Gaza Chef Wonders If Beef Fillet Was This Tough In Auschwitz

“I might just close the restaurant for the day and take my family to an amusement park – but I bet they had better ones at Sobibor.”

Gaza City, December 30 – The culinary chief and manager of Masri, a gourmet restaurant in this Mediterranean city, laments the limited availability of quality beef cuts there and wonders if conditions were similar in other concentration camps, as the Gaza Strip has been described.

Ahmad Sudri, 38, says he struggles to obtain proper filet mignon and porterhouse cuts, among others, which must be imported through Israel because the border with Egypt is almost always closed, and the smuggling tunnels under that border have been mostly destroyed by the Egyptian military. Given the relatively low demand for such quality beef in Gaza, the chef complains that he must either pay a premium to secure cuts that would otherwise go to the burgeoning Israeli market, or make do with meat of a less consistent quality. Sudri expresses curiosity as to whether the inmates at Auschwitz, for example, faced such obstacles to proper living.

“It’s unconscionable that I only have access to quality cuts of beef some of the time,” he avers. “My customers know good beef and good cuisine, and the Zionist siege makes it exceedingly hard for me to provide what they’re willing to pay for – and I suffer if I can’t serve what’s on the menu. They will simply take their business elsewhere, or settle for the less-profitable items I prepare. Our leaders and allies are not kidding when they call Gaza the world’s largest concentration camp.” He wondered aloud whether the Nazis similarly restricted imports into the camps, allowing in only civilian goods of all kinds, and limiting only items that also have a military use.

“I’ve had to issue a backup menu with only goat, chicken, and sheep meats, just to save myself the embarrassment of explaining to our customers that item after item is currently unavailable, or not recommended because of middling quality,” he says. “Tell me, did the fine restaurants in Treblinka or Bergen-Belsen need to debase themselves this way? If I weren’t Muslim I’d be drowning my sorrows in wine right now.”

“And that’s another thing,” he continued. “The Nazis weren’t Muslim, so they wouldn’t have restricted alcoholic beverages, so those restaurants could easily make up for mediocre beef or veal offerings with an impressive Merlot or Cabernet Franc,” he surmised. “But here, things are just terrible. I might just close the restaurant for the day and take my family to an amusement park – but I bet they had better ones at Sobibor.”

Sudri conceded that Gaza has one clear advantage over Nazi camps, in that Gaza has no Jews.

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