allow space for much else. As our families were forced to transition from growing the majority of their own food to importing it, Palestinians have become the third largest export market for “Israeli” goods. Namely agricultural produce, which is inherently less expensive than domestic alternatives produced by the remaining fellaheen. The “Israeli” government ensures this by providing “Israeli” farmers with free land and water, and subsidized insurance policies for their massive agricultural endeavors, protecting them from crop failure. Of course, there are no such insurances available for Palestinian farmers, who in addition to lacking access to these financial protections, face additional barriers to agricultural inputs. For example, in the case of irrigation, not only do they have to pay for water–they are also forbidden from capturing rainwater.¹⁰

In December 2023, it was reported by the World Food Programme that 9/10 Gazans were unable to eat every day and were skipping meals for extended periods of time, while most do not have daily access to clean drinking water. The vast majority of Gazan humans and animals are at the precipice of starvation and thirst, irrespective of gender, class, or education. This violence has seen 85% of the population internally displaced due to the “Israeli” governments’ unrelenting bombing campaign that has been targeting all aspects of Palestinian life there. The people have been without cooking fuel, electricity, or even kitchens, which has spawned a renaissance wherein mutual aid initiatives have led to the construction and distribution of tabun so that families are able to cook and bake whenever they are lucky enough to have access to basic ingredients like flour or water.

This most recent “Israeli” campaign against Gazan civilians has included the systematic targeting and destruction of all of Gaza’s bakeries, mills, farmland, and the UNRWA food storage facilities that provide 2 out of every 3 bags of flour. This now eradicated bread infrastructure was the backbone of sustenance and life for the 2.2 million people who have lived under a siege and blockade by “Israel” for almost 2 decades. In the early days of this assault, when some of the bakeries were still functioning in any capacity, thousands crowded into hours-long breadlines, with most leaving empty handed, and some never leaving at all. We have since witnessed human beings scrambling to locate flour, literally and physically. Videos of neighborhoods reduced to chaos show children scraping loose flour off of asphalt streets already covered in chemical weapons residue, waste, rubble, remnants of corpses, blood, and untold filth. Many reports from Gazans have shown people making a dystopian facsimile of bread–using a flour made from animal feed–especially in the areas where “Israelis” have prevented aid from reaching at all. Now, even if one does have flour, and clean water to make dough, the search for material to fuel a cooking fire presents a new problem. Every quest for a basic resource presents mortal danger from incessant “Israeli” aerial bombing, quad-copter drones, tank shelling, and snipers, as well as the expenditure of human energy already in critically short supply due to starvation, exhaustion, and frequent illness. Many Gazans have resorted to burning solid waste or cutting down sacred olive trees, as typical fuel sources have become unavailable. 

The situation recalls the 2.5 year siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their collaborators, wherein starvation was explicitly used as a methodology for the murder of 1.5 million civilians, beginning in September 1941. For six months, the only food available to the average Russian citizen was approximately 125 g of bread per day, over 50% of which was a mixture of sawdust and other inedibles.¹¹ This blemish on recent human history has long been acknowledged as one of the most horrific crimes against humanity allowed to transpire during WW2, thought only to have been made possible because citizens of the world were not privy to the conditions and reality of human-caused suffering. We are ever hopeful as a species, to assume that the barbarism of starvation would have been left in the streets of Leningrad, over eight decades ago, never to be manifested again with such explicit desire for the death of other living things. Today, the tragic reality of our time is that the intentionally created horrors of now are perhaps worse than the horrors of then for their visibility and avoidability, ever present in the form of live streams in real time, on demand on the cursed devices we live our modern lives attached to.  All made worse by the deafening silence and purchased impotence of global governments and their disenfranchised masses, threatening an almost certain potential for future violence elsewhere, against anyone.   

The “Israeli” entity, as the occupying power in Gaza and all of Palestine, is bound to abide by International Humanitarian Law, which not only strictly prohibits the use of starvation as a method of warfare, but obligates it to appropriately provide for the needs and protection of the population which it occupies.¹² In 2018, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2417, which declared the use of starvation against civilians as a weapon of war and any denial of humanitarian access a violation of international law. Our relatives in Gaza have experienced a hyper-synthesized version of the worst that humankind has to offer, coupled with the decades of ongoing dehumanization of millions of us fueled by ignorance, racism, indifference, and the ethno-supremacist ideology of zionism. This is the impunity of the oppressor that they, and we, the oppressed, have become accustomed to. A most modern collusion in service of most archaic ends.

Food has been wielded as a weapon since the dawn of civilizations. Only the application, location, and ingredients of the recipe have changed. It has proven to be one of the most effective tools against entire cities and populations of those who are deemed ‘enemy’. Throughout history, many horrors have been linked to wheat and bread, specifically. Massacres happen because of it, and famines because it isn’t.¹³ A most malleable medium, made more effective by bread’s importance in so many human cultures. Life or death waits for whichever population is given access to or deprived of it. Bread is a weapon, the staff of life and the staff of death. Wheat is the sower and the reaper, that which sustains life, or the scythe that takes it. So much opportunity for spiritual evolution for humankind is lost in the inability to recognize that as we do to other beings—humans, plants, animals, the earth—we do to ourselves. 

In August 2022, when a young resistance fighter by the name of Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi was assassinated by the “Israeli” military in the old city of Nablus in the North of the West Bank on a weekday morning, I watched with horror, first on my phone screen, and later on television with my grandparents. A few days later I found myself, by chance, visiting the destroyed stone house where his still sticky blood was collecting the dust of the rubble left by a missile sent to kill from close range, which also destroyed the neighbor’s kitchen wall that it was launched through, as the family that lived there was held blindfolded at gunpoint. On another wall there still hung a plastic bag that held bread next to an old frying pan, and on the ground, his tactical vest and a prayer mat. Today in Gaza, the path of the martyrs comes without even this, our daily bread.