Tomer Ben Hur (R), 23, Aharon Ben Hur (C), 84 and Oz Ben Hur, 55, pose for a photograph at the Ben Hur Falafel restaurant in Tel Aviv, Israel on March 20, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

“Everything is politics,” Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain. George Orwell later offered his own variation: “All issues are political issues.”

For the more obsessive critics of Israel, however, this seems less an aphorism than an operating principle.

Because nothing Israelis do is permitted to remain non-political. Cook dinner? Stealing Palestinian cuisine. Go dancing? Engaging in fascistic escapism. Sit in an air-conditioned shelter while rockets are intercepted overhead? Evidence of a diseased national psyche.

The activity itself is almost incidental; it could be the most mundane of everyday pursuits. The ideological meaning can always be engineered afterwards.

That tendency was on vivid display in a recent New York Magazine “Grub Street” feature, in which writer Madeline Leung Coleman set out to examine the supposedly fraught politics of eating at Middle Eastern restaurants in New York.

There is, of course, a legitimate story there. Food carries history and identity. Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and Jewish cuisines overlap in numerous, sometimes complicated ways. And since Oct. 7, restaurants have – whether they like it or not – found themselves caught up in political arguments raging far beyond their dining rooms.

But reading Coleman’s piece, you would struggle to understand how that politicization actually came about, particularly when it comes to Israelis and Jews abroad, who have found themselves subjected to extraordinary levels of vitriol, hostility and collective blame for a war against Hamas being fought thousands of miles away.

She certainly invokes Oct. 7. Just not to explain what happened on that dark day.

She does not tell readers how the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust became, almost immediately, a pretext in some quarters for targeting Jews and Israelis elsewhere, or why mass murder and hostage-taking might have profoundly altered the way Israelis and Jews experienced the months and years that followed.

Instead, Oct. 7 becomes not an atrocity to be described but a chronological hinge: the dividing line between the period before and the period after people supposedly woke up to the truth about Israel.

And what truth might that be?

“Israel’s genocide.”

Not an accusation of genocide. Not an alleged genocide. Coleman repeatedly presents it in her own narrative voice as an established fact.

Nor is that the piece’s only revealing choice of language.

Elsewhere, Israel itself is described as “the land mass currently called Israel” – a remarkable formulation for a sovereign country, particularly when describing a map on which Israel has disappeared entirely beneath the words “Discover Palestine.”

That question of authenticity sits at the heart of Coleman’s treatment of Israeli cuisine: how much of what Americans came to know as “Israeli” was ever authentically Israeli in the first place?

1/9@NYMag’s “genocide” food piece isn’t an outlier.

It’s part of a bizarre genre in which ordinary Israeli life is incriminating.

Food? Theft. Dance music? Fascism. A/C + Iron Dome? Pathology. Apartments? “Gwynocide.” Turn away from a camera? Guilt. 🧵https://t.co/yGS49B0hgy pic.twitter.com/hosKePcVUg

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 11, 2026

Regarding its provenance, Coleman distills it thus: “The most popular dishes were Mizrahi, Arab, North African. Some were imported by Jewish immigrants. Many of the dishes were Palestinian.”

The implication is difficult to miss: Israeli cuisine was less a cuisine than an appropriation – take Palestinian and other Middle Eastern foods, add dishes brought by Jewish immigrants and rebrand the resulting mixture as Israeli.

More fundamentally, Coleman’s categories blur distinctions that are rather important. “Mizrahi” is not something separate from “Jewish”: Mizrahi Jews are Jewish communities with centuries-old roots across the Middle East and North Africa. Many of the very “Jewish immigrants”” she refers to were therefore the bearers of those Mizrahi culinary traditions.

Those “Jewish immigrants” did not arrive in Israel culturally empty-handed and begin rummaging through their neighbors’ kitchens. Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere brought with them deeply rooted culinary traditions developed over centuries in the Middle Eastern and North African societies of which they themselves had been a part.

Nor did they arrive in a land devoid of Jews. Jews have maintained a continuous presence there for millennia. Modern Israeli cuisine grew from the meeting of those longstanding local Jewish traditions with the cuisines brought by Jews arriving from across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

In other words, Jewish food was not some foreign ingredient suddenly introduced into an otherwise exclusively Arab culinary landscape. It was already part of the region’s history, and became still more diverse as Jewish communities from across the diaspora converged in Israel.

And that is precisely what makes the appropriation framing so strained. Many of the foods now fought over as markers of modern national identity long predate the modern national labels being imposed upon them. They developed across borders, communities and centuries, not in neatly partitioned national kitchens awaiting ownership certificates.

Curiously, Coleman’s own historical account demonstrates the problem.

She describes an earlier New York Middle Eastern food scene in which Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Muslim, Christian and Jewish cooks, restaurateurs and musicians overlapped freely. An Egyptian chef could work at an Israeli club; a Palestinian-American woman could prepare falafel for her Lebanese husband’s business.

By Coleman’s own account, this was a shared regional culinary culture – until Israeli participation in that same inheritance becomes something requiring an appropriation analysis.

The asymmetry is revealing. Palestinian associations with regional food are treated as evidence of authentic inheritance. Jewish Middle Eastern traditions are something “imported.” And when those traditions become part of Israeli cuisine, the result is rendered suspiciously artificial – “self-fashioned” – rather than what national cuisines everywhere are: products of migration, geography, inheritance, exchange and adaptation.

Coleman even manages to enlist American foreign policy in explaining restaurant trends. Israel, readers are reminded, was “richly funded and supported by our own,” while Israeli chefs supposedly “cruised free” of the prejudices facing other Middle Eastern restaurateurs and consequently “gave themselves permission to be expensive.”

Naturally, no evidence is offered that this sweeping theory of Israeli geopolitical and cultural privilege actually explains why these particular restaurants succeeded, or why their chefs were able to charge more.

The asymmetry becomes even clearer once diners enter the picture.

Coleman treats Palestinian political expression in restaurants as an understandable assertion of identity. Palestinian flags, Palestinian wine and overt expressions of solidarity are framed through community, dignity and human rights.

Something changes when the solidarity is Israeli.

Jewish patrons supporting Israeli restaurants become objects of ridicule. Israeli establishments are described as “safe spaces for Zionism.” Pro-Israel customers allegedly create a “bloodthirsty environment.” One former employee concludes that working at an Israeli restaurant was simply “propaganda.”

Palestinian political expression is contextualized and humanized. Israeli political expression is treated as something suspicious, sinister or faintly absurd.

Ayat provides perhaps the clearest illustration of that double standard. The Palestinian restaurant’s menu displays a map on which Israel disappears entirely beneath the words “Discover Palestine.” Yet Coleman describes the gesture only as “combative.”

Readers are not told that Ayat had previously placed “From the River to the Sea” on its menu – a slogan envisioning a Palestinian state across the entire territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean, and one long embraced by Hamas as a rallying cry for eliminating Israel and the Jews living there.

That omission is particularly striking in a feature supposedly examining how restaurants communicate political identity and ideology.

Nor does the documented targeting of Israeli restaurants receive anything like the narrative weight afforded to supposedly objectionable Zionist diners.

The article does acknowledge that Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, but remarkably little is made of it. Miriam in Park Slope was daubed with “GENOCIDE CUISINE” and “ISRAEL STEALS CULTURE.” Effy’s Cafe was splashed with paint and targeted with messages accusing its customers of supporting genocide. Other Israeli establishments have faced harassment, graffiti and organized efforts to drive them out of business.

The piece even notices that some Israeli restaurateurs have begun describing their food more generically as “Mediterranean.” Coleman briefly entertains one rather obvious explanation: “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted.”

Given the vandalism she has already acknowledged, one might imagine that possibility deserved serious consideration.

Instead, Coleman gives the final word to Palestinian restaurateur Jumana Bishara, who supplies an explanation rather more congenial to the article’s thesis: Israeli chefs are distancing themselves from their national identity because “their state is genocidal.”

“That says it all,” Bishara concludes.

It certainly says something. Just perhaps not what Coleman intended.

She saves one final vignette for the conclusion of the article.

At Huda, servers were placing GAZA stickers with customers’ checks. Coleman describes watching one diner receive his, recoil and say: “I don’t want this!”

There are several conceivable explanations for such a reaction. Perhaps he disagreed politically. Perhaps he had some personal connection to Oct. 7. Perhaps – radical thought – he simply did not want unsolicited political material served alongside the bill.

But Coleman closes instead with the restaurant’s interpretation: that such diners have “othered” Arabs and “freak out” when they discover the restaurant they entered is not Israeli.

And there the article ends.

It is an oddly perfect conclusion to a piece supposedly examining the politicization of food.

But Coleman’s feature belongs to a much broader tendency: a growing genre of commentary in which Israeli identity itself is treated as morally suspect, and therefore even the most inconspicuous acts of everyday life cease to be ordinary.

The Pathologizing of Israeli Identity

The subject can be food, music, housing, air conditioning or even the direction someone happens to face in a photograph. The method remains remarkably consistent. Begin with the assumption that something is fundamentally wrong with Israelis, then interpret whatever they happen to be doing as evidence of it.

Haaretz writer Ori Morad recently managed this with air conditioning. A/C, Israel’s defensive Iron Dome, reinforced rooms and even protective netting over children’s playgrounds are, he argues, symptoms of a “bubble-boy country” retreating into a national “cocoon.” Rockets simply come “from Gaza”; deadly drones “from Lebanon.” The terrorists firing them are irrelevant.

That absence is what makes the inversion possible. Israelis protecting themselves and their children from incoming explosives are transformed from civilians responding to attack into evidence of a defective national psychology. Morad eventually dispenses with subtlety altogether and declares that “Most Israelis” simply want to remain comfortable while “Gaza is wiped off the map” and southern Lebanon is destroyed.

Current Affairs found pathology in something still more innocuous: electronic dance music. Its treatment of the Nova festival dwelled on drugs, tattoos, decadence and supposed cultural appropriation; Hamas terrorists became “fedayeen,” the massacre “crossfire,” and Israeli electronic music eventually acquired a supposed “fascistic utility” before being compared with culture in Nazi Germany.

The Guardian‘s Arwa Mahdawi achieved something similar with an advertisement for luxury apartments in Herzliya. Gwyneth Paltrow’s participation was “Gwynocide.” A development featuring swimming pools, Pilates and wine rooms was rhetorically marched through Gaza until Mahdawi arrived at “The Zone of Interest” and Auschwitz, before imagining future Israeli resorts “built on mass graves.”

From Gwyneth to “Gwynocide”🧵 pic.twitter.com/uSzkpEkf7q

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 12, 2026

Online arts magazine Hyperallergic perhaps offered the purest distillation. Israeli soldiers photographed with their backs to the camera were said to be making a “tacit admission of guilt.” In the same article, concealing one’s face from facial-recognition technology was described as potentially “paramount” to protecting civil rights.

Taken together, these pieces reveal something more corrosive than hostility toward a particular Israeli government.

They turn Israeliness into an explanatory category of guilt.

The mundane becomes sinister by association. Normal life becomes evidence of callousness. Self-preservation becomes pathology. Culture becomes propaganda. Privacy becomes culpability.

And once that framework is adopted, it becomes virtually impossible to falsify.

The Israeli is placed in an impossible position because innocence itself has effectively been removed as an available category. Whatever he does can be reinterpreted as proof of the accusation that preceded it.

This rhetoric performs a broader delegitimizing function. A government can be voted out. A policy can be reversed. A war can end. But if the defect resides in Israeli identity itself, no change in policy can cure it.

And the boundary between “Israeli” and “Jew” is hardly impermeable. The same framework readily migrates to Jews abroad who eat at Israeli restaurants, express solidarity with Israelis or simply refuse to repudiate the Jewish state. What begins as criticism of government policy becomes an indictment of a society, and from there an indictment of identity.

That is the more disturbing pattern behind these otherwise absurd examples.

Israelis are not merely accused of doing wrong. They are increasingly depicted as uniquely incapable of doing anything innocently: their culture is stolen, their pleasures decadent, their homes obscene, their self-defense pathological.

First comes the verdict.

Then comes the search for the falafel, rave, air conditioner, apartment or photograph that can be made to prove it.

At that point, guilt attaches not to what Israelis do, but to what they are. That is pathologization – and ultimately, delegitimization.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.