The two women behind a Palestinian-Israeli pop-up this week in Washington, D.C., knew their event had the potential to draw protests, given the humanitarian crisis created by Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. But the pair wasn’t fully prepared for the backlash generated by their $95-per-person fundraising dinner, dubbed the Two Plate Solution.

On the restaurant’s Instagram post, critics blasted the event at El Secreto de Rosita — which raised money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Women Wage Peace, an Israeli grassroots group — as “inappropriate and tone deaf” during a war in which Israel is accused of starving Palestinians in Gaza. Several singled out the title itself, a puckish reference to “two-state solution,” the fraught, decades-long effort to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“To see them fundraising for an Israeli organization and a Palestinian one, it’s very both sides,” said Jinan Deena, a Palestinian activist and chef based in Washington, in an Instagram story. To Deena, there’s nothing equal about the situation in the Middle East: Israelis, she argued, don’t need assistance. Those in Gaza are the ones clinging to life.

Deena urged her followers to take action, whether leaving a comment or organizing a boycott of the restaurant. “Now you’re going to have a bunch of people boycotting you because of your stupid decision to do this dinner,” the chef-activist said in a story. “So I hope you’re happy with your decision.”

By Wednesday, just a day into the scheduled three-day pop-up, Two Plate Solution organizers were scrambling to explain themselves, their motivations and even the name of their event. El Secreto took down its Instagram post for hours while Nesrin Abaza, the Palestinian co-owner of the restaurant and one of the Two Plate organizers, put together a video in which she suggested, “We must engage with all sides and be able to communicate, to discuss our differences, to bring humanity back to the table.”

The message did little to pacify the naysayers, who suggested the organizers were doing little more than coddling their oppressors and normalizing their actions. More than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 72,000 injured since Israel declared war after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, which left more than 1,200 Israelis dead.

The backlash underscored, once again, the blowback that restaurants can face when they wade into the turbulent waters of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Last fall, a small restaurant in Seattle received threats and was accused of “sleeping with the enemy” for raising cash for the same Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. (The owner had to hire security for the fundraisers.) In December, Israeli American chefs Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook were accused of supporting genocide in Gaza when their Philadelphia falafel shop raised more than $100,000 for United Hatzalah, an Israeli nonprofit emergency medical response group. A Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn was accused late last year of being antisemitic when it renamed the seafood section of its menu “from the river to the sea,” a rallying cry that many Israelis see as a threat to their existence.

Unlike many of her peers around the country, Abaza decided to embrace her detractors and hear their anger. But in return she wanted them to understand her story — and how it informed her decisions to partner with Abbie Rosner, a Jewish American writer, to host the Two Plate Solution dinners.

Abaza and Rosner addressed some of the criticisms at their fundraising dinners. A Jordanian-Palestinian raised in Greece, Abaza talked about how the name of the event derived from her experiences with a Jewish American friend when both were living in Ecuador, the home country of Abaza’s husband, the restaurateur Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld. Abaza and her friend would cook together and argue about the origins of hummus, falafel and other Middle Eastern dishes.

“One day he said to me, ‘Oh, you know, you and I should open a restaurant called Two Plate Solution, and we can compete on our cooking and see who likes which,’” Abaza told The Washington Post during an interview.

Rosner told diners about her own formative experiences living in Israel for 29 years. During her time there, she often visited Palestinian and Bedouin villages to talk to farmers, herders, cooks, olive harvesters and others about foodways that have changed little since biblical times. Rosner became close friends with Balkees Abu Rabiya, a Palestinian cook from Nazareth, whom the writer has called her culinary mentor. Rosner’s experiences became the basis for her 2012 book, “Breaking Bread in Galilee: A Culinary Journey Into the Promised Land.”

“I was able to actually build these incredibly beautiful relationships with people who didn’t necessarily have any reason to have anything to do with me, and we ended up finding this very beautiful place of shared humanity,” Rosner told The Post.

Abaza, 62, and Rosner, 65, are part of a baby boom generation that, for decades, wasn’t tethered to a smartphone and its power to transmit thought and feeling without any human interaction. The women talk frequently about the importance of in-person conversations, often over a shared meal, to break down barriers, even when those conversations may be with people who want to tear your world apart.

“There is a lot of pain, and I totally understand it,” Abaza said. “And with pain comes anger and with pain comes vengeance. This is unfortunate, but that’s the reality. And we all felt it. And did I feel that? Yes, I did, but you sometimes need to take that anger and channel it into something, because otherwise it consumes your daily life. And I think putting that energy into making something happen, change, is therapeutic for me.”

The women’s experiences have often been hands-on, whether it was Rosner’s wanderings in Galilee or Abaza’s activism throughout her career. Among other things, Abaza spent weeks in Greece in 2016, serving as an interpreter at a Syrian refugee camp. She is also used to having difficult conversations, right in her home: Fraga-Rosenfeld, her spouse, is part Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Alfredo Mauricio Rosenfeld, fled Poland in the early years of the Holocaust to start life anew in Ecuador.

Like Abaza, Deena, 41, is an activist with a serious interest in food. As a child, she spent countless hours working in her parents’ Middle Eastern restaurant in Toledo. She moved to D.C. in 2017 and began working at nonprofits, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. These days, Deena hosts pop-ups under the name Bayti, which she describes as a “Palestinian hospitality culinary experience.” Her goal is not just to serve Palestinian food but also to argue that Israeli cuisine is appropriated from Arabic and Palestinian lands.

Deena said part of her distaste for the Two Plate Solution dinners was how the organizers framed the meal as a showcase of Palestinian and Israeli cuisines.

“It’s very deliberate when [Israelis] take that food and call it their own. That is a direct erasure of an entire population, and Palestinian identity is tied to our land. Everything that we make and that we eat and that we enjoy comes from the land,” Deena told The Post. “So I take it very personally when I see something like that, and that’s kind of why my reaction was just so strong.”

Rosner, the writer who has studied the foodways of the Fertile Crescent, disagrees with the idea that one culture or another owns certain foods. The land’s native plants — pulses, wheat, grapes, olives — have been the building blocks of cookery for countless cultures.

“They have been feeding and sustaining whoever has lived in that land for millennia,” Rosner said. “So if it was the Canaanites or the Hebrews or the Philistines or the Ottomans or the Palestinians, the foods are indifferent. They don’t belong to anybody. How people prepare them, use them, there are a million different ways.”

The arguments between Deena and the organizers of Two Plate Solution might have remained exclusively online if not for an invitation that Abaza extended: She asked Deena to meet on Thursday afternoon at El Secreto. The women sat down for 90 minutes. They talked politics, cultural appropriation, food and more. Abaza even gave Deena a bracelet — designed by Fraga-Rosenfeld — that bridges the two cultures of the Abaza/Fraga-Rosenfeld household: The bracelet is composed of huayruro seeds (native to the Amazon rainforest) and evil-eye beads, a symbol that plays a large role in Arabic superstitions.

The women said they came away from the meeting with a better understanding of each other. Abaza understood how her marketing of the event could have triggered Deena, and Deena got a glimpse into Abaza’s complicated family history. Deena declined an invitation to join the final Two Plate Solution dinner on Thursday, but only because, she said, she had a previous engagement. Deena later posted a new Instagram story in which she told her followers not to boycott the restaurant. “I think we can move forward now,” she said.

The women said they didn’t agree on everything, but they were fine with that. Their beliefs don’t have to align perfectly for them to find common ground.

“Conversation,” Deena said, “is one of the best ways, over a meal, to get through to people.”