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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ZA’ATAR: FROM ANCIENT TEXTS TO MODERN CONFLICT  
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Erick Torres-Gonzalez
January 7, 2026
Jstor.org
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_ Za’atar’s cultivation, funded by the Israeli government,
attempts to use the herb to control the movements of the Palestinian
population and the plant itself. The herb shapes, narrates, and
anchors identity and political dynamics of the region. _

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Some flavors whisper of home, speaking a language rooted in place and
memory. For those living in the Levant, the slightly bitter and spicy
notes of za’atar have been a symbol of heritage, culture, and
resilience for centuries: an indispensable herb in tenth-century
cookbooks, the heart of a rich communal harvesting, and the driver of
poetic emotion. In these retellings, the plant’s name, transformed
through time and languages, has acted as a passport allowing the herb
to cross the boundaries of geography, culture, and identity, and with
that acquire new meanings: Syrian oregano, Lebanese thyme, biblical
hyssop, or, in Linnaean terms, _Origanum syriacum_.

 

Today, in its dried and ground form, za’atar is best known as the
central ingredient in the spice mix that has come to represent
Palestinian cuisine
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worldwide. This herbaceous perennial grows abundantly in the rocky
terrain of the Eastern Mediterranean and Sinai Peninsula, standing
only about a meter tall, with fuzzy, spear-like leaves growing on
hairy, square-shaped stems.

 

While naturally a free-growing shrub that carpets hillsides, za’atar
has found itself at the bench in Israeli courtrooms as the first
edible plant to be red-listed in the country’s law. This 1977 ban
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based on environmental and overharvesting concerns, labelled za’atar
as both a protected plant and a contraband commodity. In the same
year, further Israeli laws encouraged the domestication of the plant
and the expropriation of the land it grew on, consequently displacing
centuries-long mutually beneficial relationships and threatening both
the plant and the land’s ecological health.

The plant thus finds itself at the center of a controversy, with its
rootedness in cultural heritage standing in opposition to its status
as a politicized commodity, removed from its soil to assert control
over land, people, and culture.

 

Za’atar has been a longstanding ingredient in West Asian food
traditions. This pungent herb appears in the oldest surviving Arab
cookbook, the tenth-century Baghdadi Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh
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(كتاب الطبيخ, The Book of Dishes), where it is recorded as
_saatar_ and translated as thyme. Written by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq,
an Iraqi culinary author from Baghdad, the book compiles two
centuries’ worth of recipes from the caliphs and councils, blending
Persian, Greek, and Arabian culinary traditions. While many recipes
feature uncommon regional ingredients, za’atar (الزعتر) is
described as a typical garnish and essential herb for both daily and
festive dishes in the book.

It was not until the thirteenth century that za’atar’s culinary
identity would reach its full expressive potential through key
cookbooks, such as Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi’s Kitāb
al-Ṭabīkh, produced in Baghdad, and the Syrian Kitāb al-Wuslah ila
l-habib (كتاب الوصلة إلى الحبيب, The Link to the
Friend). Their authors were instructed to write detailed recipe
instructions by mixing second-person instructions with third-person
descriptions, which could be easily passed on and read aloud to
illiterate cooks. Za’atar was mentioned in recipes for almost all of
the 635 dishes
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in the books, accompanied by phrases such as “make sure to use
plenty of thyme, since it’s the ingredient whose color and flavor
should preponderate.”

These cookbooks, which form the basis of modern Levantine cuisine,
elevated recipes to the status of written culinary memory. The most
notable and variable recipe, preserved in both written and oral
traditions, is the za’atar spice mix that bears the herb’s name.
It is said that there are as many variations of za’atar as there are
families in West Asia, but all start with the za’atar herb.

This herb was also a key component of various purification rituals.
Mentioned in the Book of Exodus as biblical hyssop
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or in the Hebrew bible as ezov, za’atar symbolizes the washing away
of sins. The plant was also presented as a treatment for respiratory
illnesses and bacterial infections in _De Materia Medica_
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by ancient Greek physician Dioscorides’ (40-90 CE). It was later
cited in the Tibb-e-Nabawi (الطب النبوي, Prophetic Medicine)
in 14th-century Damascus, which also notes za’atar’s use to
fumigate the interior of homes
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More recently, za’atar’s cultural resonance extended to other,
previously uncommon contexts. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
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“of za’atar and darkened stone,” making the herb the protagonist
of his 1976 poem _Ahmad al-Za’atar_ about the aftermath of the Tel
al-Za’atar (Hill of Thyme) massacre, when a Palestinian refugee camp
in Eastern Beirut was targeted during the Lebanese Civil War. Here,
za’atar becomes a symbol of Palestinian identity and bond with the
land: “To those hands of za’atar / and darkened stone, / I voice
this cry: / To Ahmad / Forgotten and alone.” Through the motif of
za’atar, the poem illustrates the violence and resistance
experienced by the Palestinian people from the early-twentieth-century
revolts to the Nakba of 1948, a mass displacement and dispossession of
at least 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, and its
enduring consequences today.

 

In response to ongoing dispossession, acts of cultural preservation
emerged as a form of resistance, including the centuries-old
Palestinian _tatreez_—a tradition of embroidering the thobe (a long,
flowing linen or cotton dress) with “symbols of history, memory, and
place. [[link removed]]” It
became central to Palestinian life to continue documenting and
enshrining local agricultural traditions to assert the “inextricable
bond[s] to the land
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and to resist the growing settler ideology, popularized by early
Zionist and Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill
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in 1901, that Palestine was “a land without people for a people
without land.” One of these strategies is documenting the harvesting
of za’atar. In their work, titled the “Forbidden Plants of
Palestine,” mixed-media artist Shereen Quttaineh
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_tatreez_ in archiving centuries-long plant-human narratives as a
“testimony of endurance, belonging, and the fight to keep
[Palestinian] heritage alive,” as well as a display against the
Israeli attempt to erase local ecosystems and impose their own ecology
through the courts.

Healthy ecosystems lie at the foundation of za’atar’s harvesting
tradition, and yet the reasoning behind its ban makes this practice
sound ecologically unsafe. For Israeli food scientist Uri
Mayer-Chissick and botanist Efraim Lev, the heart of this
environmental threat lies in the “excessive gathering combined with
the growth of the [Arab] community
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referring to the increased use of refrigerators to store the alleged
supply of overharvested za’atar during the off-season. In contrast,
Professor Muzna Bishara
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a noted linguist at Haifa University, outlines the intention of
sustainability in za’atar’s harvesting tradition, explaining it as
a communal project that begins in early winter and spring, when the
risk of damaging the plant’s reproductive capacity is low. She
describes it as a multi-step process that starts with surveying the
land and then harvesting with “our backs bent, as if surrendering to
the plants.” Lastly, harvesters take particular care in picking the
aerial parts of the plants, protecting the roots for future seasons
and stimulating growth that can double the plant’s size.

The yearly harvest of the bushy herb usually involves three actors:
za’atar, Palestinians, and the black goat. The Israeli government
sought to undermine this tradition of multispecies interaction. It
targeted the native Palestinian black goats in 1950 by enacting the
“Black Goat Laws
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which accused them of overgrazing the land and damaging the plantings
of soil-acidifying pine, thereby criminalizing their herding by the
Arab farmer, the _fellah_. In the same year, imports of non-native
white goats and plants from Switzerland increased. Soon after the
laws’ implementation, gatherers saw a decline in the quantity and
quality of wild za’atar. This was due to a disruption in the
“natural trimming by gatherers and goats,” as Muzna Bishara
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states, which “strengthened the plants and helped them grow fresh
branches in the following year.” Moreover, the native black goats
played a vital role in wildfire prevention practices, so that, with
their removal, fire risks began to slowly increase. Concern about the
goats’ environmental impact diminished by the 1970s; however, during
the same decade, the Green Patrol of Israel increased its enforcement
of the ban, with methods so brutal that the State Comptroller censured
the unit in his 1980 report
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result, the herded goat population fell from 220,000 to 80,000. By
2013, only 2,000 goats were left, and, although the ban was repealed
in 2018
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had already left its mark: quietly removing “dunam after dunam, goat
after goat”— a reference to an Ottoman unit of land measurement
where the goal was to take Palestine piece by piece.

During the implementation of both the 1950 and 1977 bans, deadly
assaults and the development of land by the Israeli government grazed
over za’atar’s home hills. As a botanist and professor at Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Nativ Dudai
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“No one talks about the fact that we [Israel] destroy much more
za’atar than the Arabs pick. Do you know how many great za’atar
populations were uprooted by [our] bulldozers?” This tendency was
further expressed in the domestication of za’atar. In 1977, Israeli
officials encouraged the domestication of the plant on
kibbutzim—settlements established on seized and redistributed
Palestinian land in violation of international law
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concerns over refrigeration, the domestication of za’atar highlights
an attempt to take control over the land and its people, resulting in
the land’s destruction, veiled as a way to counter an environmental
threat.

In fact, the Minister of Agriculture of the West Bank at the time,
Ze’ev Ben Herut, stated
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interview, “Za’atar is all good and beautiful … but the business
has to bring back money.” The increased cultivation of _O. syriacum_
funded by the Israeli government
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za’atar to appropriate traditional local knowledge as a means to
generate profit and to control the movements of the Palestinian
population and the plant itself. This tendency is highlighted by the
human rights organization and legal center, Adalah, in a document
outlining the unlawful targeting of _fellahin_ (farm-working) and Arab
communities, where, in 2016–2018, twenty-six indictments and one
hundred fifty-one fine
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notices were issued for offenses related to this plant, all of which
were supposedly committed by Palestinians.

What once was a common herb that moved freely and was seen as a healer
and community-maker is now perceived as both a threat and a mercenary
to a broader development goal. And while the multiplicity of
za’atar’s names carries a certain richness, it also generates
fragmentation and constraint, as manifest in legislation that attempts
to delimit its movement and disrupt the reciprocal relationship with
land and local communities that it traditionally sustained. The Plant
Humanities Initiative
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Dumbarton Oaks seeks to explore plant-human relationships as
illustrated by the case of za’atar, and to underscore the intricate
connections between plants and human society.

RESOURCES

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students.
JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our
articles for free on JSTOR. 

* food politics
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* culinary traditions
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* culinary history
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