The noise coming from Nora’s backyard is unprecedented. An entrepreneur and chef, she runs a successful and busy restaurant in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Carmel, Israel. Druze are known first for their insularity and second for their fierce service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Nora caters to Jewish Israeli locals, Jewish teens on summer camp, international groups, and IDF troupes, serving food from recipes her mother taught her as a girl. This mother-daughter tradition is of great appeal to Jewish and international visitors as documented in online reviews and interviews. Simultaneously, the restaurant itself and Nora’s oral autobiography given to every group incorporates Israeli military discourse, even though as a Druze woman, Nora has never served in the army.
This conference paper considers the limitations of Druze inclusion to the national project by way of the female Druze experience. Unable to serve in the army like Druze men, Druze women find themselves excluded from educational, economic, and political publics available to the Druze men who serve in the IDF. How do Druze women combat this exclusive reality? How do they work within the discourses available to assert their own agency? How does army service influence the femininity of cooking? Utilizing a mixed-method approach including media ethnography, interviews, and participant observation, I uncover a practice unique to Druze women, what I call culinary militarism, that fuses feminine genealogical transmissions of foodways with the overtly masculine narratives associated with the army. Through the case of Druze food, I assert that Druze females work to include themselves in the masculinity of the military as their own attempt for recognition by others as loyal Israelis.