“Do people drink juice?” the writer Reem Kassis asked no one in particular one recent afternoon, as she bustled around her spacious kitchen in a suburb of Philadelphia. “They’re not kids,” she said, reasoning with herself. “They” were her dinner guests, a group of ten Swarthmore College students who were due to arrive in less than an hour. Like Kassis and her friend Sa’ed Atshan, the chair of Swarthmore’s Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, the students were Palestinian. Kassis, who is thirty-six, has long hair and dark eyes, which were accentuated with eyeliner, and wore a pin-striped apron tied tightly above her waist. Moving with nervous purpose, she assembled a spread of dishes from her two cookbooks, “The Palestinian Table” and “The Arabesque Table.” “In Arab culture, there’s this idea that if you have guests coming over you show respect by having a big piece of meat,” Kassis said. “It took me a while to get that out of my head.” She had decided, instead, on platters of baked fish and shrimp, kafta (ground-beef patties, arranged in a whorl with fried potatoes, then ladled with tahini), and msakhan: roasted chicken thighs with sautéed onions, turned tart and crimson by a fistful of sumac, and topped with toasted pine nuts. This last is the dish that Kassis classifies as the most distinctly Palestinian; hers was “the Galilee version,” she explained, without the usual underpinning of taboon—baked bread.

The students arrived in a caravan of cars, shepherded by Atshan, and piled onto couches in the living room, laughing, starting sentences in Arabic and finishing them in English. When dinner was ready, they gathered around the kitchen island, where Kassis had arranged a buffet, and introduced themselves, sharing their names and where in Palestine they or their parents had grown up: Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza. “I missed this so much,” a young woman named Noor said happily as she filled a plate.

At the table, Noor and Kassis discovered that their parents lived on the same street in Jerusalem. Another student, named Ragad, a competitive weight lifter who wore a hijab, compared notes with Kassis on cooking in college: Kassis remembered finding cockroaches in a communal kitchen as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. Ragad laughed about the boys on campus who flocked to her for food. “They’re mostly Egyptian,” she said. “And mostly don’t know how to cook.”

Growing up, in Jerusalem, Kassis had been wary of the kitchen, and of the ways in which domesticity might trap her. The longer she lived abroad, though, the more committed she became to cooking the food of her homeland, especially as she and her husband started a family. (They now have three daughters.) She left a corporate career, which included a stint at McKinsey, to work on “The Palestinian Table,” collecting recipes inherited from friends and relatives, hoping to teach people about Palestinian culture through food.

But this past fall, after Israel launched a military campaign that has since taken tens of thousands of lives in Gaza, in retaliation for the vicious attack on civilians by Hamas, Kassis wrote on Instagram that she was losing faith in the idea of food as a diplomatic tool. She described feeling “heartbroken to see how many people who have accepted our generosity, our food . . . have remained silent.”

Kassis considers the notion of unfettered hospitality inherent to her identity as a Palestinian. “In my dad’s village, people stand out on their balconies, and, if someone passes by, you automatically say, ‘Come in!’ ” she said. But she had started to wonder if she was trying to prove something more: “Like, come to my house, come eat, look, we’re nice! I’m not going to blow you up if you come eat at my table!” She grew animated. “My work shouldn’t be about helping you realize that I’m a human being,” she said. “Why is that the starting point?”

She asked a student whose mother was from Gaza if he had family there now. He did. “Uch,” she said. “Sorry to dampen the mood, but are they O.K.?”

“Yeah, they are,” he said. “They’re trying to get out.”

As the meal wound down, Atshan asked the guests to share a piece of good news. Earlier, he’d noted that the dinner was a rare reprieve from “the fraught discussions the students have to deal with in the dorms, in the classroom,” which force them to “be the ambassadors.” One student, he proudly announced, had been offered spots in graduate programs in Middle Eastern studies at two Ivy League universities. He took an informal poll of everyone’s favorite dishes. “Reem,” he cried out, “I think msakhan won!” ♦