In the early days of summer, when the dew of spring still lingered, I rode the subway. I was dressed in a pair of dark jeans that splayed wide and gave me room to move, a white T-shirt I’d thrifted nearly four years ago, a red hair clip to wrangle the curls struggling to spring loose, and a keffiyeh, tied loosely and tenderly around my neck. As the train screeched along, a few other passengers took the liberty of staring at me. At my neck. At my scarf. I could practically hear their thoughts. I knew what they wanted to call me.
I’m lucky, though, that the extent of my negative experiences in the keffiyeh ends in discomfort. Some of my Palestinian peers have been far less privileged, like Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, who took a walk last year in Vermont wearing their keffiyehs and ended up staring down the barrel of a gun, the victims of a violent alleged hate crime. All three college students were shot, and Awartani remains paralyzed. It was another tragic marker representing the plight of the Palestinians and the manner in which even something as simple as a scarf can, and will, be weaponized against us.
The black-and-white patterned shawl has been an emblem of Palestinian liberation among our own since at least 1936 during the Arab revolt against British rule. In the Middle East at large, it has been traditionally worn since the seventh century. But since October, and as Israel’s devastation of Gaza only worsens, the keffiyeh has been solidified as a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to life, both within the diaspora and among non-Palestinian allies empathetic to the cause. It is, for the most part, heartwarming to see a sea of people, diverse in ethnicity and orientation, at a protest cocooned in their scarves, or to make eye contact with a keffiyeh-clad passerby in the street and simply know there’s a deep, mutual understanding between the two of you. It’s enough to make you feel that, just maybe, the tide is turning. That our people are perhaps closer to liberation and no longer will serve as the scapegoat for an unchecked American war machine. Or, as Abdallah Fayyed wrote of spotting a keffiyeh, for just a brief blip, in the background of a scene in the beloved Home Alone 2: “Finally, something of ours didn’t seem threatening.”
And yet, in tandem with the burst in the keffiyeh’s popularity, a massive faction of right-wing bad actors and even liberal establishments have sown seeds of doubt and worked to cast the keffiyeh in a negative light. For every one step a Palestinian makes, it seems there is someone, or something, ready to push them two steps back. In Canada, on April 18, 2024, the keffiyeh was banned inside the legislative chamber in Ontario, and a member of provincial parliament, Sarah Jama, was asked to leave while wearing one. Here, in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, seemed to equate the keffiyeh with the hateful symbol that is the swastika on MSNBC’s Morning Joe without a smidge of pushback from the show’s hosts. Eurovision organizers condemned the Swedish-Palestinian singer Eric Saade’s choice to wear a keffiyeh wrapped around his wrist, while notably still allowing the Israeli flag at its festivities, saying the musician “chose to compromise the nonpolitical nature of the event.” And in New York City, the supposed pinnacle of America’s “melting pot,” two people were denied entry into the Museum of Modern Art because one of them had a keffiyeh in their bag. Each of these moments has served to instill fear and worry about an item of clothing to a public already witnessing, digitally, some of the most horrific crimes we’ve seen in modern times being perpetrated against the people in Gaza. While there are those who have succumbed to the most basic bits of propaganda, like that displayed by Greenblatt, it still feels clear to many where the true danger lies.
Time and time again, those wearing the keffiyeh have been on the receiving end of hate and vitriol. I think of Awartani and his friends, whose lives have been altered forever. I think of the Brooklyn man who had hot coffee thrown at him and his toddler by an irate woman. I think of the protester in Germany who, with their hands up and palms visible, was brutally punched in the face by police without apparent cause.
It’s clear that our sheer existence as Palestinians has to be cast as a threat in order to delegitimize the call for liberation, and the keffiyeh is a silent yet powerful challenge to our erasure. Over and over again, outlets choose to call the keffiyeh “controversial” and link its existence solely to violence, rather than a cultural representation of the Palestinian people and their steadfastness. No matter what Palestinians as a people or individuals do, what we say, what we protest or what we wear, there is, in Western establishments, always room to find fault—there is always room to attempt to control tactics used by those fighting their own oppression.
In the end, though, the “debate” surrounding the keffiyeh is a mere distraction. Policing the method in which we show up, however we show up, is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, pulling attention away from the true question at hand: don’t Palestinians have the right to live?
Danya Issawi is a staff writer at New York Magazine’s The Cut. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times.
