A Crash of Symbols
Who does the keffiyeh belong to and what does it symbolize? The answers change depending on who’s wearing it.
The keffiyeh exists in Palestinian consciousness the way the confederate flag exists in the mind of some American southerners: It is a symbol that represents the rich history and culture of its people. Like the confederate flag, its enthusiasts downplay the garment’s violent associations, insisting that it signifies only sympathy for their lost cause. That cause was undoing the State of Israel. While it is increasingly regarded as a symbol of the Palestinian people, there isn’t anything particularly Palestinian about it. The keffiyeh’s enduring legacy as a symbol comes from its mutability.
An ahistorical interpretation of the keffiyeh’s graphic motifs seems to have gripped the popular mind, which suggests that its patterns symbolize Palestinian life in the Levant. Specifically, the idea is that the fishnet pattern represents a relationship with the Mediterranean Sea, the curvy lines represent olive trees, and the thick stripes represent trade routes. This symbology is mostly fiction. The name keffiyeh (sometimes called kufiyah) is derived from the city of Kufa in Iraq, from which the garment originated in the 7th century. It is said that the design originated with Sumerian fishermen, who would wear fishing nets on their heads to protect themselves from the sun. This fishnet design evolved into a headdress made of black wool netting that was worn by priests and kings as a talisman to ward off evil. Over time it became a scarf worn around the head and neck that included graphic motifs of netting, wavy water lines, and fish scales. This patterned keffiyeh became a popular headdress signifying prestige and status in communities across the Arab world, which did not include the Levant. It was rarely worn in the Levant during the British Mandate for Palestine.
Under the British Mandate, Arab Palestinians of high social status often wore a fez, reflecting hundreds of years of Ottoman influence. Arab Palestinians in lower socio-economic classes typically wore an all-white keffiyeh with black agal (rope) set on top. Patterned keffiyehs have a very different relationship to that period than the one currently imagined by their ideological wearers in the present day.
Under the British mandate, there were two patterned keffiyeh designs in use. British Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb aka Glubb Pasha designed these patterns for the keffiyehs in the uniforms of his Desert Legion: A black check design and a red check design, used to differentiate between his Palestinian (black) and Jordanian (red) soldiers. Like other pieces of British army uniforms, the “Palestinian” keffiyehs that Glubb’s soldiers wore were made in British textile factories, not in Palestine. Despite being neither widely worn nor culturally specific, nor even geographically sourced, the designs conceived by an English colonialist and produced in England have gained popularity in recent decades and are retroactively conceived as symbolizing Arab Palestinian continuity in the Levant.
Starting in the 1930s, there was a focused effort by Arab leaders to make the keffiyeh a symbol of Palestinian resistance against colonial rule and dispossession, with an aim to make it a key element in the construction of a Palestinian national identity. However, the patterned keffiyeh did not get much traction as a useful symbol until the early 1970s, when it became synonymous not with Palestinian national identity, but with terrorist violence against Israel. Yasser Arafat, leader of Fatah and then the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), popularized the black and white keffiyeh by conspicuously wearing it in situations where it had no utility. He wore it draped over one shoulder, in a shape that mimicked the outline of the British Mandate of Palestine—a statement of his unrelenting dedication to “liberating” the land of its inhabitants, i.e. Jewish Israelis. Leila Khaled and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) adopted the red and white keffiyeh as the emblem of their movement, which became visible to Westerners through a series of plane hijackings.
Today, the keffiyeh is a popular symbol among people operating in Western leftist social justice groups, anti-capitalists, and climate activists, who use it to signal an alignment of their ‘intersectional’ causes. Calls for globalized intifada have created global demand for keffiyehs, and most “Palestinian” keffiyehs are now mass-produced in China. A single keffiyeh factory does exist in Palestine, founded in Hebron by Yasser Hirbawi in 1961. While touted as the “last keffiyeh factory in Palestine,” the business is likely the first and only of its kind ever to exist. In the 1920s, Jews from Lodz, Poland, a hub of European textile production, brought the textile industry to Palestine, and it is likely that a young Hirbawi learned industrial weaving from them.
Since the October 7th attack on Israel, the Hirbawi factory has seen a significant increase in business, as consumers from around the world eagerly buy authentic “Made in Palestine” keffiyehs to symbolize solidarity with Palestinian people and to endorse Hamas’s violence. They have been so popular that they have become a punchline—Lebanese-American comedian Jad Sleiman recently joked, “there are more keffiyehs on American college campuses than in the entirety of the Middle East.” This insistence on symbolic continuity and artifactual authenticity is ironic, given the keffiyeh’s historical evolution as variously foreign, incidental, and nonspecific.
While the campaign to manufacture the Palestinian connection to the keffiyeh over the last century has been successful, the keffiyeh was never uniquely Palestinian. It has maintained significance among many peoples in the Middle East, including Jews.
Jewish people, the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria, have been wearing garments related to keffiyehs since late antiquity—centuries before the emergence of the Iraqi keffiyeh. Called a sudra, it is mentioned in the Mishnah, a documentation of Jewish oral history, law, and daily life compiled in the first two centuries CE. The Mishnah describes the sudra as “a square piece of woven cloth, two cubits (1 meter) on each side, folded into a triangle and placed on the head, with the middle ends folded over the neck to protect it.” The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in the 3rd–6th centuries CE, provides the blessing to say when putting on the sudra: “Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, who crowns Israel in glory.” In Shulchan Aruch, another collection of Jewish religious law from 1565 describes exemption from being required to attach tzitzit: “a sudra which is worn upon the neck in the kingdom of the Land of Israel, named in Arabic shid, and also the bīqa, which was worn in Sephard (Spain) over their shoulders are exempt.” In the 11th century, Rashi, a French rabbinical scholar who provided extensive commentary on the Torah and Talmud, commented on this passage, “the Sudra is arranged on one’s neck—and the ends were used to wipe one’s mouth or eyes.”
Throughout history, Islamic countries enacted laws to regulate Jewish dress, at times banning Jews from wearing the sudra. Despite prohibitions, the custom endured. When Zionists began to resettle their ancient homeland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the sudra enjoyed a renaissance that continues today.
The sudra and the keffiyeh share their history with other regional headdresses—the shemagh, ghutrah, and hattah. These represent local variations in a rich regional tradition. The notion that the keffiyeh belongs especially to Palestinian people or especially symbolizes their national struggle is ahistorical and opportunist. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “one cannot, and must not, try to erase the past because it does not fit the present.” The history of the keffiyeh cannot be rewritten to simplify a symbol, just like the history of the region cannot be rewritten to simplify a political slogan.