Palestine Restaurants: Consuming the Colonial State

• In Event: Food, Theater, and Vampires: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Relationships with Israel

Abstract

In the spring of 1944, when the Middle East was still reeling from the economic consequences of World War II, Mandate Palestine's Food Controller inaugurated in Jerusalem the first two Palestine Restaurants. These Government-sponsored eateries, modelled after a British example, were meant to provide ordinary, austerity-struck civilians with "good, wholesome, simple meals at a reasonable price", to quote the PALESTINE POST. The Palestine Restaurants were enthusiastically welcomed by the public, and soon spread to other major urban centers of the land. The busiest one, in central Tel Aviv, served dishes such as goulash, macaroni and vegetable stew to more than 800 hungry city-dwellers a day.

Drawing on a variety of sources, including archival documents, press coverage, cookbooks and visual materials, this paper will revisit the story of the long-forgotten Palestine Restaurants. Central to the argument will be the notion of colonial citizenship. The masses who regularly dined at the 'Government Restaurants', as they were colloquially known, encountered the colonial state in a profoundly embodied way, practically consuming and digesting it. This was illustrative of a greater phenomenon - the shift from a traditional market-based socio-economic policy to a wartime interventionism that pushed the Mandate Government deep into the everyday lives of locals. This new form of intimate, continuous relationship between the formerly-distant Government and its subjects is what I shall call in this paper colonial citizenship.

Governmental responsibility for the social welfare of the people of Palestine was central to the configuration of wartime colonial citizenship. However, public benefits were not equally enjoyed. In the case of the Palestine Restaurants, colonial officials employed a reductionist and pre-determined understanding of local food cultures and eating habits. The result was that the Palestine Restaurants catered mainly to the needs and tastes of a specific social subset: middle class, urban, Jewish-Ashkenazi men. As the cultural politics of food in wartime Palestine demonstrate, the idea that colonial citizens have a right to consume the state was groundbreaking yet inherently fraught.

Author

• Hadas Fischer, Tel Aviv University