EXTRACTS:
"Campaigners point out that its parent company, Bain Capital, invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies. And so even though Gail’s describes itself as “a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK”, its very presence 20 metres away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.
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"In the current oppressive climate, even to exist as a Palestinian in western society is to be the target of aggression and suspicion, to be tainted as a murderer and an antisemite, even if your ambitions stretch little further than cooking food and serving coffee.
"Does any of this move the dial in the occupied territories even one iota? Almost certainly not. But perhaps this is simply the nature of an increasingly disenfranchised age. Palestinian activism has arguably never been less capable of exerting a meaningful influence on global events, and so is increasingly defined by small acts of petty symbolism. A smashed window. A provocative sticker. You can’t lay a glove on the US-Israeli military-industrial complex, and you can’t get your local council to boycott Israeli goods, and you couldn’t stand with Palestine Action and the protest march on Sunday has been banned by the Metropolitan police. So some people then direct their ire at the bakery with distant links to Israeli security funding.
"Food – the access to it, the denial of it, the culture and tradition it represents – has become a recurrent theme of this forever war, one with multiple resonances. And so Faten and Mahmoud will carry on hosting their supper clubs, feeding the people of north London, existing in a world where their very existence is threatened.
"The falafel, the lentil soup, the upside-down chicken: these are blunt and frankly inadequate tools of defiance. But when they’re among the few things you have left, you may as well use them."
Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
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