Last night’s episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — wherein a Palestinian chicken restaurant opens up next door to a Jewish deli — is being hailed by bloggers as one of Larry David’s finest. While staring at the pro-Palestinian posters that adorn the restaurant, Larry proposes that Palestinians engage in a chicken-based solution for Mideast peace:
Larry: We’re probably the only Jews that ever walked in here–
Jeff: –Ever.What these people should do is send their chicken over to Israel.
Larry: For the peace process.
Jeff: mmhhmm
Larry: They’d take down all those settlements in the morning.
What the Seinfeld creator didn’t know: thirty-five years ago on this day, Israel engaged in some sort of schnitzel-diplomacy during the Lebanese Civil War:
TEL AVIV, Jul. 26 (JTA) – Lebanese villagers will soon be eating kosher chicken. A truck load of frozen poultry, wrapped in nylon bags bearing the approval of the Safad Rabbinate, along with live poultry was on its way to Kiryat Shemona yesterday to be sent across the breaks in the security fence to southern Lebanon.
Of course, Israel’s involvement in Lebanon at the time was more complicated than this. For background, check out Wikipedia or Mark Tessler’s A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (preview after the jump).
UPDATE: Astute reader Aharon Varady of the Open Siddur Project points out that The Simpsons also proposed chicken as a solution to Mideast peace in an episode aired March 2010.
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Image: By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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