AFULA, ISRAEL // In the Middle East battle
over who owns the copyright to the small balls of ground chickpea known as
felafel, tempers are almost as hot as the oil in which the patties are
deep-fried.
This week the Lebanese Industrialists’ Association announced that
it was preparing a litigation to be presented to the international courts
accusing Israel of stealing Lebanon’s trademark foods, including felafel, hummus
and tabbouleh.
“The Israelis are marketing our main food dishes as if they were
Israeli dishes,” said its president, Fadi Abboud. He added that Israel’s export
of these foods around the world had possibly cost Lebanon “tens of millions of
dollars annually”.
But David Peretz, an Israeli felafel-maker who runs the Golani
restaurant, was having none of it. “Are they joking? Felafel belongs to the
world, no one can claim it,” he said.
Mr Peretz denied Lebanon invented felafel. “It came from Egypt,
didn’t it?”
And in a reminder that Lebanon and Israel have a long history of
enmity not restricted to rival food claims, he said of his time in the Israeli
army in the early 1980s when it invaded Lebanon: “I tried the felafel there and
I can honestly say Israeli felafel is much better.”
That is unlikely to persuade Lebanon’s restaurateurs. Kamal
Mouzawak, founder of Souq El Tayeb, a farmer’s market in Beirut, said: “It’s
important that we protect our foods because they are part of our origins.”
He and other Lebanese traders are pinning their hopes on a legal
decision six years ago that awarded Greece sole right to label its cheese
product feta. The Greeks successfully argued that feta had been produced by the
country under that name for 6,000 years.
Miri Buzaglo, 32, from Tel Aviv and a
regular at the Golani restaurant when she visits her parents, laughed at the
Lebanese claim. “I thought chutzpah was an Israeli quality,” she said. “Anyway,
it doesn’t matter who invented felafel. What matters is who makes it better now,
and this place makes the best.”
Like most other Israeli felafel restaurants, Golani is kosher.
And, in a further departure from Lebanese tradition, its customers expect chips
stuffed into the pitta alongside the fritters.
In Tel Aviv, upmarket restaurants are putting their own exotic
stamp on the humble felafel with innovations that may shock purists, including a
shrimp felafel starter and a chocolate felafel dessert.
But Mr Peretz said the basic recipe was a design classic that
could not be bettered. He learnt the recipe from his father, who immigrated from
Morocco and established Golani in 1962.
He said legal action from the Lebanese did not worry him. “Let
them try to sue. I’d rather say they were hurling insults than rockets.”
A few kilometres from Afula in Nazareth, the capital of the
country’s Palestinian minority, the felafel owners were only mildly more
sympathetic to the Lebanese claim.
Ziad Nassar, who owns the Al Amal
restaurant, said his family had been selling felafel since 1960 and had a chain
of 20 restaurants throughout the country.
“The fact is the Lebanese do make better felafel than Israelis,”
he said. Nonetheless, like Mr Peretz, he was unpersuaded by the threat of legal
action. “I thought felafel came from Egypt, not Lebanon.”
Israel’s food commentators agree with them. Daniel Rogov, the
country’s best known food critic, called the Lebanese move “hilarious”.
“It’s a great PR stunt but no more than that,” he said. “Felafel
is Middle Eastern and no one can claim a copyright on it.”
Mr Rogov said the most likely inventors of felafel were the
Egyptians about 5,000 years ago, though they used fava beans rather than
chickpeas. “Beans were found in the tombs of the Pharoahs,” he said, adding in
jest: “What were they going to do with them in the afterlife if not fry them and
stick them in a sandwich.”
Although his two favourite felafel restaurants are Jewish-owned,
he said in general Arabs made better felafel than Jews.
The question of who owns felafel and hummus also provoked much
heated debate on internet talk forums in Israel.
One participant observed that the foods listed were of neither
Israeli nor Lebanese origin, but generically Arab. “I guess that would mean that
only the Arab League could sue.” Another suggested that the Israelis might
retaliate by patenting chicken soup.
But if the Lebanese are only worried about the money they are
losing to Israel in international sales of felafel, many Palestinians see the
issue in larger political terms.
Israel’s success in marketing felafel and hummus as Israeli
products, particularly in the United States and Europe, has insulted people who
feel they have been dispossessed of their homeland by Israel.
One Nazareth youth, who wished only to be known as Fadi, was on
holiday from studying at college in Britain.
“I’m paying my way by working in the evenings and at weekends in
an Israeli restaurant in London. But although the owner is Israeli, all the
staff in the kitchen making the food are Arabs.
“They took the land from us, so it doesn’t surprise me that
they’ve managed to steal our cuisine as well.”
Oded Schwartz, an Israeli living in South
Africa, has written several books on the history of Jewish food. He said it
would be interesting to see how the courts responded to the case.
“The legal precedents were established by the French when they
won the right to prevent the names of their most famous wines from being
appropriated by other winemakers. Champagne is the obvious example. British
manufacturers tried the same with cheddar cheese.”
But Mr Schwartz thought it unlikely the courts would accept
Lebanon’s case for copyrighting the names of its foods. “Felafel was an Egyptian
creation, and tabbouleh and hummus are mentioned in the Bible.”
These dishes had come to be associated with Israel because it had
been good at marketing and public relations, he said.
He added: “The Lebanese, possibly under French culinary
influence, made these dishes more sophisticated in the late nineteenth century,
but claiming ownership is more a political point than a practical matter.
Recipes are used across the Middle East and unclaimable.
“After all, what will Lebanon do after suing Israel. Sue Egypt,
Turkey and Greece too?”
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