Shahar Segal is co-founder of Erev Notting Hill, one of 40 restaurants in his global Good People Group. Erev says it “offers a bold, contemporary take on Levantine cuisine” and “a bold new take on Mediterranean street food.” In reality, the restaurant serves appropriated Arab cuisine, re-labelling it “Eastern Mediterranean.” But cultural appropriation is the least of Shahar Segal’s crimes.

“A little lawless”

Erev (also called Miznon) markets itself as “just a little lawless” – if only reality matched the PR. Segal is an advertising man turned entrepreneur and a celebrity in Israel. After the 7^th October 2023, his eclectic career accelerated along a new trajectory, one that set the “prominent leftist” on an explicitly Zionist path. Segal, 62, explained, “I found myself in the army dealing with influence operations – narrative building. Fighting the war against Hamas”

In an interview early in Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip, Segal told an Israeli journalist that Hamas “is defeating you with their story, and the only way you can really fight them is to fight their story.”

Segal had decided to use his PR skills in the service of genocide; a purveyor of unreality who thought he was fighting a narrative war against the marketing and branding bros of the Palestinian resistance.

GHF

Operating from New York City, in 2025 Segal became Spokesperson for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private enterprise created by the Israeli and US governments. Israel lured Palestinians to GHF “aid distribution centres” where Israeli troops then murdered them. In just two months during Segal’s time as spokesperson, at least 859 Palestinians were murdered using this method. 

Masquerading as “humanitarian”, the GHF’s true role was to block aid distribution, usurp the United Nations’ role in Palestine, murder Palestinians and set the stage for Trump’s “Board of Peace” and its plans for a dystopian future of colonial control for Gaza.

UG Solutions was the initial recruiter for GHF’s mercenary staff, and UG has remained in the good graces of the US government, perhaps thanks to its hiring of a far-right Islamophobic biker gang to guard GHF sites.

To further manipulate the situation, Israel backed gangs of Palestinian traitors, arming them so they could steal aid, which the West blamed on Hamas. While the quisling gangs enjoyed Israel’s protection, other Palestinians approaching GHF sites were shot on sight.

Human Rights Watch has stated that the GHF’s role in Gaza formed part of Israel’s “use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war” and that the organisation “turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths” constituting “serious violations of international law and war crimes.”

With the UN’s 80-year role supporting refugees in Gaza ended, the GHF “aid” centres established by Segal and his colleagues are now set to exert control over every aspect of the lives of their Palestinian victims. The US-directed “Board of Peace” will rule Gaza for an initial two years, with Israel allowed to militarily occupy 58% of the Strip and an “International Stabilisation Force” (ISF) in situ as a continuation of the GHF, overseen by Trump and the Pentagon.

The GHF officially ended operations in October, but its former headquarters in Kiryat Gat inside Israel is now the HQ of the new “Civil-Military Coordination Centre” (according to the New York Times) – an entirely colonial operation of racist cruelty and subjugation.

A so-called ‘Green Zone’ in Gaza will be under Israel’s control, in violation of international law. A ‘Red Zone’ will be left to Hamas to govern without support for rebuilding efforts. Israel will be free to bomb anywhere in that zone, under the pretext that Hamas ‘controls’ it. A third section of Gaza will be the ‘Yellow Line’ – “the death zone separating the Green and Red Zones.”

Segal’s views

On his role as GHF Spokesman, Shahar Segal told NPR, “I believe this is the only correct and possible way to deliver food to Gazans without bankrolling Hamas’s terror machine.”

Speaking about the thousands of murders at GHF sites, Segal re-labelled them “tragedies that occurred….on the way to the distribution points,” blaming “a very efficient Hamas influence machine.”

Citing an anonymous source familiar with the GHF’s operations, NPR reported that Segal was cherry picked as Spokesperson for the GHF “to project the image that the initiative has nutritional value for Gazans.”

The reality that Segal was helping to starve and slaughter Palestinians while seeking to present a virtuous image has not gone unnoticed. Anti-genocide protests at Segal’s Melbourne branch of Miznon were spun by the Australian media as “antisemitic.”

The 2025 opening of Segal’s Gila & Nancy restaurant in Berlin was delayed by more anti-genocide protests. And here in Notting Hill, Erev’s management have called upon the Metropolitan Police, far-right Tommy Robinson-linked gangs and members of the House of Lords to push back against protestors. As in Melbourne and Berlin, the London protestors were labelled “antisemites” and Segal’s GHF role entirely ignored by his defenders.

Segal is defiant, telling Ynet, “we will continue opening more places and telling our story — our Israeli story — to anyone who’s willing to hear it. The Israeli identity is a core part of the experience, and we won’t dilute that to make others comfortable…a wave of hatred rising around the world that inevitably becomes antisemitism. And antisemitism, once unleashed, is like a genie from a bottle. You can’t put it back. It’ll take years.”

Segal went on, “One restaurant is worth a thousand hatreds.”

Home

Despite Netanyahu’s wars of aggression and conquest enjoying overwhelming approval in Israel, Shahar Segal’s GHF role provoked some negative reactions in his home country.

Managers at Teder, a Tel Aviv bar and music venue part-owned by Segal, released a statement saying they had “learned from the media that he is involved in the GHF, a shady organization to put it lightly.”

Cultures of Solidarity, a mutual aid organisation based at Teder, immediately announced they were leaving the venue after years of working there, stating, “there’s no way to separate the public image of Shahar Segal from the involvement with the GHF.”

While mainstream British media has chosen to ignore Segal’s GHF role, in Israel there is more freedom of speech on these issues. The newspaper Haaretz has published scathing criticisms of Segal, saying his restaurants sell food “plagiarized from working-class kitchens and catered to Tel Aviv’s high-tech and Instagram economies.”

The same publication labelled Segal’s resignation from the GHF “another PR manoeuvre meant to turn the fire away from his enterprise…Segal, a man who collaborated with a brutal mechanism of killing, starving, and expelling Palestinians, is accurately a very authentic representative of contemporary Israel.”

Fantasist

It is doubtful Segal is moved by these moral and cultural critiques of his work. On Instagram he posts racist propaganda. He labelled the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as the “murderer” of young children from the Bibas family who died as captives in Gaza. Despite the children apparently dying at the hands of the Israeli army under their Hannibal Directive, Zionist propagandists including Segal made much of the claim that Palestinian resistance fighters had murdered, mutilated and raped Israeli babies and children; all such claims have been proven to be lies invented to manufacture support for genocide.

Despite the lies being debunked, Segal’s posts remain online. Last week he posted words from Ynet, lauding the ideological forerunners of the GHF, Jabotinsky (Netanyahu’s guru) and Ben Gourion (terrorist and Israel’s first Prime Minister), and seemingly supporting Israel’s conquest “up to the Litani” (river) in Lebanon. Like the invasion and occupation of Gaza, the invasion and occupation of Lebanon is illegal under international law and recognised as such by Britain.

Who is Shahar Segal?

We can say with certainty that this businessman is a genocidal racist who supports the ethnic cleansing of at least one nation in the Middle East, and the conquest of others. He appears to be a phony, selling appropriated cuisine and seeking to win a PR war without concern for truth or reality. Yet we have seen a ring of protection form around his business interests here in London, from the police, the far right, politicians and the media.

Segal is entitled to his warped views of Israel’s role in the world, even if they are based on ethnic or religious superiority. But he does not have the right to (prima facie) break the law. And when protestors protest at Erev just off Portobello Road, it is to let local people know that this businessman has been involved in genocide. The Metropolitan Police has a war crimes division, but it is presumably under instructions not to prosecute prima facie war criminals, if they work for Britain’s ally, Israel.

In Ladbroke Grove, where residents know all about justice being delayed, it is unlikely anti-genocide campaigners will forget Shahar Segal’s role in Gaza any time soon. He is, after all, “a very authentic representative of contemporary Israel.”

 

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles