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Last week, I sent $36 to Manny Yekutiel. I don’t know him, and I don’t owe him money. But I was moved by what he said at a press conference earlier this summer after his San Francisco restaurant, Manny’s, was ransacked and defaced with anti-Israel and antisemitic graffiti, like “Intifada,” “F___Manny” and “Die Zionists.”
Manny said he got a call at night from a customer attending an event at the restaurant, which also serves as a community space.
“There’s someone trying to break down the windows,” the caller said, “I don’t know if I’m safe here.”
Civic leaders stood by Manny, who reopened his restaurant and launched a fundraiser to help support it.
As I searched for the donation page, I stopped to read Manny’s menu — I mean, food, right? There were chilaquiles, avocado toast, bagel sandwiches, seared ahi, Beyond Burgers, a crispy chicken sandwich, along with the usual coffee drinks and IPAs. No hummus. No falafel.
“I’m not even Israeli,” Manny, who comes from an Afghan Jewish family, said of the graffiti.
Not that it’s okay to attack Israeli restaurants, or Palestinian ones for that matter. In Philadelphia, vandals threatened a falafel restaurant. In Miami, they defaced a new place partly owned by the Israeli chef Eyal Shani.
And their thug cousins did the same to restaurants where Palestinian workers work, defacing one in 2024 in San Francisco with anti-Arab graffiti and harassing and review-bombing another co-owned by the Palestinian chef Reem Assil shortly after Oct. 7.
Why have food and the places that serve it become a surrogate battlefield?
Fighting here, because of hunger there
One answer is that, in Gaza, food has become a tragic part of the conflict.
From the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza, Israel’s critics were accusing it of carrying out a genocide-by-starvation in the narrow strip. They were wrong.
But when Israel decided to enforce a total blockade this past March, credible reports of severe malnutrition emerged.
International authorities recently concluded that there is a famine in northern Gaza and that Gazans have died from lack of food due to Israeli policies. Israel officially disputes that assessment.
This week, the country’s Foreign Ministry distributed videos in different languages showing Gaza restaurants and markets full of food and people.
When mainstream media posted photos of emaciated or dying Gaza children, Israel’s defenders pointed out that those children had preexisting diseases that made them weak and sickly.
But just because there’s food in one part of Gaza doesn’t mean other areas have it. In America, there is both rampant obesity and dire hunger. And, yes, mentioning that starving children have preexisting conditions is responsible journalism. But that fact doesn’t disprove assessments of famine, during which the most vulnerable would logically be the first to feel its impact.
Without independent journalists reporting from Gaza, which Israel won’t allow, it’s hard to get an accurate picture. But the lack of food, the killings at aid distribution sites, the credible reports of malnutrition in a territory Israel almost wholly controls, troubles the conscience — and it should.
Et tu, ‘Love Is Blind’?
The conflict over food so far away seeps into everything food-related here.
“How can I promote recipes or a cookbook when people in Gaza are being starved, when children, women, and men are being killed?” posted the Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi.
Social media posts about Jewish food inevitably draw “F— Israel” in the comment section. Online commenters slammed Alexa, the shakshuka-loving contestant on the reality TV show “Love Is Blind,” as a “closet Zionist.”
People attack restaurants like Manny’s because they are far more convenient targets than consulates and synagogues. In our increasingly secular and food-obsessed culture, restaurants have become more prominent cultural touchstones than places of worship.
The chef who has the answer
But dumb people attack restaurants, with no understanding of the humans behind them.
“I believe in peace—deeply, urgently, desperately,” Manny wrote on his website. “I believe both Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live with dignity and safety in their ancestral homeland.”
Traveling in Gaza and Israel earlier this month, the chef and humanitarian Jose Andres demonstrated how people of conscience should respond: with empathy for both sides, and action. His nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, has prepared millions of meals for Gazans. Unlike Israel’s knee-jerk critics or knee-jerk defenders, he has seen the hunger and destruction firsthand, and instead of pointing fingers, he prepares food.
And he does it for both Israelis who were displaced after Oct. 7, and for Palestinians who have been uprooted since. And he does it despite the devastating Israeli attack that killed seven of his own workers.
On his latest trip, Andres visited the site of the Nova massacre near Kibbutz Re’im (photo courtesy WCK, above) and spoke with Israeli survivors. He restarted the kitchens in Gaza. He pressed the Israelis to allow more aid in.
In his report on the visit, “What I Saw in Gaza,” Chef Andres gave us all a way to think about food, Gaza, and Israel.
“With the scale of suffering in Gaza and Israel,” he wrote, “it can sometimes feel like there is little room for compassion in the middle of so much grief. But I heard time and again from Palestinians and Israelis who see the humanity in one another. We believe that our shared huma
