Is baladi in Hebrew identical to baladi in Arabic? How did the term evolve from signifying rural domestic produce into a sexy trend in Tel Aviv – and what does that say about Israeli identity?
The political biography of the term “baladi” takes us on a journey that stretches between the culinary and the political; between the identity-based and the economic; from the agricultural expanse in Ottoman Palestine toward the end of the 19th century to the upscale Tel Aviv culinary scene of today – and from there back to the rural Palestinian expanse and even to an unlawful outpost founded by extremist Israeli settlers.
The political biography of the term 'baladi' takes us on a journey that stretches between the culinary and the political.
The term baladi is derived from the Arabic word “balad” (بلد), which means village, city or geographical area.
Balad, explain Orphee Senouf Pilpoul, Jad Kaadan, Vered Shimshi and Ido Fuchs in an article recently published in “Mafte’akh: A Lexical Review of Political Thought,” symbolizes multiple meanings that denote “place,” but also the dim and at times ambivalent attitude toward place. Balad is the village (الكفر), the city (المدينة), the land (الأرض), but never the state (الدولة).
At its heart, the term stands for the intimate connection with the land and the community. Whereas in Arabic balad comprises a complex conceptual array that relies on textual strata that go all the way back to the Koran, in today’s spoken Hebrew, balad has become “baladi” – which, as they see it, represents a “fabricated authenticity.”
Baladi, as it is used in Hebrew, has been severed from “balad” and instead became a stand-alone adjective detached from any specific spatial significance. Like “organic” or “terroir,” baladi is also a term with multiple meanings. But baladi seems to be particularly difficult to translate, and has therefore been preserved in its Arabic form in other languages as well.
Baladi is neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian invention. As will become clear below, baladi is a word that refuses to be translated or even defined.
It seems that the only way to define it is by negation: baladi is nonindustrialized, non-global, not grown in hothouses, not preserved in frozen form, not bereft of flavor, not from the Other (from the other village, from the other city, from the other region in the country, from the other regime).
It is, therefore, little wonder that baladi is also becoming an expression of political resistance: against colonialism; against the state’s invasion of the rural space; and, in the Israeli-Palestinian case, against occupation, the taking over of land and erasure of national identity.
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