THE NEW
SALSA
quiet. When he’d first traveled
those hills, in 1967, he was in a
tank, pushing forward toward the
Jordan River as thousands of Palestinian refugees streamed down
the sides of the road. The Six-Day
War had broken out and the Israeli army had conquered the Palestinian villages.
After a while we reached the
outskirts of Nablus, parked and
made our way through the mazelike casbah, to a dim, windowless hummus restaurant with
electrical wires hanging from the
ceiling. A teenage boy strolled
into the room with an unmarked
bottle of olive oil, tipping it onto
people’s plates. After a few minutes of “swiping,” my father announced that this was the best
hummus he’d tasted on the trip
— though he also remarked that
the excitement of entering forbidden territory had enhanced
the flavor. By that point I knew
that my hummus palate wasn’t
refined enough to discern the
subtle differences between the
various hummusia offerings, but
I liked them all better than any
hummus I’d ever had in America.
Toward the end of our stay, we
traveled to the fertile hills of the
Galil