Falafel: The staple dish of the Middle East is as contested as the region

From Alexandria, falafel spread throughout the country, gaining such popularity that, further south, it became known simply as ta’miyya – literally ‘a bite of food’. Suspicious of anything they regarded as ‘Arabic’, they stuck doggedly to their own cuisine, shunning falafel as an ‘alien’ – even ‘unclean’ – dish. Made famous by the singer Nissim Garame, it was unambiguous in claiming falafel for Israel: ‘Every country in the world has a national dish that everyone knows’, it began:

By the 1960s, this process of ‘nationalisation’ was complete.

Source: www.historytoday.com