RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the passing of Shimon Peres at the age of 93, two very different men died. The first was young, pragmatic and tough-minded, skilled in negotiation and focused on building Israel’s military strength. The second was older, a dreamer, resolutely focused on a vision of peace that proved stubbornly impervious to reality.

The first Peres was tapped by Ben-Gurion to head Israel’s navy at the tender age of 24, and then became director general of the defense ministry at 29. He helped establish Israel’s arms industry and led the negotiations with France that made it Israel’s chief weapons supplier. He was deeply involved in the planning, with England and France, of the 1956 Sinai campaign and is credited with the construction of Israel’s nuclear deterrent at Dimona.

This Peres reacted to events like a security hawk. When in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wavered between sending a rescue mission to Entebbe or giving in to terrorist demands, it was Peres, as defense minister, who pushed hard for the risky and unprecedented rescue effort. And it was Peres, within a divided government, who supported the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.

But around 25 years ago, Peres was reborn. In 1993, as foreign minister he became the architect of the Oslo Accords. Until then, it had been illegal for an Israeli to speak to PLO representatives. In the blink of an eye, Yasser Arafat went from terror chieftain to world statesman. The new policy led to a Nobel Peace Prize for both Arafat and Peres, along with Prime Minister Rabin, whom Peres carried along with his vision. This is the Peres who promoted the idea of a New Middle East, in which cooperation would replace conflict.

The new Peres would become the most un-Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers. This is not in the sense of religious observance: Peres may have been less alienated from tradition than some of Israel’s other secular leaders. It is in the sense of departing from fundamental Jewish historical values and insights. One of the most central of these is the importance of remembrance. Zakhor—remember, according to former Columbia Professor of Jewish History Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, is invoked 169 times in the Bible. Indeed, Yerushalmi wrote a book entitled Zakhor in which he notes that only in Israel “is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yet Peres repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in the past. Noting the contrast between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on memory in Judaism and Peres’s cavalier dismissal of history, the pro-Israel group Americans for a Safe Israel compiled a pamphlet of statements from Peres on subjects like history, Zionism, and Judaism over nearly a decade following the Oslo Accords. Below is a sampling:

When I was 7 my family moved from the Midwest, in the dead of winter, to Israel and everything shifted. Our snow boots gave way to sandals, blizzards turned into salty sea breezes and food that used to arrive wrapped in plastic came alive, in very real ways. On Friday mornings the poultry vendor would chase our Sabbath chicken around the market yard, until we heard the last strangled squawk. The oranges from our neighbor’s tree would spray juice when we halved them, and hummus was always spilling out of pita and running down our bare arms.

We left Israel before I entered high school and returned for short visits in the years that followed. But I hadn’t gone back for an extended visit until last year, around the same time the rest of the world was busy discovering the tastes I remembered. Israeli cuisine is having a huge global moment, from Jerusalem-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s network of Middle-Eastern restaurants in London to Alon Shaya’s Shaya, currently one of the toughest reservations in New Orleans. And all that excitement isn’t just an Israeli export. The Tel Aviv I knew, a relatively quiet, provincial town, has morphed into Israel’s largely secular trendsetter; new restaurants are debuting weekly. “We’re open to the world now,” chef Eytan Vanunu later told me, “in fashion, art, music and, of course, food.”
On this return trip, the proof of that voracious appetite, and Tel Aviv’s ascendance as style maker, were obvious my first day in town. I passed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s glossy new contemporary wing, and the warren of boutiques and galleries crowding the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, before my cab deposited me in the hipsterized Florentin district at Halutzim 3, the restaurant Mr. Vanunu runs with his partner, Naama Szterenlicht. Housed in a small renovated warehouse, the bistro is anchored by a recycled wood counter and filled with flea-market-find tables. But if the dining room’s casual design doesn’t suggest the dynamism of Israeli food, the amped-up menu unequivocally does. The parents of Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht variously came to Israel from Argentina, Poland, Germany and Morocco. A decade ago northern European Jewish (Ashkenazi) and southern (Sephardic) recipes would have ended up in different pots. But Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht, representing a new generation of Israeli chefs, bring all those international accents to the freshest local produce and turn out a coherent tumble of flavors. At Halutzim 3, my bowl of black lentils, true to Israel’s abiding vegetarian palate, came tossed with coriander, cured lemon, tomatoes, roasted almonds and goat yogurt. Unabashedly non-kosher, the kitchen also serves a challah loaf stuffed with minced pork and a calamari salad brightened by lime and parsley.

‘When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over.’

“Israeli cuisine,” Mr. Vanunu told me, as he dished up the lentils, “is a dialogue that starts now. When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over. The flavors on your plate aren’t just Naama and my own personal heritage. They also blend in lots of other strands of Israeli culture—Palestinian, Lebanese, Russian, Tunisian, Turkish, Algerian, Romanian, Bulgarian.” Add the growing number of French and Iraqi immigrants and Tel Aviv’s border-hopping food, taking shape before our eyes, is driven by an exuberant flavor profile that won’t be confined by any rigid tradition.

The lesson got reinforced that night when I dined at Yaffo Tel Aviv, an industrial-cool restaurant sitting at the base of downtown’s sleek Electra Tower. The standout hybrid dishes included a puffy focaccia that read more like pita, and an Italo-Israeli gnocchi with shavings of local goat cheese, for a taste of Tel Aviv on the Tiber.

The next morning, though, the very idea of another restaurant seemed claustrophobic. In a city where the sun rarely dives behind clouds, nobody stays inside too long, and Tel Aviv’s dense network of markets and street vendors do a brisk business. The choices are legion. Determined to recover a nostalgic taste of my childhood, I started just down the block from Halutzim 3 at the Levinksy Market, where the fruit stalls displayed pyramids of pomegranates and the market’s long-running Yom Tov Deli was selling cream cheese-stuffed hibiscus flowers in a dollhouse-sized storefront. “What’s good?” I stupidly asked the sale clerk. “Everything,” he said, with a classic Tel Aviv shrug, as I popped a rice-filled grape leaf in mouth, “We’re a deli.