Israel’s crackdown on the Palestinian flag veers into the surreal
Alex Sinclair’s kippah, returned to him by police after they cut out the Palestinian flag sewn into it.
Amos Brison writes in +972 on 1 May 2026:
The mere sight of a Palestinian flag has long troubled the powers that be in Israel. But over the past week, two seemingly minor episodes revealed how the authorities’ growing anxiety toward even the faintest expression of Palestinian national identity has moved beyond the realm of straight-forward repression and into that of the absurd.
The first took place in the city of Modi’in, where police officers detained 53-year-old British-Israeli Alex Sinclair, a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for wearing a kippah embroidered with both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag. After being locked in a cell, Sinclair was given back the kippah — with the Palestinian flag crudely cut out.
In the second incident, which took place at an anti-government protest in northern Israel, police officers confiscated a Hungarian flag carried by an Israeli demonstrator — an allusion to the recent ousting of the country’s far-right prime minister and the hope for a similar change at home — on the grounds that it resembled a Palestinian flag and could therefore cause a “provocation.” When the protester pointed out that it was not a Palestinian flag at all (even though, it should be noted, waving one is not illegal in Israel), an officer replied: “You may understand that, but others won’t.”