Mexicans eat cactus with gusto. Indigenous to what is now called Mexico, cactus is easy to throw a handful of green slivered cactus paddles into a molé or to scramble with your eggs in the morning. Make it into a salad, covered with crumbled white cheese. That’s how my mother’s family eats it.
Cactus also grows in Palestine, where my father’s family is from and also, where I grew up. Its pears are prized, as they are in Mexico, as a summer fruit. They are fleshy, growing in pink, orange, and yellow hues at the very top of fleshy green paddles. Chill them in the fridge and pull them out after dinner: they collapse under the slice of your teeth as your tongue navigates the black seeds studded throughout the fruit.
Mexicans and Palestinians eat the fruit, but the paddles –the nopales– are not eaten in Palestine. Somehow, even though they’ve been in Palestine for several hundred years, nopales has never made it into the Palestinian kitchen. I’ve been asking other Palestinians for years, in search of an answer. Instead, all I know is that the nopal is trimmed away from the rest of the plant as it grows tall, and then, they’re discarded. Maybe given to livestock with thick tongues that can withstand the thorns. I’m not sure.
In both Mexican and Palestinian contexts, cactus is a political symbol. In one, cactus graces the flag, and beyond being a national symbol, it always seemed to me a cypher for how Mexican civil society encounters its indigenous past, present, and future. Indigeneneity is celebrated but only where useful to the state and its apparatus. And in Palestinian society, it is a metaphor for steadfastness in the face of Zionist oppression. Like cactus, we stand our ground, we are patient.
My family talks about the absence of cactus in Palestinian cuisine. But it wasn’t until one day, in the months the genocide on Gaza’s Palestinians began, on a phone call that my mother issued me a challenge. My mother knows Palestine and what it is to live under the occupation. She spent the better part of a decade living in Palestine, walking her two Palestinian-Mexican children through Zionist checkpoints, Sunday through Thursday, to get us to school.
So, on that phone call, my mother asked me to dream up Palestinian dishes starring the nopal.
Close-up of young cactus pears (sabr) emerging from a nopal paddle. While the fruit is cherished in Palestine, the paddle itself is trimmed and discarded—symbolic of time and possibilities left unexplored. Ramallah, Palestine, 2025. Photo courtesy of Juliana Hodali.
The occupation of Palestine is often framed as the theft of land and human life. Keys and settlements stand in as symbols of this loss. But what if a symbol that already exists in Palestinian contexts took on another meaning and thus, another dimension of the occupation and thus, Palestinian resistance?
To occupy Palestine, the Occupation steals our time with each other
January 2024 sees devastating images on my social media feeds. In some ways, it has always been this way for Palestinians. The year 2023, prior to October 7, was violent: a different young person, community pillar, or an elder murdered by the Zionist entity on my screen and for all the world to see; destruction of homes. Jenin. al-Khalil, Nablus, Ramallah, Tulkaram, Tubas, al Quds and more.
It was this way before social media, too. The news we told each other and the world: recaps of raids, relayed to give a warning, notes about roads destroyed by Zionist military bulldozers or settlers setting fire to a home, sexual assault. My Arabic-language teacher in primary school loved grammar, but he preferred using the school day to give us oral histories: he told us how children hid during the first Intifada when the Israeli army came in deliberately looking for children to maim. Sometimes— being so small, children hid in bigger trees,and once during his childhood, my teacher himself hid in an abandoned fridge in a partly destroyed house.
Palestinians are always willing to share information. It’s made my cactus-finding mission easy. You can just ask your neighbor, your teachers, and they’ll tell you they’ve never seen any Palestinian eat the nopales. They’re surprised Mexicans even eat them: They’re thorny! How would you even cook them?
Then, in January 2024, a news report from Gaza popped up on my feed. A re-posting of a tiktok or reel. The Ghazzawi, bitter and resigned, against a backdrop of destroyed concrete chews on a raw nopal.
This is what we’re reduced to eating. It gives you diarrhea.
Thick clusters of cactus paddles growing densely in a garden. In Palestine, these nopales are rarely eaten, yet their presence is a testament to rootedness and endurance across centuries. Ramallah, Palestine, 2025. Photo courtesy of Juliana Hodali.
There’s no way of telling him that he’s halfway there. He’s just got to cook the cactus or put it in salt. That it can bulk up with eggs or luncheon meat in a frying pan. You can leave a comment and hope someone anywhere in Gaza with access to cactus will see it. You can text your friends, but will they even find cactus that’s safe to eat?
There’s a world where Palestinians eat cactus. A world where two people lying under a tree look up at the sprawling plants, half-bush, half-tree, all juicy, and look at one another.
Dare you to eat it.
A few failed experiments and maybe then, one successful one.
But passing ideas, you need time to do it. You need moments to rest, for energy to produce an idea. Too much of that time is snatched away by the Zionist state. And then, ideas need time to soak into another person’s being. The process repeats and each step needs time.
Maybe there are other Palestinians in Gaza who have eaten cactus and enjoyed it. They’re held away from other Palestinians, like the man in the video, by the genocide. They’ve been cut off from each other by destruction and Israeli attacks. Or they’ve died and remain unburied, under the rubble, joining scores of martyrs before them. This is stolen time, too.
To share information is to fill up a moment of time. In one of those stolen moments, a Palestinian might have cooked cactus and handed that dish to another.
To fight the occupation, Palestinians give each other time
Tell a Palestinian man over a certain age –be it your father, uncle, grandfather, great uncle, your friend’s father, your neighbor who is kind of like an uncle– that you love a food item at your own peril. Cucumbers, which you might offhandedly comment on, will appear in large cardboard boxes.
Since the genocide on Palestine aggravated after October 2023, there are so many small instances of this generosity. A father, gone off to find a treat for their child, returns to the site of their murder by the Zionist entity. It strikes the heart differently if you know this is part of a culture of quietly spoiling the people you love.
If the object of your desire is seasonal, Palestinian men will try even harder to find it for you. In the few weeks of summer when cactus pears are in season, cartons of them, peeled to show their brilliant jewel tones, will appear in the fridge or on the counter. They’re fresh from the street, where vendors pile the fruit high on carts. They set up little folding tables and don rubber gloves. You tell them how many pears you want and they peel them open, expertly using 2 or 3 slits of a paring knife.
It can sometimes grate on you to receive gifts of food in such excess. You warn each other not to mention in front of your uncle or grandfather that you enjoy something. But the truth of the matter is that it is still a show of love, one of many—and in particular, it is respect for your time. The time you spent saying that you love something and the time it takes to go retrieve that edible delight. It is respect, bundled with the gift of time.
There’s something else, too. There’s the fear that, one day, there will be no food left to give –just as there has been no food for many times in our history, most recently in March 2025 in Gaza. And just as important, is time. There will be no time left to give, no time left to look for candy for the loved ones in your life, no time to buy 5 or 6 kilos of cactus pears.
Wild cactus hedges grow untended along a field’s edge. Once boundary markers between farmlands, today they stand as silent witnesses to the Nakba and the villages erased from the map. Ramallah, Palestine, 2025. Photo courtesy of Juliana Hodali.
To occupy Palestine, the Israeli occupation steals our time on our lands
On the few occasions my family left the Diffa al-Gharbiyya during my childhood –a precarious undertaking full of potential violence from the Israeli occupation, my father intentionally pointed out the villages Zionist militia destroyed during the Nakba. He knew all their names and sometimes, he also knew a bit more, like what they used to be famous for, ‘just like our village is famous for mish-mish’.
My father sometimes even knew details of each village’s Nakba: how many Palestinians were murdered and where people fled following the attacks. He remembered stories of their resistance: someone who hid their families and neighbors in a well or who threw themselves in front of a Zionist or British army vehicle to try to stop it in its tracks.
These precarious childhood road trips taught us to read the landscape—how to notice these villages if you passed by. Look for the pile of rubble aged by the sun and wind, laid out in the shape of buildings. Maybe a steeple or caved-in dome somewhere in the village center. And look for the cactus, overgrown with no one to trim it back.
On our way back to our own village, my father pointed at cactus hedges at the edges of farmland. That’s what it is supposed to look like. A barrier to signal the end of one person’s land and the start of another’s.
Overgrown cactus hedges tell a story of a Palestinian past, of Palestinians who grew them and ate their pears in the summer. But they also tell the story of Palestinians separated from their land, by Palestinian genocide in 1948 and our dispossession from the land itself, the land they shaped and which shaped them in turn. As the cactus grows wide and tall, it covers more and more ground. But it does not hide the rubble at its feet. Each inch grown takes the place of every moment that a Palestinian could have spent with their cactus. These are small moments and big ones.
That time on the land is critical. It is that time spent with your land that teaches you how to work the land. It is time to make mistakes and to experiment. To explore.
An overgrown cactus thicket basks in the midday sun. Their sprawling forms are metaphors for Palestinian time, disrupted, growing wild, and reaching for continuity. Ramallah, Palestine, 2025. Photo courtesy of Juliana Hodali.
To fight the occupation, Palestinians distort time
My mother asked us again, her two children, sometime in the summer of 2024, if we had any new thoughts on recipes for Palestinian cactus dishes.
She quickly shot down all my ideas, imposing new rules and restrictions on this game with each turn of play. Stuffed cactus in yogurt is too similar to Mexican dishes. Frying it in an omelet is literally the same dish as the Mexican dish. New Rule: You can only use Palestinian cooking techniques.
My mother is made of steel. She watched the Israeli military raid her Palestinian home, she stared down Israeli army jeeps at checkpoints and yelled at soldiers gleefully holding up hundreds of students trying to get home before nightfall. So she didn’t listen to the argument that some Palestinian cooking techniques –like scrambling an egg– are the same techniques Mexicans use. Nay, these are universal techniques, I protested.
It’s a Palestinian ingredient. Give it Palestinian techniques.
Cactus became a game, a conversation stretched out through time. It would come up on phone calls or over board games. It created a bubble where time slowed, for a few minutes, and history and memory bubbled up to the surface. Experimental meals never came out of the conversations— but that was not the point, not during an active genocide, nor even during the genocide that is the ongoing Nakba. Neither was the goal to distract us. The point was to walk with cactus through Palestinian space and time, to give it the honor of wonder, instead of delegating it to merely a symbol of resilience. And the cactus, being Palestinian as it is, distorted time and gave it back to me.
Epilogue
But, nopales never need to make it onto the Palestinian plate to be Palestinian.
There are idylls told by us and our allies: a romanticization of both the Palestinian past and present. A rosy vision to fight for Palestinians in a rural existence, perfectly in tune with nature and Palestinians freedom fighting. Eating nopales can exist in an idyll: a people totally in sync with the land who used every part of it and knew best how to take care of it.
And idylls are fine. Palestinians are indeed the best people to take care of our land. And idyll can motivate, they can animate, but they also regurgitate myths and fantasies. An idyllic vision of Palestine is never all that should exist. It distorts our sense of the past and ourselves in the past. There is more than one way to be. But we need time to learn that: time with each other and time on our land.
Cactus fruits crown the tops of the paddles, while the paddles themselves go unused. In the background, modern buildings press in, contrasting the plant’s historical and political symbolism. Ramallah, Palestine. 2025. Photo courtesy of Juliana Hodali.
Thus, there is something beautiful about the nopal staying where it is, unused by Palestinians, out of our kitchens, living its life out as the bearer of fruit, crowning a thick stalked-plant. There, it lets us step outside of the narrative of Palestine as a pre-capitalist rural idyll, where Palestinians use the land efficiently, a farm-to-table idyll to match the fallah who knows the land like the back of their hand. The nopal, just the way it is now, can give us complexity, and not romanticism.
I just worry that complexity is lost when time is quickly running out.
N.A. Mansour
N.A. Mansour (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-Mexican historian, educator and writer. Her writing on food, culture, art and history has appeared inEater, Bon Appetit, The Counter, Contingent Magazine, Vittlesand more. Mansour’s historical research focuses on both the history of Muslim devotional manuscripts and Palestinian material history. She’s taught Palestinian history, archival science, Muslim contemporary literature, manuscript history and art history in both community and higher educational settings.
