The ‘cult of the keffiyeh’ turns pro-Hamas college kids into vicarious victims

Whatever happened to the sin of cultural appropriation?

This ideology of rebuke held sway on university campuses for years.

The idea was that no member of the majority group should ever appropriate the cultural habits of a minority group.

It’s offensive, apparently.

It’s racial theft.

It’s parody disguised as authenticity.

And yet today, visit any campus in the West and everywhere you look you’ll see white youths dressed as Arabs.

Keffiyeh chic is all the rage.

You’re no one unless you have one of these black-and-white scarves that are widely worn in the Palestinian territories.

Student radicals, celebrities, Guardian-reading dads on their way for a macchiato — everyone has a keffiyeh draped over their shoulders.

It has become the uniform of the politically enlightened, the must-have of the socially aware.

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Is this cultural appropriation?

The keffiyeh-wearers will say their scarves are about solidarity, not stealing.

They’re showing their support for a political cause, not purloining Palestinian culture.

But since when did solidarity involve fancy dress?

The 1960s students who protested against the Vietnam War did not wear bamboo conical hats in mimicry of the Vietnamese peasants who so often felt the heat of America’s bombs and napalm.

Solidarity was expressed with words and actions, not imitation of style.

No, there is something else going on with the cult of the keffiyeh, something that falls outside of the traditional realm of solidarity and even awareness-raising.

That an item of clothing has become so omnipresent among the virtuous set points to a performative streak in pro-Palestine activism.

That so many progressives rarely leave the house without first wrapping themselves in a keffiyeh confirms the extent to which the Palestine question itself has come to be wrapped up in the personalities of these influencers, in their sense of self, in their very social status.

The cult of the keffiyeh is proof that Palestine has become the great “social signifier” of the radically chic of the Western world.

Pitying Palestine, and by extension hating Israel, has become the “luxury belief” du jour, the means by which one’s social worth is measured.

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This goes way beyond “cultural appropriation” — it is the wholesale moral appropriation of an entire people and their plight by the political intimates of high society with virtue to advertise.

Since Hamas’ pogrom of Oct. 7 , “urban combat with a twist of Middle Eastern” has become the look in socially aware circles. You declare your pronouns, you take the knee and you wear a keffiyeh.

And apparently, it’s not fashion, it’s politics.

It’s not style, it’s solidarity.

It’s a fiery statement of one’s deep convictions about Israel/Palestine.

And it certainly isn’t cultural appropriation.

It’s people with privilege (Ivy League radicals, the laptop elites, latte socialists) taking a custom of a foreign people (the Bedouin and the Palestinians) and turning it into the “hot new thing.”

The keffiyeh classes are attracted to the Palestinian people not for their dynamism, but for their wretchedness.

Not for their vim, but for their victimization.

It’s vicarious victimhood.

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This is a new and unsettling form of activism. It is not 1960s-style solidarity with foreign struggles or even radical chic, that old politics-as-fashion.

No, it is a coveting of suffering.

The keffiyeh classes, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution.

They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people in order to escape, however fleetingly, the pampered reality of their own lives.

In order to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood.

The elites’ vicarious victimhood through the Palestine drama is a dangerous game.

It seems undeniable now that the more the cultural powers of the West crave and collect depictions of Palestinian distress, the more the ideologues of Hamas will be willing to supply such depictions.

Hamas clearly recognizes that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, then it is in Hamas’ interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur.

Hamas’ 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 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.”

The aftermath of Oct. 7 is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.

Adapted from “ After the Pogrom ” by Brendan O’Neill, editor of spiked.

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