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Oct. 7 nearly derailed Berlin’s famous Israeli-Palestinian restaurant. But it’s back in business.
(JTA) — On the morning of Oct. 7, as the horrors unfolding in southern Israel reverberated through mobile screens and live-streamed videos across the world, a hummus restaurant in Germany closed its doors.
Behind Kanaan, a restaurant in northeastern Berlin serving up hummus, salads and falafel, is a rare Israeli-Palestinian partnership. Oz Ben David grew up in Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. His Palestinian co-owner Jalil Dabit comes from Ramle, a mixed city in central Israel, and has family in the West Bank and Gaza.
The restaurant has won a reputation for both its hummus — called by some “the best” in Berlin — and its message. It hosts belly dancing parties alongside employment programs for Syrian refugees and transgender Berliners. Ben David and Dabit frequently speak in public forums about coexistence.
But after Ben David’s family and friends were attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, he could not imagine walking back into work. He called Dabit in a fit of anger.
“I felt full of rage, I felt like that’s it — it’s stupid, everything I’ve worked on in the past years is stupid,” recalled Ben David. “I was giving lectures nonstop and getting invited to talk about peace, and then I lost it, I just felt like it didn’t exist in me anymore.”
Dabit, who travels between Berlin and Ramle, was in Ramle when Hamas attacked. He cried on the phone as he heard Ben David’s voice distorted by pain and vengefulness.
“He was really not the Oz that I know,” Dabit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I let him talk — he wanted to close the restaurant, and let’s do this to Gaza, let’s do that, all the angry things that people say when they are in tough times.”
Dabit agreed to temporarily close the restaurant, but he called every day to check on his partner. As the only Palestinian child in an Israeli school during the Second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, he witnessed Hamas bombings of buses and targets in the middle of Israeli cities. He knew intimately the machinations of terror and how Israeli children were taught to hate an enemy. And he believed that if Ben David vented his anger, he would leave it behind.
“He had the tools to understand and believe that I would come back to myself,” said Ben David.
On Oct. 13, he reopened Kanaan. The restaurant has filled with customers showing support for the Israeli-Palestinian duo, some seeking an alternative to deep social rifts over the war in Israel and Gaza.
Those divisions have spilled into the world of food and turned hummus into a political weapon. Some groups accuse Israeli chefs of “colonizing” Palestinian food, while others argue that Israeli cuisine merges recipes from the Jewish diaspora with Middle Eastern influences. In the United States, nearly 900 chefs, food authors and farmers have signed a pledge to boycott Israel-based food businesses. Other groups, such as the Philly Palestine Coalition, have boycotted restaurants that are not Israeli-owned but claim to serve Israeli food.
When Ben David and Dabit started Kanaan, they were less interested in a peace mission than in bringing the best hummus to Berlin. They met through mutual friends in the city and discovered that many German food suppliers imported supplies neither from Israel nor the Palestinian territories, preferring to avoid the politically sensitive region altogether and get their tahini from Turkey. But to Ben David’s and Dabit’s minds, the best hummus came from the West Bank.
So they established Kanaan in 2015, billed as a vegan Middle Eastern restaurant. But they soon learned that their mere existence as Israeli-Palestinian partners was divisive. When they opened, thousands of Berliners protested the “normalization” of a Palestinian working with an Israeli, while thousands of others showed up to support their business.
“We understood we were creating something really special,” Ben David told JTA.
The two decided to leverage their platform. Over the past eight years, they have used the popular restaurant as a space to promote a peaceful political solution in their shared homeland. But that project was put to the test on Oct. 7.
Ben David and Dabit don’t agree on everything when it comes to politics — or even food. (Boaz Arad)
Some of Ben David’s family lives in Kibbutz Re’im, a secular farming community just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. As Hamas militants rampaged through the kibbutz on Oct. 7, killing five of its residents and 364 people at a nearby music festival, Ben David pieced together the news from his family members on WhatsApp.
“I’m literally talking with my cousins and my uncle that live in Kibbutz Re’im, and they said that they were locked in their security rooms and hearing the gunshots outside,” he said.
Ben David spent his childhood summers visiting his aunt and uncle at the kibbutz, playing in grass fields among the cows and goats, picking apples and peanuts. About 2,000 people lived in the three neighboring kibbutzes struck by Hamas — Re’im, Alumim and Be’eri — where at least 130 people were massacred. Many who live there represent Israel’s slim left-wing, peace-seeking bloc.
Ben David’s family survived, but a friend of his was killed at the Tribe of Nova music festival.
Dabit has stayed with his wife and children in Ramle since the war broke out, sheltering day and night from Hamas rockets. He lost contact with his family members in Gaza weeks ago.
On his mother’s side, Dabit’s family has lived in Ramle for hundreds of years. His paternal grandfather Abu Fuzi arrived from Jaffa in 1942 and opened the famed hummus restaurant Samir. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Abu Fuzi was the only member of his family who did not flee to Jordan.
“One Jewish soldier knew him from the restaurant and told him not to go, because if he ran then he would not have a place to come back to,” said Dabit. “So he decided to stay.” The business was passed down to Dabit’s father Samir and then to Dabit, who still runs the restaurant in addition to Kanaan.
As their families at home are ravaged by war, Ben David and Dabit have faced down a fraught debate about mounting antisemitism and free speech in Germany. Berlin has seen a surge of antisemitic incidents since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, from Molotov cocktails thrown at a synagogue to Stars of David painted on apartment buildings.
German authorities have responded by cracking down on demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians, including the more than 14,000 that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry has reported killed by Israeli airstrikes. Cities such as Hamburg have blocked pro-Palestinian rallies, while Berlin’s education senator authorized schools to forbid the keffiyeh scarf and the phrase “Free Palestine.”
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called these bans a “justified” measure against “anti-Israel, aggressive and antisemitic” threats. But some opponents of the clampdown are Jews. One group of more than 100 Jewish Berlin writers, scholars and artists denounced the measures in an open letter that said, “If this is an attempt to atone for German history, its effect is to risk repeating it.”
In a meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Nov. 8, Ben David and Dabit offered Kanaan’s menu as an example for German society — an ideal in which all people can be heard without taking away from each other.
“We take German Kartoffelpuffer [potato pancakes] with Israeli salad and Palestinian hummus, and we create this dish that’s called Hummus Kartoffelpuffer,” said Ben David. “It’s a one-of-a-kind combination of flavors and taste, and everyone donates something to the plate — this is how German society needs to be.”
The duo often disagrees about food, business and politics. Ben David describes his political views as more right-wing than Dabit’s; for example, he believes in a peace agreement that would allow Jewish settlers to remain in the settlements of Hebron and Ariel. But there is nothing they won’t talk about.
“After time we agree, and sometimes we agree not to agree,” said Dabit. “But life is more important, and making things is better than breaking things, and building things makes them harder to destroy. So we’re building something, and we don’t want to destroy it because we don’t agree about this or that — the idea and the vision, it’s more important.”
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US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant
US House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to members of the media at the Capitol building, April 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation that would sanction members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act (HR 23) calls for the warrants against the Israeli officials to be “condemned in the strongest possible terms,” labeling them as “illegitimate and baseless” actions that “create a damaging precedent that threatens the United States, Israel, and all United States partners who have not submitted to the ICC’s jurisdiction.”
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Beyond condemning the arrest warrants, the bill would also impose sanctions on any officials with the ICC, or entities supporting the court, who seek to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute “any protected person of the United States and its allies.”
The bill easily passed by a margin of 243-140. House Republicans overwhelmingly backed the bill, with 198 voting in favor, zero voting against, one voting “present,” and 20 abstaining from voting. House Democrats were more divided on the bill, with 45 voting in favor, 140 voting against, and 30 abstaining from voting.
The proposed sanctions would target individuals “directly engaged in or otherwise aided any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a protected person.” In addition, the legislation would freeze assets and ban visas of sanctioned individuals and allow the sitting president to waive individual sanctions if the waiver is considered critical to US national security interests.
US Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), a stalwart ally of Israel and co-sponsor of the bill, condemned the ICC on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“Israel is the tip of the spear in bringing the fight to an enemy that currently holds and has killed our fellow Americans,” said Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, referring to Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), another co-sponsor of the bill, lambasted the ICC for taking an “unprecedented action” against Israel, arguing that the court’s actions are undermining the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself against Hamas terrorism.
Roy decried the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant as a “politicized witch hunt” and claimed that the ICC “doesn’t have any jurisdiction” over the defensive military operations of the Jewish state.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) issued a statement endorsing the bill.
“The ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants against the leadership of Israel represents the weaponization of international law at its most egregious,” Torres said. “The ICC has set a precedent for criminalizing self-defense: any country daring to defend itself against an enemy that exploits civilians as human shields will face persecution posing as prosecution.”
Immediately after the vote, pro-Israel organizations issued statements applauding the House for advancing legislation to sanction the ICC.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, praised the passage of HR 23.
“AIPAC commends the House for adopting the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which imposes sanctions on foreign persons aiding the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) morally bankrupt and legally baseless attack against Israel,” AIPAC said in a statement.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) also celebrated the passage of the legislation, lauding Republican leadership in helping advance the bill through the House of Representatives.
“We thank [House Speaker Mike Johnson] and the [House Republican] majority for their leadership and prioritizing this critical legislation in week one of the 119th Congress,” the RJC wrote on X/Twitter.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, initially made his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation infuriated US and British leaders, according to Reuters, which reported that the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Following the official issuing of arrest warrants in November, a slew of US lawmakers vowed to seek retribution against the ICC after President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
Incoming US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has also threatened to push legislation imposing sanctions on the ICC if it does not halt its efforts to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.
The post US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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California College Sued for Punishing Jewish Professor Over Conversation on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Photo: Edward H. Blake via Wikimedia Commons
A Jewish professor is suing the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for allegedly violating her rights by punishing her because she disagreed with students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner by the Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit which defends the civil rights of Jewish educators, Professor Karen Fiss’s tribulations began on Oct. 23, 2023, when she exchanged remarks with several members of the terrorist-linked Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group who summoned her to an anti-Zionist display and asked that she support the campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Fiss scanned their materials — which included a sign that proclaimed the anti-Israel genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea,” artwork, and quick response (QR) codes promoting their cause — and initiated a dialogue with the students, asking what the slogan meant and what news sources they read. Offended by Fiss’s signaling she was not an anti-Zionist, one of the students tore down the “from the river to the sea sign” and began arguing that reports of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 were fabricated.
The conversation reached the fateful moment which precipitated Fiss’s lawsuit when one of the students, Maryiam Alwael, asserted that her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was superior because she was a native of Kuwait, to which Fiss responded by asking the student if she was aware of the Kuwaiti government’s expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians in 1991. Fiss then argued for a more nuanced narrative of the Middle Eastern conflict, noting that not all Middle Easterners are anti-Israel and many oppose Hamas and disapprove of Iran’s backing of it. She ended by counseling the young women to avoid ideological echo chambers. Alwael said she liked her own views.
While both sides made sharp points, the conversation remained civil, according to court documents. However, the students interpreted Fiss’s comments as an attack on their identities and filed a complaint which accused her of being “harassing and discriminatory.” With little due process, Fiss was ultimately found guilty of the allegation and forced to submit to a series of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” trainings — a form of political rehabilitation in which subjects are forced to denounce key values of Western civilization such as the meritocracy and the sovereignty of the individual.
In explaining its guilty verdict, the college accused Fiss of being culturally insensitive and imposing her “power” on the women, who are ethnic minorities of color. Fiss, it said, “began explaining the history of Alwael’s country to her,” and “caused the students to reasonably believe” that Fiss was “using [her] positional power as a professor to get the outcome [she] sought, which was for the students to agree with [her] point of view.”
The college reached these findings but declined to apply the same logic to an earlier complaint Fiss had filed about the Critical Ethnic Studies program’s issuing a statement — “DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY,” it said — which justified Hamas’s violence and implied that Jews are not indigenous to their own homeland. This is because, the Deborah Project says, CCA rules are in place to protect left-wing anti-Zionism and punish Jews who oppose it.
“Because Dr. Fiss’s beliefs do not align with the creed mandated and enforced by the college, she has suffered repeated and severe adverse treatment by CCA, which has dramatically impeded her ability to function as a scholar,” the Deborah Project said in its complaint. “As part of its policy of enforcing ideological conformity about Israel, CCA has threatened Dr. Fiss with dismissal for two reasons: (1) her refusal to comply with student demands to contact her congressional representatives to pressure Israel — a sovereign nation — to cease its military response to an ongoing threat; and (2) for respectfully challenging this monopolization of discourse and reaffirming the principles of open dialogue and open debate within CCA.”
According to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, the college ignored Fiss’s concerns about widespread support for Hamas’s atrocities in Israel last Oct. 7, arguing they were simply expressions of free speech.
“Karen Fiss, a fully-tenured professor at CCA was told that her pain, intimidation, and horror upon learning that a huge number of not only students at CCA but her fellow faculty members, the department chairs, and members of the administration not only justified, but supported the wanton rape, torture, and murder of her co-religionists on Oct. 7 was not problematic as far as CCA was concerned because those positions were protected by free speech,” Lowenthal Marcus told The Algemeiner.
She added that CCA “accorded no such academic freedom to Dr. Fiss, who was disciplined for a single conversation that all parties agree was civil.”
“For this actual exercise of academic freedom,” Lowenthal Marcus concluded, “CCA found that Dr. Fiss’s speech constituted harassment of the Kuwaiti student. It was also found to be bullying, on the theory that Dr. Fiss was found to have used her position as a faculty member to pressure the students to adopt Dr. Fiss’s view — when it is undisputed that, throughout the conversation, the students did not even know Dr. Fiss was a professor. For this, Dr. Fiss’s file was permanently marked, and she was warned that if such a thing were to occur again, Fiss would suffer additional punishment, up to and including termination.
Now, with her reputation blighted by scandal and the college threatening revoke her tenure, Fiss is fighting for both her right to exist as a proud Jew at work as well as her right to free speech. She is suing CCA for discriminating against her for being Jewish, a violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and breach of contract, offenses which caused her “substantial damages” and other trauma.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Voice for Peace’s ‘Extremist’ Anti-Israel Agenda, Terror Group Ties Highlighted in Report
Anti-Israel protesters take part in a demonstration hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, IfNotNow Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace that turned violent in Washington, DC, Nov. 15, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
A pro-Israel nonprofit has published a new bombshell booklet detailing the inner workings and funding of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a controversial and prominent anti-Zionist group that has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
StandWithUs (SWU), an organization which promotes a mission of “supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism,” released the report examining how the far-left JVP — which defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7 — “promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories” and even partners with terrorist organizations to achieve its “primary goal” of “dismantling the State of Israel.”
According to the report, JVP weaponizes the plight of Palestinians to advance an “extremist” agenda which promotes the destruction of Israel and whitewashes terrorism, receiving money from organizations that have ties to Middle Eastern countries such as Iran.
“JVP and its allies slander and dehumanize Israelis as privileged, powerful, and racist white European colonizers,” the report says. “They promote dangerous conspiracy theories tying Israelis to injustices against various communities” around the world.
The booklet points out that JVP pushes a misleading history of Jewish presence in the Middle East, ignoring that Jews “faced systemic discrimination at best and brutal violence at worst under Muslim and Arab rule, until almost all of them fled or were expelled in the 20th century.” SWU also notes that JVP has routinely labeled Jews as “racist” for expressing fear about the prospect of living as minorities in Israel.
“JVP simply refuses to acknowledge that most Jews genuinely see efforts to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state as a form of hate,” the report reads.
In addition, the report alleges that JVP advances “antisemitic conspiracy theories,” such as the notion that American police are trained by Israeli forces. This narrative suggests that Israel exacerbates alleged police brutality in the United States through training law enforcement to brutalize black people. Prominent anti-Israel pundits such as Marc Lamont Hill and Linda Sarsour have cited this misleading information in various public statements.
StandWithUs also alleges that JVP harbors deep connections and support for international terrorist groups, highlighting JVP’s record of support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization with the stated goal of dismantling Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian state.
“JVP has campaigned in support of PFLP terrorists, hosted PFLP members at events, and partnered with groups that openly support PFLP and other terrorist organizations,” the report reads.
In addition, the report states that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for terrorist groups such as PFLP. The US Treasury Department said that PFLP “uses Samidoun to maintain fundraising operations in both Europe and North America.”
“Organizations like Samidoun masquerade as charitable actors that claim to provide humanitarian support to those in need, yet in reality divert funds for much-needed assistance to support terrorist groups,” Bradley Smith, the US Treasury Department’s acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement at the time.
The SWU report also says that JVP has ties to “extremist” anti-Israel groups such as Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Leadership for these groups have repeatedly expressed support for violence against Israel and terrorist groups. JVP has worked alongside these groups to hold anti-Israel demonstrations and marches.
According to the new report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran. For example, the Maximum Difference Foundation, which has been accused of maintaining ties with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, donated $65,000 to JVP.
JVP has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which according to SWU has funded other anti-Israel organizations, including Palestinian organizations linked with the PFLP.
The report additionally noted that JVP received $200,000 from The Quitiplas Foundation, which has allegedly donated to other organizations connected to Samidoun.
“JVP’s harmful rhetoric and alliances make it clear they are not a voice for peace,” StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “This organization fuels hate and shields extremists from accountability while doing nothing to bring about peaceful coexistence.”
“To help fight rising antisemitism, the public, media, and leaders across our society must finally recognize JVP’s dangerous agenda and reject it,” she said.
The Algemeiner has previously reported that JVP argued in a recently resurfaced 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians.
In June, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission accusing JVP’s political fundraising arm of misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The post Jewish Voice for Peace’s ‘Extremist’ Anti-Israel Agenda, Terror Group Ties Highlighted in Report first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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