How Being Civilizationally Malleable Works for Both Zionist and Chinese Restaurants

In his The Bible and Zionism, Dr. Nur Masalha argues over and over that the founding leaders of the State of Israel, despite being a generally irreligious bunch, attempt to leverage religious language to advance the idea that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the world's Jewish population, while Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, are considered squatters who must be evicted to right a historical wrong. By evoking passages from the Old Testament that discuss how the ancient Israelites defeated the Canaanites and the Philistines, the Zionist leaders somehow managed to form an alliance with Christian evangelicals.

A central theme in this religiously tinged argument, Dr. Masalha points out, is that the land of Israel is devoid of civilization without the hard work of the Jews to improve its barrenness. By pointing to the negative portrayal of both the Canaanites and the Philistines as ignorant and backward in the Bible, the Zionist leaders and their religious supporters argued that the modern Arabs, in the same way, are simply incapable of realizing the full potential of the land. The underlying racism of the argument manages to achieve moral high ground through religious evidence.

It does not take the literary analysis of Dr. Masalha for readers to comprehend just how far such an argument is from the truth on the ground. In the many centuries during which Jews made up a tiny portion of the overall population in what is today the State of Israel, the local population still thrived in its own ways. The Bible and Zionism only needed to cite a few examples of Zionist settlers exterminating entire Arab villages and uprooting centuries-old fig and olive plantations, to illustrate that pre-Jewish Palestine was far from barren, in terms of its population, economy, and civilization.

Indeed, Dr. Masalha did not bother to extensively detail just how much of the modern Hebrew culture of Israel is created using ideas borrowed from the Arab population it is trying so hard to displace. To create a unified Israeli identity that is different from the European/American one they left behind, Zionist leaders not only resurrected Hebrew as a national language and discouraged the use of German-based Yiddish, but also invented an entire culinary tradition for Israel that is not based on Jewish cuisines of New York and Berlin, but very similar to the national foods of Baghdad and Beirut.

While Dr. Masalha attributes the Zionist success largely to its ability to attract support from the religious elements of American political power through references to the Bible, it could be argued that such civilizational flexibility that the Zionist leaders displayed can be just as pivotal. But by changing the language, the names, and food to create a more-or-less invented ancient tradition, the Zionists convinced outsiders that they were not simply a Western implant in the Middle East but a localized people who, despite centuries of living elsewhere, culturally belong to the region.

That cultural malleability is recognizable in entirely different contexts as well. My recent trip to a Chinese buffet in Malta startled me with just how popular localized versions of the cuisine can become. Playing straight into the local affinity for fried and heavily savory dishes, the restaurant, to my eyes, almost entirely reinvented Chinese dishes, heavily featuring gooey sauces and deep-fried pieces to a full house of non-Chinese diners. Just as localized Chinese food has become a part of indigenous Japanese cuisine, it is possible to imagine localized Chinese cuisines, after even just a few decades of popularity, being an essential part of Maltese traditions.

Selective localization to become rooted but remaining somewhat different works for both Zionism and Chinese food. To outside observers, Zionist culture is different from both the Jewish culture of the West and the Arab culture it displaces, just as Chinese food in Malta is different from the ones elsewhere. But for those experiencing it firsthand, whether the Jewish settlers, the Palestinian Arabs, or the Maltese patrons of the local Chinese restaurants, such objective differences mean very little: from their point of view, localization is only a tool for advancing practical interest such as occupation or revenue.

When thinking this way, defining who is "civilized" and who is not, as the Bible and Bible-wielding Zionists and evangelicals do in such black-and-white ways, no longer matters. Rather, how to create one's own definitions of civilization in practical ways that attract a greater number of supporters, as both the Zionists and Chinese restauranteurs in Malta have done, is much more important in winning over the competition by finding external supporters. Culture and religion may be important, but being in flexible on how to express them, rather than what they are in absolute terms, determine success.