Do I really care about a restaurant review in London's Time Out magazine?

But it's symptomatic of a much wider, more sinister phenomenon. Israeli agricultural exports to the UK are down by around 20% since October 7. Anti-Israel activists are constantly working to portray anything grown in Israel as ill-gotten gains, "blood avocadoes" or "genocide grapes".

They don't care if these are grown by Jews, Druze or Arab citizens of Israel, I"ve met farmers from many different sectors of Israeli society who've had orders cancelled from Europe. Others have had their British and other European buyers grill them about whether they've served in the IDF or how many Gazan children they've killed or if their fruit was grown on stolen trees.

There is growing pressure on supermarkets not to sell products from Israel, while Palestine activists have taken to staging "actions" in which they raid supermarkets and stick anti-Israel stickers ("product of baby killers" for example) on anything they suspect of being from Israel or kosher. The Co-Op chain says that it will no longer stock Israeli products at all, while a London friend told me that her local green grocer now has a sign that the pomegranates he sells are imported from Iran, that great beacon of freedom and tolerance, not from Israel.

So this Middle Eastern restaurant review is just part of this wider picture. Israel and Jews viewed as irrevocably tainted, evil, immoral, but more than that, spreading the disgusting lie that Israel is a foreign colonial implant, rather than an ancient, intrinsic and authentic part of the Middle East.

Erasing Israel and Jews from a review of Middle East restaurants in London is part of a wider campaign to erase Israel and the Jewish people's origin as a Middle Eastern people and state, wipe out our roots and our historic identity, strip us of our heritage and plant a false myth of the Jew as European nomad.

It is all the more galling because the key component of Jewish identity, the Torah, whether you believe it is a divine sacred text or simply the Jewish people's national, ethnic saga, is entirely grounded in the Middle East. It only truly makes sense in the context of being Middle Eastern literature, from the metaphors based on distinctly Levantine geography and weather patterns to the descriptions of flora and fauna, to the central role of native agriculture and foods like wine and olive oil.

The Bible lists seven special species which have an added sacred connection to the Land of Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. All are central to our ancient cuisine, the rites of the ancient Temple, foods and recipes described in the Tanakh and Talmud. From fig cakes to jujube fruits (sheizafin) to lighting the menorah with olive oil and the Talmud connecting the seed rich pomegranate with being full of good deeds.

This is a culinary culture steeped in the indigenous species and native agriculture of the ancient Middle East, not Europe or anywhere else. This is who we are, a people whom even when exiled far from the cradle of our heritage found solace in dried Middle Eastern fruits brought from their faraway ancient homeland all the while yearning to be home in Eretz Yisrael.

I think of this cultural and psychological war on the Jewish people every week when I'm out in the fields and orchards and greenhouses of modern Israel. The farmers, religious and secular, who maintain the ancient religious laws pertaining to agriculture that only apply to Jewish agriculture in the Land of Israel, the farmer growing pomegranates to donate to Leket so that even the poorest will have pomegranates for their Rosh Hashanah table, the vintner who takes pride in growing an old varietal of grapes used to make the kind of sweet kiddush wine that is much ridiculed today in our age of finer wines and chicer wine grapes.

It doesn't get more Middle Eastern than that. Take that Time Out. OPINION: Why were Israeli establishments left off Time Out's list of best Middle Eastern restaurants? - Jewish News