A Palestinian boy carrying belongings walks past the rubble of destroyed buildings in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City on October 27. Photo / Omar Al-Qattaa, AFP
The restaurant Kanaan, in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, opened in 2015 as a radical experiment, a barrier-breaking partnership between Oz Ben David - an Israeli Jew from a “very right-wing” settler family - and Jalil Dabit, a progressive Palestinian Christian.
At least that’s how the world chose to see it. Ben David and Dabit insist they were just trying to make great hummus.
Whether it was their message of hope or the texture of their tahini, people flocked to Kanaan. There was laudatory media coverage. Crowds packed the place for musical and other performances. Ben David and Dabit landed a book deal.
Then Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and Kanaan became a political lightning rod.
Defenders of the Palestinians accused Dabit of treachery for working with an Israeli and slammed the restaurant for not labelling Israel’s actions a genocide.
Conservative Israel backers disparaged the restaurant’s staff, which included Palestinians, Syrians, and other Arabs, sometimes using hateful language.
Nobody seemed to be in a mood for peace and harmony.
A hummus shop that initially sought to be apolitical found itself at the centre of a bitter - sometimes violent - public debate.
Vandals broke into the restaurant in July 2024, smashing bottles and furniture and smearing faeces on the walls.
Social media attacks on Ben David and Dabit grew more virulent. Performing artists reported being blacklisted by other venues if they performed at Kanaan.
Business declined by more than half.
And so, this summer, Ben David and Dabit made an announcement. “Kanaan is in danger,” they wrote on Instagram, and unless business picked up dramatically, they would soon shut it down.
Ben David grew up in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights. His father was a general in the special forces of the Israeli military and later became a police officer.
“I was literally a teenager who from ’93 to ’95 was going every Saturday to Jerusalem, protesting against the Oslo agreement,” Ben David said, referring to the peace accords that established a degree of Palestinian self-governance.
Dabit was born in Ramla, a mixed Israeli city of Jews and Arabs. A self-described Palestinian Arab, he went to a predominantly Jewish school.
“I was surrounded by Jewish Israelis,” he said in a phone interview from Ramla, where he’s spent time with family since the war broke out. “I know their narrative, and I know their fears.”
He came from a family of restaurateurs. When he was 12, he started working at Samir, a restaurant founded by his grandfather and run by his father. Hummus was a major part of his heritage and upbringing.
“On the other hand, there is me, who made hummus maybe one time for his friends,” Ben David said.
They met in Berlin through acquaintances, and Ben David tried Dabit’s hummus. “I know this hummus, it’s the Palestinian one,” Ben David told Dabit. “I don’t like it - it’s too sour.”
“Show me yours,” Dabit responded.
They soon wrote down recipes for Palestinian- and Israeli-style hummuses, then set about trying to combine them.
“The recipe looked like something that couldn’t work,” Ben David said.
“We said, okay, let’s make it even though it doesn’t make sense. When we created that and we tried our recipe for the first time, we understood that we have something that is amazing.”
They started making hummus together.
For their first event, in typical Berlin fashion, they illegally took over an abandoned building for a celebration of hummus, fashion and peace.
They expected a couple of hundred guests. More than 1000 came, Ben David said. Their second event drew 3000, plus what Ben David described as “left-wing” protesters against “the normalisation of Jalil and me.”
The police and fire departments showed up. So did the press.
“Everyone had this Cinderella story in his head,” Ben David said. “And we kept saying, no, it’s only business. It’s just business. We don’t mix politics. It’s not relevant.”
“I didn’t want to say we are Israeli-Palestinian,” Dabit said. “We are serving the best hummus in town.”
They launched a restaurant and named it Kanaan (Canaan in German), the historical “promised land” of the Jews and Palestinians.
Kanaan’s first eight years were “non-stop miracles,” Ben David said: glowing media coverage, steady business and a growing number of community events.
On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, Dabit woke up to open his family restaurant in Ramla. His bedroom windows face south, toward Gaza, and he heard alarms blaring, then bomb and rocket blasts.
Ben David was in bed when he heard his phone blowing up with WhatsApp messages. A few hours later, after learning the extent of the Hamas assault, he called Dabit.
“That’s it,” Ben David said. “Project Kanaan needs to disappear. It needs to close.’”
All the criticism from the past eight years rushed into Ben David’s head - everyone who had called him naive or warned that his Arab partners would stab him in the back.
“All those voices were like fingers of blame,” he said. “Like, how stupid I was to believe that it’s possible.”
Ben David entered “a very dark place” for several days. Dabit, huddled with his wife and children in a war zone, called him constantly to make sure he was okay.
Ben David hurled abuse at his friend, telling him Gazans needed to die and that Kanaan had to disappear.
Only after a few days, when Dabit put his 2-year-old son on the phone and challenged Ben David to repeat everything he’d said, did the Israeli finally calm down.
Dabit sent a few people from the restaurant - which closed the day after the attack - to check on Ben David at his apartment.
“The first hug I got since the 7th of October was from a Syrian,” Ben David recalled, choking up.
“I remember how much I cried and cried on the shoulder of a Syrian guy. And that’s the moment I understood the power of what we created here.”
Ben David gathered friends from the media in front of the restaurant and announced that Kanaan would reopen.
“We will not surrender to fear,” he recalled saying. “We will not let the terrorists win. We will not give them what they want the most. They wanted to take the hope. From now on, Kanaan will be the temple of hope.”
The hummus shop that once sought to transcend politics got more political.
It hosted peace events, worked with school groups, and scheduled LGBTQ+ events and drag brunches. Business was strong, but expenses were high.
Muslim and Jewish musicians and dancers were paid generously to perform there. While other restaurants often paid refugee employees less than minimum wage, Ben David said, he wanted to compensate them like Tim Raue - Berlin’s most famous restaurateur - paid his chefs.
To make the numbers work, Ben David said, Kanaan needed a “Berghain queue of people,” referring to the renowned Berlin club where people wait hours in line, sometimes to be turned away at the door for no apparent reason.
For a few months, the restaurant succeeded, in part because of good timing: Ben David and Dabit’s cookbook was published on October 18, 11 days after the attack, to worldwide attention and acclaim.
But as the war dragged on and deepened, so did political division.
“People were asking us, ‘So what are you: Pro-Israel? Pro-Palestine?’ And we kept saying, ‘We are pro-peace.’”
To many, it was no longer a satisfactory answer. Artists asked Ben David and Dabit to take down videos of their performances at Kanaan. Some friends stopped associating with them.
“Basically, we found ourselves suddenly alone,” Ben David said.
As Kanaan struggled to find its place in a sharply divided society, so did the German Government.
Since World War II, Germany has worked to make amends for the Holocaust, partly through staunch support of Israel. Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in 2008 that protecting Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsräson”, or “reason of state”. Subsequent chancellors reaffirmed that stance.
The mounting casualties in Gaza opened up divisions in Germany, with supporters of Palestinian autonomy, especially younger Germans, accusing the Government of being too slow to rethink Germany’s unwavering support for Israel.
The 27-nation European Union determined that Israel had violated human rights obligations and weighed sanctions and a suspension of trade.
France and Britain, among other countries, announced plans to recognise Palestine as a state. Germany held back, and when it finally suspended some arms shipments to Israel in August, members of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right party openly rebelled.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, writers and artists complained of crackdowns and censorship by German officials and institutions. A country that had long stood in broad - if never total - solidarity with Israel was increasingly torn apart by the suffering in Gaza.
“The rift in Germany didn’t emerge sometime after Oct. 7; it emerged in Germany on October 7,” said Max Lucks, a member of the German parliament and the Green Party’s spokesman for human rights. “Starting on that day, we’ve experienced this unbelievable division.”
Lucks ate at Kanaan before the Gaza war, at the invitation of a part-Palestinian friend.
The July 2024 vandalism of the restaurant, he said, showed “that there are obviously very strong opponents of places and spaces that inspire hope.”
Still, the assault on the restaurant led to an outpouring of support.
Berlin’s government awarded Kanaan’s owners its biennial Moses Mendelssohn Prize, for fostering tolerance toward dissident thinkers and between peoples and religions.
The city’s conservative mayor, Kai Wegner, visited to declare the restaurant’s importance to the city.
“The restaurant Kanaan is a powerful symbol for me: Here, Israelis and Palestinians demonstrate that peaceful coexistence is possible,” Wegner told the Washington Post by email.
“Berlin is a city of freedom, diversity and tolerance, and these are precisely the places that belong in Berlin and that we want in this city.”
But the publicity bump was short lived. In November 2024, Ben David and Dabit started putting in their own money to keep the restaurant afloat, but business only got worse.
This summer, Ben David and Dabit polled their email list of supporters to ask why they thought things had gotten so bad. They gave three main reasons, Ben David said.
First was the rocky German economy, which had contracted for two years. Second was Gaza fatigue - people going out to dinner no longer wanted to be thinking about a seemingly endless war.
“And the third was that your voice is not clear,” Ben David said. “It’s for Israel? It’s for Palestine? What are you exactly?”
Ben David and Dabit decided to declare bankruptcy. Their office manager persuaded them first to go public with their struggles. So they sent their SOS.
The boost came quickly. Reservations booked up.
German media reported that the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, sent his staff to dine at Kanaan - which a spokesman for Steinmeier denied, while adding, “This does not affect the President’s appreciation for Kanaan”. He noted that Ben David and Dabit were invited to the presidential palace in November 2023.
A month after the plea for help, however, Ben David’s assessment was tepid. “It’s still very shaky and risky,” he said.
The Gaza ceasefire announcement this month gave Ben David hope that “we can foster meaningful dialogue and recognise our shared humanity”.
His relief was more personal than professional. The number of diners has continued to decline, leaving the future in doubt.
If the restaurant is forced to close, Dabit and Ben David said they plan to keep Kanaan alive - at least as a pop-up business, and as an idea.
“We’re not making the restaurant just for making hummus,” Dabit said. “We have a mission to try to bring people together, no matter which background. It’s not easy. … You need to have guts to do what we’re doing.”
He paused. “Or be crazy.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.