These days, Sansour travels the West Bank with a street-cart-size wooden kitchen that she sets up in the middle of villages, where she hosts meals and gathers stories of vanishing ingredients: strains of wheat like kaf al-rahman (“the palm of the merciful”) or abu samra (“the dark and handsome one”), which yields a bread as rich as cake; drought-resistant watermelons from Jenin in the West Bank, in whose fields people took refuge during the Six-Day War of 1967, and distant cousins to the watermelons of Gaza that are roasted unripe over open flames — in a communal process “that can take more than half the day,” according to Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt’s 2013 cookbook “The Gaza Kitchen” — and mashed to make fattit ajir, a salad strewn with scraps of qursa, unleavened bread baked in the fire’s embers.

Palestinian food is still rare in the West, at least under that name. Often it’s subsumed under the oversimplified label of “Middle Eastern” — a broad sweep from North Africa to Central Asia — or the more euphemistic “Mediterranean,” invoking the familiarity and safety of Italy and Spain to deflect from negative Western stereotypes of Arabs. Certainly it has kinship with other culinary traditions of the Levant, with meals built of dishes meant to share, at tables set with bright salads of just harvested vegetables and khubz (flatbread) baked that morning, alongside bowls of cooling yogurt, olive oil and za’atar, a wild herb that is ground with sesame seeds and sumac in a blend that’s deeply floral and sour. But the particular contours of the cuisine come from the natural bounty of the land between the Jordan River and the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, today designated as Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

Therein lies the difficulty. Before Kalla’s first cookbook, “Palestine on a Plate,” was published in 2016, prospective editors were worried that the title might be taken as a provocation, by asserting Palestine as a literal place. (“The Gaza Kitchen” and Christiane Dabdoub Nasser’s 2001 “Classic Palestinian Cuisine” were early outliers, issued by small presses dedicated to international issues.) There are those for whom the word “Palestinian” is already a stance, as if simply pronouncing it constitutes an attack on Israel’s right to exist. Some insist that, historically, there was no Palestinian culture distinct from that of their fellow Arabs in the region — since Palestine was for centuries part of Greater Syria, under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire — a largely academic argument that fails to answer the question of what, then, to call the people who lived in the territory before 1948. They are not merely Arab any more than the French are merely European. In any case, if they did not have a fully formed identity under the Ottomans, they certainly do now, defined in part by the land they have lost.

If cooking is in part an act of preservation, a way to sustain cultural identity, it is also an art of resilience, demanding the ability to adapt.

Kalla persisted with her book, and since the publication of “Palestine on a Plate,” each year has seen a new addition to the Palestinian culinary canon: Reem Kassis’s “The Palestinian Table” in 2017; Kalla’s “Baladi” in 2018; last year’s “Zaitoun,” by the British writer and human rights activist Yasmin Khan; and this spring’s forthcoming “Falastin,” by the Jerusalem-born, London-based chef and restaurateur Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. Still, for each, the problem remains: How to speak of the cuisine, given the political context? Alongside recipes, must there be testimony to the daily tolls of life under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of local olive trees over the past half century? Should there also be an acknowledgment of the rockets lobbed into Israeli territory by Palestinian militants, or the rallying cry of Hamas, the party that controls Gaza, for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” tacitly wiping out the country that lies between, or the rise of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world, or any of the countless accusations and defenses that can make a case for suffering on both sides?