Keffiyeh Chic and ‘The Thin Line Between Pity and Hate’

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‘Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation,’ writes Brendan O’Neill.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, FrontPage Magazine

Brendan O’Neill is an editor of the British magazine Spiked and one of the few trustworthy commentators in the U.K. on Israel and the “Palestinians.” He takes apart what he calls the “keffiyeh classes” here: “The cult of the keffiyeh,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, December 20, 2024:

…The keffiyeh classes don’t only have a ‘startling disconnect’ from the realities of the Middle East, but also from the true global injustices of the 21st century. Consider where their keffiyehs are likely to come from – China. The great paradox of the cult of the keffiyeh is that, as Niloufar Haidari reports, ‘the more popular the keffiyeh has become in the West, the less this has translated into a boon for the Palestinian economy’. There is only one Palestinian weavery left that makes keffiyehs. The keffiyehs we see in the coffee shops, campuses and art galleries of the West are ‘mass-produced’ items ‘from China’. The last remaining keffiyeh-maker in the Palestinian territories says it has become ‘increasingly difficult to compete with the low prices of the imported counterfeits’. That the keffiyeh craze of the Western bourgeoisie has hurt keffiyeh-makers in Palestine is a dark irony that will not be lost on those of us who know that the virtue-signalling of the powerful often has unintended consequences….

Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s intransigence in the face of its far more powerful foe is a direct consequence of the keffiyeh classes’ commodification of Palestinian pain as a testament to both Israeli malfeasance and Western indifference.

The cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.

The end result? Protesters in keffiyehs telling Jews in New York City to ‘go back to Poland’. Activists in keffiyehs shouting on the New York subway: ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.

The keffiyeh entitles its wearer to “share the pain” of the “Palestinians,” without admitting that any pain those “Palestinians” now feel is the direct result of 6,000 members of Hamas smashing into Israel on October 7, 2023, and proceeding to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 251, who were taken back to Gaza. The Israelis only want to be free of Hamas rockets, Hamas drones, Hamas murderers, Hamas kidnappers. But the keffiyeh wearers in the West have no interest in what the Israelis have suffered. They despise Israel. The keffiyeh is the fashion statement that proclaims its wearer to be on the side of the angels; that is, the wearer wants Israel to disappear entirely, to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. The keffiyeh proclaims the wearer’s solidarity with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It’s akin to the Chinese waving Mao Tse-tong’s Little Red Book during the Cultural Revolution, or the Nazis with their sinister Hakenkreuz armbands.

Many of the people wearing those keffiyehs in the West will soon be having plenty of Muslims in their own countries, and then — too late — they will discover what Islam teaches, and that they too, just like the Israelis whom they now despise, will become the objects of Islamic hatred, aggression, and triumphalism.