WTF is a Keffiyeh

It must have been twenty years ago now when I first saw a young person in the West wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional headdress associated with Palestinian culture. As a Palestinian human rights activist, I thought to myself, “Does this young Westerner know the meaning behind that headscarf? Never mind,” I reckoned, “you can’t fight fashion.”

So – wtf is a keffiyeh? As the popularity of the keffiyeh in the West has soared in recent years, the meaning behind wearing a keffiyeh has blurred. The keffiyeh has a very specific political meaning, a violent one, linked to a series of terrorists with genocidal aspirations.

The origins of the keffiyeh are ancient. Similar headcoverings are also in use among many other Middle Eastern people. There is a well-known Jewish variant of this headscarf, called the sudra, that has existed for centuries. The modern-day Palestinian keffiyeh that has become trendy in the West has a specific history that connects it with the Arabs who crossed the Jordan as conquerors and colonizers during the Islamic conquests.

Do you know what a keffiyeh means, literally? The clue is in the name: keffiyeh is “of or pertaining to Kufa, Iraq,” a garrison city on the Euphrates founded by the second Caliph, Omar. The Kufans introduced it to Arab civilization, but the headcoverings were reportedly first worn by a much older Iraqi people, the Sumerians, more than five thousand years ago. According to legend, these first Iraqi prototypes were either made from or represented fishing nets, worn on the head to protect against the blaze of the Middle Eastern sun.

Kufa, which served as the capital of the Shi’ite caliph Ali during his brief Caliphate (656-661), was an important center for the nomadic tribes central to the early Arab conquests. Thereafter, the popularity of the keffiyeh spread across the Arab empire by nomadic Bedouins, giving rise to many local variants. This Arab settler-colonial period was so important to the Palestinian makeup that Hamas’s Minister of the Interior and of National Security, Fathi Ḥammad, said that “half of the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis.”

During the times of the Ottoman Empire, what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories were administered by the Turkish authorities as part of Syria in a custom inherited from the Romans, who implemented it to oppose Jewish independence. In those days, in cities like Jaffa and Jerusalem, many people wore the fez, a cylindrical hat common among the empire’s elites and aspirational classes. The keffiyeh, in contrast, was associated with the nomadic Bedouins of the desert.

During the Arab uprisings against British rule in Mandatory Palestine, the keffiyeh was used as a face covering during attacks on British soldiers, and was banned as the apparel of enemy combatants by the British. It was this modern use that turned the desert headscarf into a symbol of Muslim territorialism.

The modern incarnation of the keffiyeh as a symbol of violent nationalism directed against Israel is linked to Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born “Father of Modern Terrorism,” who stylized himself with it while carrying out a series of terror attacks. Arafat used to wear the keffiyeh draped over his right shoulder to resemble the pre-1948 map of British Palestine, implying a rejection of peaceful coexistence in the land with the Israelis. This is the same all-or-nothing extremism espoused by modern-day radicals who chant “from the river to the sea,” implying a maximal Arab state and the destruction of Israel. The keffiyeh was further popularized by terrorist Leila Khaled, who draped herself in one as she became the first female plane hijacker.

Today, keffiyeh usage has become standard among all the major Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel, whether announcing themselves to be jihadi, Marxist, or nationalist, with some stylistic variation. It has also become a favorite amongst radicals at American and Western university campuses, who use it to disguise their identities while carrying out crimes such as assault and vandalism.

Many naive college students and people of good will no doubt believe that they are wearing a harmless symbol of vague anti-Western sentiment, like the ubiquitous T-shirts depicting Cuban mass murderer Che Guevara. In the West, the keffiyeh is associated with global anarchy and violent upheaval as much as any particular outcome in the Middle East. Yet, in Arab political culture, the significance of the keffiyeh is clear – it represents a threat to perpetrate mass violence on a religious and ethnic basis.

In the last two years – since Hamas became trendy for massacring innocents -the keffiyeh has given the world a whole new level of wtf. What was once a symbol of Bedouin culture has morphed in the West into a symbol of anti-civilizational animosity. As worn by Westerners today (and by the terrorists who inspired this trend), the keffiyeh is a hate symbol, and should be recognized as such.