Israeli restaurant chain in DC hit by Liberal Gaza protests permanently closes

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Shouk, a plant-based kosher street-food chain in Washington, D.C., permanently shut down its final locations this month in part due to protests and boycotts from anti-Israel activists.

Once featured by the Food Network and The Washington Post for its "Shouk Burger," the chain had five stores in the region. The closures come after two years of protests and boycotts over the war in Gaza crippled the business.

Local activist group DC for Palestine led a boycott campaign that claimed the restaurant’s falafel and other menu items "appropriated" Palestinian cuisine and that the owners were "complicit in Israeli apartheid."

Co-owner Dennis Friedman, a Jewish American who opened the first Shouk location over a decade ago with Israeli co-owner Ran Nussbacher, rejected those accusations. He said the mission of Shouk was to bring people together.

"I don't agree with that because the intention of Shouk was pure, and good," Friedman told Fox News Digital. "When my business partner came to me, it wasn't ‘let's make Israeli food.’ He wanted to make plant-based food that reminded him of his childhood and home. That was the core of where we started to build the recipes. For the most part, Shouk has been promoted as Mediterranean, plant-based, and Middle Eastern. Very rarely have we claimed anything else. That’s why Shouk is written in both Arabic and Hebrew in all the stores — because we are a place to bring everyone together."

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Trump America, losing.  Why did you vote liberal again? 

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Deporting liberals is the answer to a lot of this country's problems.