Raveena Grover

[Update, Dec 2023: After a short period of closure, Khamsa reopened in St Peters, up the street from its former location. Find out more about the new café and updated menu over here. Read on for our article from 2021.] Nestled between Erskineville and Newtown is a small, bustling Palestinian vegan eatery. Khamsa Café holds the hubbub of clinking cutlery and coffee frothing between bright, white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The seating spills outdoors to a makeshift wraparound verandah where you’ll often find local pooches grazing at their owners’ fallen crumbs. Khamsa (pronounced ‘ham-sa’) was founded in 2019 – but its story begins much earlier. Ten years ago, Sarah Shaweesh, owner of Khamsa, relocated from Jordan to Australia and began learning more about veganism. When she was younger, her father took her to rallies, protests and events lobbying for Palestinian human rights in the face of Israeli occupation, and celebrating Palestinian culture. She cultivated a sense of responsibility and desire to minimise the negative impact she had on her surroundings – on all living things around her. “Because of the Palestinian struggle, it was important for me not to be involved in anything that enacted harm on the environment,” she says.  Photograph: Alannah Le Cross With most of her childhood spent ricocheting between three homes – Australia, Jordan and Malaysia – cooking was Shaweesh’s grounding. Unhappy in a nine-to-five office job a few years after relocating to Australi