I’m calling it: the Palestine flag has become an eyesore. It’s everywhere. There was a sea of them at Glastonbury. They flutter wildly in city centres every weekend as Leftists march for the millionth time against the Jewish State.
Twenty-somethings love to wear the flag like a pashmina, so that the world might know what virtuous people they are. Toytown rads on TikTok make video tutorials on how to snazzily accessorise your flag. It appears in the social-media bio of every self-regarding celeb, alongside the Pride flag and their pronouns. (The BLM fist is on the way out – that’s so 2020.)
Even wildest nature is pock-marked with the Palestine colours: I saw a flag flap half-heartedly on literal bogland in the West of Ireland. And now, naturally, it has colonised Cambridge University. There’s a clip doing the rounds showing the 2025 graduation ceremony, and student after student whips out a Palestine flag and unfurls it for the cameras.
There’s a whiff of narcissism to these flag antics. Is this stunt really about raising awareness of Palestine, or raising awareness of the ethical rectitude of the preening grads themselves? They all smile smugly as they wave their little flags, suggesting self-satisfaction might be the main motor here, not solidarity.
And what happened to Cambridge University’s stiff rules on what may be worn and displayed at ceremonies? Cambridge is not known for messing around when it comes to graduation decorum. It clearly stipulates that grads must wear a formal gown, sensible shoes and no garish jewellery. And under no circumstances should they disrupt the ceremony with political bluster.
That all went out the window this year. The ceremony morphed into a “Free Palestine” rally. It felt indistinguishable from those trudging displays of anti-Israel sentiment we see on our streets as Leftists from the leafy suburbs gather in their keffiyehs to holler about “genocide”.
Cambridge has questions to answer. Watching that clip made me feel antsy, so I can only imagine how Jewish viewers must have felt.I worry for the young Jews among Cambridge’s Class of 2025 who were confronted by that flag under which more than a thousand of their co-religionists were killed less than two years ago. Do their feelings matter to Cambridge?
That the Cambridge graduation was awash with Palestine flags is galling but not surprising. It reveals a truth about “Palestine solidarity” that some would rather hide – it is the main means through which the privileged advertise their moral credentials to the watching world.
If you’re in an area where Palestine flags hang from every lamppost and even in front-room windows, then you are either in a Muslim-majority or a hyper middle-class suburb.
England’s chattering classes have co-opted Palestinian paraphernalia. These are the kind of people who moaned for years about “cultural appropriation”. And yet here they are beating the streets in their appropriated keffiyehs and their Palestine flags that they hug creepily close to their bodies.
To me, it looks like a woke version of “blackface” – plummy Leftists adorning themselves in Arab headgear and Arab banners to make a spectacle of their own righteousness. That’s what the Palestine flag really represents. Not a statement of solidarity with a people having a hard time, but a statement of moral supremacy, of cultural sneering, where the bourgeois influencers of the West get to pose and preen as such caring and enlightened people.
That many of them probably couldn’t point to the Palestinian Territories on a map, and don’t even know what river and sea they’re referring to when they belt out that dumb and dangerous chant “From the river to the sea”, is immaterial. All that matters is that they get to coat themselves in the Palestine colours to let their fellow travellers in the universe of correct-think know that they are “good”.
I’ll admit it: when fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team tore down Palestine flags in Amsterdam last year, I let out a little cheer. Maybe more of us should be doing that: taking down this puffed-up banner of bourgeois virtue that offends so many of our Jewish compatriots. Who’s in?
I’m calling it: the Palestine flag has become an eyesore. It’s everywhere. There was a sea of them at Glastonbury. They flutter wildly in city centres every weekend as Leftists march for the millionth time against the Jewish State.
Twenty-somethings love to wear the flag like a pashmina, so that the world might know what virtuous people they are. Toytown rads on TikTok make video tutorials on how to snazzily accessorise your flag. It appears in the social-media bio of every self-regarding celeb, alongside the Pride flag and their pronouns. (The BLM fist is on the way out – that’s so 2020.)
Even wildest nature is pock-marked with the Palestine colours: I saw a flag flap half-heartedly on literal bogland in the West of Ireland. And now, naturally, it has colonised Cambridge University. There’s a clip doing the rounds showing the 2025 graduation ceremony, and student after student whips out a Palestine flag and unfurls it for the cameras.
There’s a whiff of narcissism to these flag antics. Is this stunt really about raising awareness of Palestine, or raising awareness of the ethical rectitude of the preening grads themselves? They all smile smugly as they wave their little flags, suggesting self-satisfaction might be the main motor here, not solidarity.
And what happened to Cambridge University’s stiff rules on what may be worn and displayed at ceremonies? Cambridge is not known for messing around when it comes to graduation decorum. It clearly stipulates that grads must wear a formal gown, sensible shoes and no garish jewellery. And under no circumstances should they disrupt the ceremony with political bluster.
That all went out the window this year. The ceremony morphed into a “Free Palestine” rally. It felt indistinguishable from those trudging displays of anti-Israel sentiment we see on our streets as Leftists from the leafy suburbs gather in their keffiyehs to holler about “genocide”.
Cambridge has questions to answer. Watching that clip made me feel antsy, so I can only imagine how Jewish viewers must have felt.I worry for the young Jews among Cambridge’s Class of 2025 who were confronted by that flag under which more than a thousand of their co-religionists were killed less than two years ago. Do their feelings matter to Cambridge?
That the Cambridge graduation was awash with Palestine flags is galling but not surprising. It reveals a truth about “Palestine solidarity” that some would rather hide – it is the main means through which the privileged advertise their moral credentials to the watching world.
If you’re in an area where Palestine flags hang from every lamppost and even in front-room windows, then you are either in a Muslim-majority or a hyper middle-class suburb.
England’s chattering classes have co-opted Palestinian paraphernalia. These are the kind of people who moaned for years about “cultural appropriation”. And yet here they are beating the streets in their appropriated keffiyehs and their Palestine flags that they hug creepily close to their bodies.
To me, it looks like a woke version of “blackface” – plummy Leftists adorning themselves in Arab headgear and Arab banners to make a spectacle of their own righteousness. That’s what the Palestine flag really represents. Not a statement of solidarity with a people having a hard time, but a statement of moral supremacy, of cultural sneering, where the bourgeois influencers of the West get to pose and preen as such caring and enlightened people.
That many of them probably couldn’t point to the Palestinian Territories on a map, and don’t even know what river and sea they’re referring to when they belt out that dumb and dangerous chant “From the river to the sea”, is immaterial. All that matters is that they get to coat themselves in the Palestine colours to let their fellow travellers in the universe of correct-think know that they are “good”.
I’ll admit it: when fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team tore down Palestine flags in Amsterdam last year, I let out a little cheer. Maybe more of us should be doing that: taking down this puffed-up banner of bourgeois virtue that offends so many of our Jewish compatriots. Who’s in?