Last year, a friend and I were returning home after an afternoon out, and decided to take a longer route than usual. On the way, we passed a Jewish temple. We quickly noticed the prominence of the building, but more so we noticed the prominence of the flag waving above it.
The Israeli flag was striking for one reason: while the building itself was certainly impressive, the stature of the building seemed almost an afterthought beneath the flag itself. A shadow, almost. But how could an enormous building be a mere shadow of cloth?
We noted how odd it must have looked to passersby: a hijab-clad woman pondering the facade of a Jewish temple in the middle of the quite secular city. I’ll admit - we even shared a laugh about how strange it must have looked.
As we stood there, someone was making their way to the entrance for a service that evening. The person smiled and — what? Held the door open for us, thinking we were actually on our way inside.
Talk about crumbling walls. No, this didn’t break down the heinous checkpoints in Gaza or bring down the firing posts looming from atop the wall hideously marking the Middle Eastern skyline. But it certainly threw me for a loop. I was being invited in, hijab and all. There was absolutely no animosity, fear, or hesitation in this stranger’s eyes. I declined the invitation, but was left with something to reflect on for the evening.
No image is simple.
Just before leaving the premises, my friend snapped a picture of me. Quickly. It was a picture of my face and the Israeli flag blowing above me. I was neither saluting nor cursing it. I wasn’t looking at it, either - I was looking ahead, even away from it.
It was, at the time, simple: a snapshot of seemingly irreconcilable imagery. On a more analytical level, perhaps it was me looking toward a future where being invited inside wouldn’t have struck me as odd at all.
Of course, nothing is simple. Flags are not simple, garments are not simple. People get seriously wound up about flags, about who they represent - and who they fail to represent.
Once the photograph was released, the lesson about flags was drilled into my conscience even more than it had in my years of waving a Palestinian flag at demonstrations. People made all kinds of assumptions about what the photo signified. They assumed - without bothering to ask.
My good friend Roi Ben-Yehuda, an Israeli dissident and man of conscience (I talked about him in a previous blog) addresses the issue of flags in his most recent piece for Haaretz. He has the nerve - the chutzpah, even - to highlight that the Israeli flag doesn’t represent a non-Jewish Israeli citizens - who, he elaborates - have “de facto secondary-citizen status” in the country.
Some of his own are none too happy with him. Just see the “talkbacks”, where Roi is being slammed by readers. But wait - isn’t Israel a democracy? Why is he an ingrate and infidel just for speaking truth to power? It seems to me that if one is proud of their democracy, they’d call Roi a patriot and celebrate a system that allows him to speak freely.
See Roi’s latest article here, and a powerful anecdote from it here:
“As I stared at the flag some more, my mind wandered: I remembered a heated debate I had with an Arab-Israeli friend during the height of the second Intifadah. Discussing the disproportionate and deadly use of power exercised by the government in response to an Arab-Israeli protest, which left 12 citizens dead, my friend cried in a broken voice:
“Just look at your flag, where the hell am I represented there?”
I had no good reply. Unfortunately, I still don’t.
Looking at the flag with the eyes of an Arab-Israeli one does not see Ben-Gurion’s personification of unity and continuity, rather, one sees a symbol of exclusion.”
- Roi Ben-Yehuda
