When Reem’s California opened as a small Arab corner bakery in Fruitvale last month, proprietor Reem Assil envisioned her 14-person operation as more than just a restaurant. She said that she sees the space as a community anchor — not just a spot for a quick breakfast or a bite after work.
Through grants, Assil’s crowdfunding efforts, and membership in La Cocina, a small food business incubator, she has come out of the gate with a community at her back. ”You know this is a place where people can really sort of speak their mind and maybe have the hard conversations and talk their politics,” Assil told Eater before the opening in May.
A few weeks after opening, those hard conversations did come to Reem’s. But rather than happening in a convivial way on the patio over baked goods and backgammon, they manifested as a wave of online backlash as two sides clashed over Arab-Israeli relations and street food.
The Op-Ed
Whether intentional or not, Reem’s prominent mural depicting Rasmea Odeh is a shot fired. Odeh is a Palestinian activist who was convicted by the Israeli government in 1970 for her connection to a 1969 grocery store bombing in Jerusalem that killed two university students.
The bakery’s positive depiction of her has spawned a controversy as summarized in this sharply worded op-ed in J., the Jewish News of Northern California. In the piece, venture capitalist Daniel Frankenstein criticized Assil’s decision to feature a mural of Odeh. A series of coordinated Yelp attacks followed, in which users claimed there was blood in the bakery’s dough and an open endorsements of terrorism on the walls.
This week, the story landed on Brietbart, which labeled the restaurant an “Arab culture-inspired bakery.” A day later, another flood of one-star Yelp reviews triggered the site’s “Active Cleanup Alert,” which is meant to prevent users from posting fake reviews about a business that has recently appeared in the news. “The atmosphere in the restaurant is terrible,” one Yelper from Massachusetts wrote. “They have a mural of a convicted terrorist here, which made me nauseous.”
Another Yelper accused the restaurant of glorifying “people who use weapons of mass destruction against civilians who are grocery shopping.” The reviewer concluded by saying, “This may be a case for law enforcement.”
Frankenstein told Eater SF he intentionally avoided naming the bakery in his article to avoid giving Reem’s any additional negative publicity. And he calls the Yelp smear campaign that followed his op-ed “regrettable.”
By the afternoon of June 22, tensions had heightened to the point that Oakland police stationed outside the bakery in response to the hate calls and emails Reem’s had received.
The Woman Behind the Controversy
To her supporters, Odeh’s confession is another symbol of oppression — a forced admission of guilt made after she allegedly suffered 45 days of torture and interrogation in the weeks after her arrest. The life sentence she received in Israel was eventually cut short 10 years later, when she was freed as part of a prisoner exchange with the U.S. in 1979. Upon her release, Odeh testified before a U.N. special committee that she was tortured, beaten, and sexually abused at the hands of her Israeli interrogators. Her father told the U.N. that he witnessed some of the torture.
The story is complicated by a U.S. court case that started in 2013, when a Federal court learned that Odeh failed to disclose her arrest in Israel on her immigration documents. Shortly after the Women’s March in Chicago which she helped organize, Odeh accepted a plea bargain allowing her to peacefully leave the U.S. instead of waiting out the case settlement that could have ended in significant jail time for immigration fraud. Many believe the anti-immigration tone set by the current presidential administration influenced her decision to leave the country.
The Conflict
Frankenstein calls accounts that Odeh was forced to confess “a lie,” citing Israel’s stated prohibition against torture. “Rasmea Odeh is not controversial because of the movement she supports; she is controversial because she is a convicted murderer and terrorist who is trying to whitewash her crimes by appealing to progressives by portraying herself as an activist.”
“The point of my op-ed was to raise awareness,” Frankenstein — who says he is a firm supporter of a safe, secure Israel and an independent, free Palestine — wrote in an email. “My goal was simply to provide the context and information that Berkeleyside neglected to do in their original piece.” Ultimately, Frankenstein says, “I’m offended by the elevation of a convicted terrorist to role model status.”
Assil sees it another way. “I put Rasmea up there because she is an emblem of resilience,” she told Eater via email following Frankenstein’s op-ed. “She reminds me that as an Arab woman, I should never be afraid to speak up against injustice, no matter what the consequence.” Using the words of American political activist Angela Davis, Assil calls the case against Odeh a politically motivated “witch hunt” that Odeh has weathered while working to empower immigrant women. She views the attacks on her bakery as a result of the current political climate, not condemnation of a terrorist as Frankenstein would assert.
“We put her up there to make sure that we understand that intersectionality is the right symbol,” Assil told the audience at an event coordinated by Real Food Real Stories earlier this month. “The attacks coming against Reem’s are part and parcel of the increased attacks we are seeing against Arab and Muslim communities, even more so under Trump,” she elaborated to Eater. “Yet these kinds of attacks labeling Arabs and Muslims as terrorists or terrorism supporters are not new, and as unfortunate as it is, we knew we’d experience some level of this kind of racism and xenophobia. Anybody who accuses us of not being inclusive and not being a safe place for people can walk into our space and know otherwise.”
The Mural Remains
“There was a whole campaign that said that there was blood in my food and all this crazy stuff,” said Assil at the talk. “And within a day [my supporters] responded and took all those one star reviews away and so that just shows to me that there's a force field of community, that there's nothing to organize to understand the truth.” [Editors note: As of Monday June 26, Yelp’s Active Cleanup Alert was again activated due to an outpouring of negative reviews.]
Though much of the outrage cites Odeh’s conviction of terrorism, Assil frames it as an attack on women of color specifically. However Frankenstein is at least one Odeh opponent who is openly for immigration and its often related causes. “I am fervently in support of immigration and believe the rhetoric in our country to be shameful,” he said to Eater in an email. “I am against any bigotry, against Muslims, Jews, or anyone else. There is no place for hate at my table.”
But the tension around Reem’s feels bigger: The cultural rift between Israel and Palestine also appears to be in play. Several Israeli English-language blogs claimed Reem’s was trying to “game the system” when asking for support on social media in the wake of the controversy. These sites also invited readers to leave negative ratings and comments on the bakery’s Yelp, Google and Facebook pages.
While Odeh is thousands of miles away, there’s still a picture of her that faces customers as they order a celebratory Draymond Green man’oushe, made by Oaklanders in the shadow of the Fruitvale BART. The current clash hasn’t shaken the resolve of either party. But Assil’s mural may have thwarted any attempts to foster an environment where tough conversations about politics can happen in person — for now.
“For us, we have tons of Israeli customers in our building,” Assil concluded near the end of her talk. “They love our food, it reminds them of Israel and if we can connect to them that way, then what is the potential? All my life I've been other, certainly I'm not going to go make anyone feel other. We, at the very basic level, if we can actually respect one another, then we can have a conversation.”
- Reem’s California Brings the Arab Corner Bakery Home to Fruitvale [ESF]
- Reem’s, a new Arab bakery where food, activism and culture come together [Berkeleyside]
- Plea Deal: Rasmea Odeh, convicted terrorist, agrees to leave U.S. in exchange for no jail time [Washington Times]
- Northwestern president joins vigil for victims outside convicted terrorist’s campus speech [Washington Times]
- UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Rasmieh Yousef ODEH, Defendant–Appellant. [FindLaw]
- A bakery that dishes out hate [J.]
Editors’ note (6/26/17): The content in this piece has been edited since its original publication to more accurately depict the entirety of the controversy.