Hummus is made with love: At a time when the phrase "coexistence" sounds like a distant dream, a restaurant in Berlin jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian succeeds against almost all odds in generating hope (and good food).
"You don't understand how many interview requests we've received in the past month," Oz Ben David, who together with his partner Jalil Devit runs Canaan Restaurant – a well-known and esteemed restaurant in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, a paradise for fine culinary and proof that food can bridge gaps and disagreements.
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The vegan vegetarian restaurant's menu includes hummus, tahini, falafel, sabih and shakshuka, a combination of the roots of Ben David (an Israeli who grew up in Judea and Samaria) and Devit, a Palestinian whose family also owns the successful Samir restaurant in Ramle.
The restaurant's employees come from a wide range of ethnicities, sexual orientations and backgrounds: Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Israelis, refugees and gays, a web of identities, sexual orientations and nationalities, which in normal times is not always taken for granted and in these tense days of severe war, all the more so.
Hummus in Canaan, photo: from Google Maps
Indeed, tensions and war have long since left the borders of the country in the form of manifestations of anti-Semitism, racism and violence that are striking the world and have not spared Berlin either. This led to the closing of the restaurant's gates for several days at the beginning of the Iron Sword War. "When the fighting started on Saturday, I told Jalil that I wanted to close and that I didn't feel I could open the place wholeheartedly," Ben David shares. "The pain and rage were greater than me. Since there were many invited to sit and first we agreed to close on the second. All the while, Jalil called me constantly, checked on me and waited patiently for my anger to pass."
On Thursday, the first week of the war, the two heard that the next day, Friday, would be the "Day of Rage," declared by the Hamas terrorist organization. "Many businesses announced the closure of restaurants out of fear of riots and anti-Semitic attacks," Ben-David says, adding that it was precisely this announcement that made him realize that he was not willing to let terror win.
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"That reaction of fear woke me up," he says. "She opened my eyes. I invited online local media teams and announced that after four days of being closed, Canaan was opening. Terrorism will not defeat us."
What were the reactions?
"The local customers connected with the message and filled the restaurant. I was surprised by the number of Israelis and Palestinians who came looking for a place to hurt together. It didn't take ten days from the time we returned, but it happened."
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Did you and Jalil disagree about the conduct?
"We were unanimous. We work from the heart and out of a true sense of mission. Jalil knew this, so he didn't insist," Ben David says, reinforcing his statement: "I knew Oz had opened up. I didn't lose hope for a moment," he added. "For eight years we've been together talking all day every day."
"We are a real island of peace"
Canaan, as mentioned, reopened and received support from customers who kept coming, but outside the cannons are still thundering (and not just as a cliché) and tension is in the air.
Do you feel the tension?
"We don't feel in our flesh. We are a place of peace," Ben David stresses. "We have rabbis and imams. The restaurant manager is Iranian, the kitchen manager is Syrian. We have employees from Afghanistan and Sudan. We are a real island of peace. We are the only ones in the world running LGBT programs with Muslims in Germany," he adds proudly, and goes on to elaborate: "We have created our own world, which lives and breathes the outside - and we process the information into a common language. Riyadh, the manager of Syrian cuisine, was waiting for me with his arms outstretched on the day we reopened. All the days I embraced him after the Israeli air strikes in Syria prepared him to be my supporter this time. That made him tell me for the first time about the atrocities he had seen in Syria."
Ben-David adds that he and Devitt met last Wednesday with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president of Germany, to discuss the sensitive issues of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. "It was a round table. A meeting that lasted three hours and was attended by six other people besides us. Together with his team, we sat down and wrote operative plans for schools against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia."
Did you talk to him about his attitude to the situation?
"I drew his attention following his speech, that if they expect a Turkish child who is a third generation, or a Syrian or Afghan child, to adopt the existing narrative, simply because they are in Germany, but on the other hand they will not invest in educating and truly connecting these children to the importance of 'never again,' it will not happen by itself," Ben David says. "Germans must develop new ways to convey this message – even to Germans whose grandfather was not a Nazi during World War II. What is so natural to them is a far cry from what the Muslim citizens of the country know and grew up with."
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