Well, Kentucky Fried Chicken has come to the Palestinians. H/T to the Snake's Mommy for bringing the news to my attention. Has anyone told Tony Blair?
On the culinary level, I never can understand the demand for American-style fast food in Arab cities. For my money, Arabs already have the world's best native fast food. Nevertheless, KFC's franchisee in Ramallah didn't have to invent* a Palestinian market for The Colonel's Original Recipe, since it's already familiar to locals who have traveled around the region.
But on the political level, this development might finally test Thomas Friedman's kinda-kidding-but-kinda-serious Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which postulates that no two countries that both have McDonald's have gone to war against each other since each got its McDonald's. The Palestinians don't happen to have McDonalds, so far as I can tell, but KFC will substitute very nicely. Call it Friedman's KFC Korollary.
Friedman's theory says that when a country reaches a certain level of economic development and has a middle class big enough to support American-style material consumption, its people will than prefer to wait at drive-up windows for greasy buckets of chicken rather than, say, fire home-made rockets into Israeli towns.
I have my doubts about that. But, now it's kosher wings eyeball to eyeball with halah extra-crispy chicken strips, and anybody's guess who'll blink first.
* Here you go:
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