Arwa Majayda //
I spent most of my time with my mother’s family, who taught me a lot about our relationship to food as Gazans. Growing up, my tita (grandmother) did not strike me as very expressive. I came to know her through her prayers, food, and hands. Those hands worked to bring us food and I remember being transfixed by them—the power, the stories, and the love they held.
One of my favourite dishes she used to make us is fattit salatah—a traditional Gazan dish made of torn bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, and olive oil. She used to make it on hot days because of its cold, refreshing vegetables. I used to watch her hands, the way she brought everything together. I would follow her as she quickly cuts the vegetables, moves her knife with effortless rhythm, tears the bread, drizzles generous amounts of olive oil over it, and brings it all together. I’ve never tasted anything so heavenly. I always admired how she made and tasted food with all of her senses. “Eat with your hand, it’s much nicer,” she used to say. And while everyone ate with spoons, I used to count the days to go to her house, where she’d make us her strangely—almost magically—good fattit salatah to eat with my hands. The mixture of the flavours of the cold vegetables, the fresh olive oil, and the tangy lemon juice in my mouth, and the bread on my hands, always left me happy and satisfied.
I won’t lie. I do consider myself good at cooking. I find comfort and joy in cooking and trying new ways to make Palestinian food whenever I get the chance. Yet somehow, I’ve never managed to make food as good as she makes it—I really tried! On rainy days, she made us fattit mulukhiyya, a dish I’ve never heard anyone else make; it really offers no visual promise. It’s made of dried mulukhiyya leaves cooked with bread and pepper, almost as if you accidentally spilled these leaves on torn bread. I don’t think I’d want to eat that without knowing how it tastes. And yet, on rainy days, it’s the first thing that I crave and think of every time for the warmth it brings me. Isn’t it remarkable how a dish that makes so little effort to look beautiful, yet carries so much love, can remain so warm in my memory—untouched by the brutal attempts to distort my relationship to food?
I find it very hard to think of most dishes the way I used to after the last famine on the Strip, at least not without the consuming thought of how long this food will last for us to enjoy. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully recover from that. Yet this stubborn, warm—very Gazan—dish finds a space to breathe in my troubled mind. It’s worth mentioning that the dried mulukhiyya leaves used in fattit mulukhiyya is one of the few ingredients the occupation failed to take away from Gazans.
This ingredient made me think about how my ancestors saw and thought of food. I’m sure so many of them also saw food as a means of survival, but also as a way to experience life and resist. They managed to dry seasonal herbs, like mulukhiyya, and created warmth out of scarcity. My mother often tells us stories about how my tita defied the curfew by taking her and her siblings on long walks to visit my sidu’s (grandfather’s) land. And when it was supposed to feel life-threatening, they were always on a mission to find halayoun (asparagus) that grows along the sideroads. They spent hours finding the best ones to finally go home and cook them with eggs. This speaks to how Palestinians, despite all of it, have always chosen to resist the restrictions on their movement and livelihood by enjoying everything the land generously gives. They never cease to find new ways to connect with the beloved land across generations.
One of the ways my people connect to their land is by planting and growing food everywhere they can. You can’t find a family in Gaza without at least one olive or palm tree planted somewhere in their yard or on their land. Little did I know that one day this very land would be impossible to access because of the Israeli occupation confiscating it. That connection to land doesn’t end with planting—it lives on in how we gather, cook, and mark our lives through food.
Growing up, I’ve seen love and care shown in many forms among Gazans: people running to show up for each other and inviting neighbors over for meals. They grow crops, share fresh produce with extended family each season, and collectively harvest olives, sharing the oil it produces.
In Gaza, every season brings with it a new harvest of seasonal crops the fathers and grandfathers of the family plant and tend. Mothers, on the other hand, lovingly transform these crops into the dishes that mark every occasion.
Here, each occasion—births, weddings, Eid—has its own dish. And of all occasions marked by food and gathering, Ramadan, in particular, holds the deepest meaning to Gazans and Muslims around the world. It’s the time when people get the chance to connect with each other through iftar (breaking the fast) gatherings. It’s also the month that we call kareem (generous) and mubarak (blessed) for many reasons. And while it has always been hard for us to fully enjoy it because of the siege on Gaza, the past few years were the hardest.
In Ramadan, the rhythm of life shifts to the night. Many gatherings in Gaza take place after sunset, when men and women share food and stories, practice prayer together, and then prepare suhur (the pre-dawn meal) for the next day’s fast. Over the past two and a half years, dawn and dusk—times when you’re supposed to feel the safest—became the heartbeat of the month for us. The occupation weaponized these very hours meant for worship and peace, which left us struggling to feel Ramadan as kareem and mubarak as we know it to be.
In 2024, every day during suhur in the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, under relentless quadcopter fire, my mother crawled across the ground to reach the small kitchen corner of our tent. She did it just to prepare enough food for us to survive the next day of fasting. Now, with very little food on our suhur table for the past two Ramadans, her way of consoling us is to tell us this story “at least we’re not attacked by the quadcopter,” she says. And my mind will never fathom that the ‘at least we’re not being shot at’ is now what passes for reassurance at our table.
This reality is the result of a systematic and deliberate assault on life itself. Over the past two and a half years, the occupation has strategically aimed to erode Gazans’ morale by targeting their connection to land through both food and religion. They have confiscated and seized agricultural land. They have destroyed the infrastructure needed to sustain it and dismantled any means of food independence.
And while it feels unbearably heavy, Gazans wake up every day choosing resistance. We choose to keep the love and the land alive. This year, after missing three consecutive Eids, people decided to go out to perform Eid prayer and make new memories through food and rebuild their relationship with it. We decide to love it because it’s worth loving, even when it’s painful.
That same act of choosing to love, to remember, and to rebuild, gently found its way into my life. Over the past ten months, Liz, Sara (Liz’s mom), and I have shared pictures of food and recipes from Gaza, Wales, and Sweden. This quiet, intimate action of speaking about our food and daily-life details has been radicalising. To experience Palestinian food as we know it, Liz decided to make my favourite dish (Musakhan, roasted chicken with sumac and onions on taboon bread) and have friends over to share it. Seeing how much thought and love she put into the dish and how much joy they took in it has helped my restless mind find peace in knowing that our food will live on.
Sharing and making Palestinian recipes is how we keep them alive, one recipe at a time. Make Palestinian recipes. Share them. Learn their histories. In this instance, Laila El-Haddad’s episode with the podcast Tarwida documents how deeply rooted Gazans are in this land through food. It shows why recipes matter beyond taste, and the histories and stories they carry through generations.
While it can be easy to believe the genocide in Gaza has ended, this is when Gazans need support most. Resisting and defying the occupation doesn’t stop with Palestinians. There’s always more you can do to help. Boycott complicit companies. Refuse to fund the occupation. Amplify Palestinian voices. Every act of reconnecting with each other and the land, however slow, helps us reclaim our narrative. It’s a story we choose to live and write despite every attempt to silence it. Hope is radical and action sustains it.