How the keffiyeh became a symbol of the Palestinian cause.

Article published by Vox. Written by Abdallah Fayyad.

There’s a scene in Home Alone 2 that stood out to me when I was a kid. It’s the one where Kevin McCallister gets chased through the streets of New York by the two dimwitted burglars known as the Wet Bandits. But it wasn’t the cartoonish chase that grabbed my attention. It was a brief moment that most of the movie’s viewers probably never noticed: An extra, playing a street vendor, was wearing a keffiyeh.

The traditional Middle Eastern scarf was on the screen for only a few seconds, but I remember feeling excited. Until that point, I had only ever seen people wearing keffiyehs in the Arab world. (My grandfather often wore one on his head and my brother wore one around his neck as a teenager; I would later wear one as a young adult.) It seemed as though anytime the keffiyeh did appear in Western media, it happened to be on the news and associated with violence of some kind. But seeing it worn casually in an American movie, even if it was merely in the background, felt like an embrace of my people — finally, something of ours didn’t seem threatening to Americans.

I was, of course, wrong — as is to be expected from a kid gleaning so much meaning from a couple of frames in a Christmas movie. Just last year, a North Carolina police department used a man wearing a keffiyeh as a target for officers in a school shooting drill. No matter that school shootings in the US are overwhelmingly committed by white men — to the organizers of that drill and others like it, a keffiyeh was still a stereotypical image of violence.

Over the last century, the scarf — and the black-and-white version of it in particular — became closely tied to the Palestinian cause. While Palestinians view it as a symbol of their cultural and national identity, others view it as a threat: Over Thanksgiving weekend, three Palestinian college students were shot in Burlington, Vermont, in what is being investigated as a potential hate crime; two of the young men, according to police, were wearing keffiyehs.

As long as Palestinians are subjugated as a people, then even something as simple as a traditional scarf turns into something bigger than a cultural display; it becomes an intrinsic part of a controversial journey toward freedom. So while Palestinians still wear the keffiyeh for the cloth’s practical purposes and cultural significance, they also often wear it to assert a political statement. After all, expressing Palestinian identity has become an act of resistance in and of itself — to remind others that this people is still here.

From practical garment to a sign of class struggle

The Palestinian keffiyeh evolved out of a common headdress for men across the Middle East. The most common version of the scarf today has the iconic black-and-white checkered pattern that some say resembles a fishing net. Its exact origins are difficult to trace, but according to Wafa Ghnaim, the curator for the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC, it’s clear that the scarf we know today was around in the 19th century.

“The keffiyeh, which is also known as the hatta, was a men’s head cloth, specifically, that distinguished [men in] nomadic or Bedouin communities from villagers and city people and townspeople,” Ghnaim, who is also a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told me.

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