What’s black and white and a threat all over? A keffiyeh, of course. It may look like a harmless piece of fabric, but it’s actually a weapon of mass distraction. According to an awful lot of anti-Palestinian voices, the mass graves and forced “full-blown famine” in parts of Gaza are not what you should be outraged about now. The thousands of dead children and calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza are not what should be keeping you up at night. No, what should really upset you are people wearing keffiyehs – the traditional black and white scarf that has long been a symbol of Palestinian identity.
Being a British-Palestinian living in the US has never been a barrel of laughs. Anti-Arab bigotry has long been normalised in the US – although it’s hard to quantify the extent of this because the FBI did not properly track anti-Arab hate crimes between 1992 and 2015. Long before this current iteration of violence in Gaza, I’d grown used to people telling me Palestinians were terrorists while simultaneously proclaiming that “Palestinians don’t exist”: a phenomenon I’ve dubbed Schrödinger’s Palestinian.
Still, while the demonisation and erasure of Palestinians is nothing new, it feels like there’s now a concerted effort to outlaw any expression of Palestinian identity whatsoever: whether that be flags, keffiyehs, or watermelons. (Watermelons have become symbols of Palestine as a way to bypass attempts to censor the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag.) In March, for example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York denied entry to two people because one of them had a keffiyeh in their bag – after a public outcry, the museum later apologised and said it had mistaken the scarf for a banner. The Ontario legislature has banned people from wearing keffiyehs within the chamber. And, last week, the Eurovision song contest rebuked the Swedish-Palestinian singer Eric Saade for compromising the “non-political nature of the event” by wearing a keffiyeh around his wrist during his performance.
“I got that keffiyeh from my dad when I was a little boy, to never forget where the family comes from,” Saade later said on Instagram. “Back then I didn’t know that it would one day be called a ‘political symbol’.” Saade added: “I just wanted to … wear something that is authentic to me – but the EBU [the European Broadcasting Union] seems to think my ethnicity is controversial.”
Of course it’s controversial, Eric! You can’t get a cup of coffee as a Palestinian without someone making it controversial. You certainly can’t wear a traditional scarf. Back in 2007, when the keffiyeh had a moment as a mainstream fashion item, Urban Outfitters, which was marketing it as an anti-war scarf, stopped stocking it partly because of pressure from pro-Israel groups who smeared it as a terror symbol. At the time, a director of the pro-Israel group Stand With Us told the Jerusalem Post that she thought someone in Urban Outfitters’ buying department might have a “political agenda against Israel and Jews”. Now Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, is going one step further and trying to make keffiyehs synonymous with hate symbols. Last month he went on MSNBC’s show Morning Joe – one of Joe Biden’s favourite news programmes – and compared the keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika. The host, Joe Scarborough, didn’t push back on this outrageous comparison. Nor did the five other people on the news panel. Instead, the session was wrapped up and Scarborough told Greenblatt: “Thank you so much.”
Whipping up hatred against symbols of Palestinian identity has dangerous consequences. Last November three Palestinian college students in Burlington, Vermont were shot; it’s thought that they may have been targeted because they were wearing keffiyehs. Around the same time, a British-Indian man living in Brooklyn was attacked in a playground while with his 18-month-old, because he was wearing a keffiyeh. A woman called him a terrorist, threw her phone and a hot cup of coffee at him and said she hoped that “someone burns your child in an oven”.
Cowardly though it may be, the anti-Arab atmosphere in the US has made me afraid of wearing my own keffiyeh out of the house. Particularly, as I recently had a very unpleasant interaction when wearing my watermelon sweater (the same one Ben Affleck’s daughter was criticised for wearing). Still, being worried about getting harassed on the street is nothing compared with what people in Gaza and the West Bank are dealing with. Please don’t let hate-mongers try to distract you: it’s not keffiyehs or protesting university students that you should be outraged by, it’s children being starved to death.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
