Palestinian Watermelon and Keffiyeh Graphics

• Let a substitute carry the banned or filtered flag: draw a watermelon slice whose red flesh, black seeds and green-and-white rind hold the four national colours, so the image says 'Palestine' without showing the flag.
• Reduce the slice to a flat, unshaded vector icon isolated on a plain white ground, so one image survives at every scale, from an emoji in a username to a sticker, a pin, a tattoo and a placard.
• Fold the slice into the nation's own shapes: the flag's red triangle, a triangular watermelon with triangular seeds, the outline of the map of Palestine, a Hebron ceramic plate.
• Lay the keffiyeh's fishnet, olive-leaf and bold-line bands under or around the emblem as a pattern ground, border or all-over print, in black and white or in the flag's colours.
• Answer a ban with a wink: caption the slice with a denial ('This is not a Palestinian flag'), or swap a forbidden garment for a watermelon print, so the censor has to forbid a fruit.
• Make images to be reposted rather than signed: emoji strings, profile frames and one-tap templates that put a single wordless picture on millions of accounts within days.

Palestinian artists in the West Bank and the diaspora, then Palestine-solidarity movements and social-media users worldwide. The watermelon goes back to the closure of Gallery 79 in Ramallah in 1980: Sliman Mansour recalls that an Israeli officer told him, Nabil Anani and Issam Badr that even a watermelon painted in the flag's red, green, black and white would be confiscated, and he remembers no watermelon imagery until Khaled Hourani's silkscreen for the Subjective Atlas of Palestine (2007); an often-repeated New York Times report (1993) of young men arrested for carrying sliced watermelons was later qualified by the paper's editors, who said it should have been omitted or marked as unconfirmed. Digital watermelon illustrations spread online in spring 2021, around the Sheikh Jarrah evictions. In Israel, after Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered police in January 2023 to remove Palestinian flags from public places and a June 2023 bill sought to ban the flag at state-funded institutions, watermelon stickers stood in for the flag; once the Gaza war began in October 2023 the symbol spread far more widely, and users turned to the watermelon emoji to get past moderation and shadow-banning ('algospeak'). The older national lexicon of the resistance poster (olive tree, key of return, map, Dome of the Rock, embroidered dress) belongs to palestinian-resistance-poster and returns here only as a second motif, as the map does in Sami Bukhari's slice and Naji al-Ali's Handala (1969) does on protest signs

1. Wikipedia, 'Watermelon (Palestinian symbol)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_(Palestinian_symbol)), for the 1980 closure of Gallery 79, Mansour's dating of the icon to Hourani's 2007 image, the 1993 New York Times anecdote and the editor's note qualifying it, the January 2023 flag order, the 'This is not a Palestinian flag' stickers, the emoji as algospeak after 2023, the flag with a slice in place of its red triangle and the NYPD training materials that classed the watermelon and the keffiyeh as antisemitic symbols
2. Billie Anania, 'How Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Resistance', Hyperallergic (29 July 2021), on the officer's remark, Hourani's silkscreen series The Story of the Watermelon (2007) and The Colours of the Palestinian Flag (2013), his large watermelon for an exhibition in Toulouse and the variations at Darat Al Funun and in Glasgow, Sami Bukhari's map-shaped slice, Hanan Alsagoff's red-and-green keffiyeh, the Rotterdam students' Magritte banner and the renewed online interest of 2021: https://hyperallergic.com/666111/how-watermelon-became-a-symbol-of-palestinian-resistance/
3. Alexandra Chaves, 'How the watermelon became a symbol of Palestinian resistance', The National (30 May 2021), on Mansour's account of Gallery 79 and Issam Badr's question, Hourani's 2007 slice and its tours, and the illustrations by Sarah Hatahet, Aya Mobaydeen, Beesan Arafat and Sami Bukhari: https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts/how-the-watermelon-became-a-symbol-of-palestinian-resistance-1.1230806
4. Adam Sella, 'The fruits of Palestine and their symbolism', Al Jazeera (31 August 2023), on Zazim's watermelon flags on about a dozen Tel Aviv service taxis, a response to a June bill to ban the flag in state-funded institutions, left up for two weeks and organised by Amal Saad of Haifa, and Ben-Gvir's January 2023 order: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/the-fruits-of-palestine-and-their-symbolism
5. Armani Syed, 'How the Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity', TIME (20 October 2023), on Zazim's June campaign against the arrests and flag confiscations, with watermelons on 16 Tel Aviv taxis captioned 'This is not a Palestinian flag': https://time.com/6326312/watermelon-palestinian-symbol-solidarity/
6. Anna Furman, 'How the watermelon image became a global sign of Palestinian solidarity', Associated Press (17 January 2024, via NBC4 Washington), on the 1980 gallery closure, Zazim's taxi stickers, the emoji as a stand-in, Jewish Voice for Peace's triangular watermelons in New York the previous month after ACT UP's triangle, Shawn Escarciga's design for the coalition of a watermelon with bold triangular seeds shown at Lincoln Center, and Instagram's mistranslation of Palestinian bios: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/how-the-watermelon-image-became-a-global-sign-of-palestinian-solidarity/3518482/
7. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, 'Who is Handala, the barefoot, spiky-haired boy who symbolizes Palestinian resistance?', NPR (6 February 2024, via WUNC), on Handala's hair, bare feet, rags and turned back, the renewed interest during the Gaza war, the Madrid march of 27 January and the Italian publisher's poster from 80 submissions of figures drawn from behind: https://www.wunc.org/2024-02-06/who-is-handala-the-barefoot-spiky-haired-boy-who-symbolizes-palestinian-resistance
8. Mukta Joshi, 'Who Is the Cartoon Child Seen on Palestinian Protest Signs?', Hyperallergic (1 May 2024), on Handala rendered on protest signs and art during the siege of Gaza and the 'Hind's Hall' banner at Columbia's Hamilton Hall: https://hyperallergic.com/909775/who-is-handala-the-cartoon-child-seen-on-palestinian-protest-signs/
9. Wikipedia, 'Handala' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handala), for Naji al-Ali's creation of the figure in 1969, its turned back and clasped hands from 1973, its standing as 'an iconic symbol of Palestinian identity and defiance' and the July 2025 Freedom Flotilla ship named after it
10. Wikipedia, 'All Eyes on Rafah' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Eyes_on_Rafah), for Rik Peeperkorn's remark in February 2024, the image's tents and peaks, its spread in late May 2024 after the Tel al-Sultan attack, the attribution to Amirul Shah and Zila Abka's competing claim, the 47 million shares and the criticism as performative and sanitising
11. Wikipedia, 'Tel al-Sultan attack' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_al-Sultan_attack), for the Israeli Air Force's bombing of a displacement camp in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah, on 26 May 2024
12. Ben Goggin, 'Viral All Eyes on Rafah image inspires wave of AI-generated Instagram posts about Israel-Hamas war', NBC News (31 May 2024), on more than 47 million shares through Instagram's template feature, activists' criticism of the AI image and the copycat AI templates on both sides: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/viral-eyes-rafah-image-inspires-wave-ai-generated-instagram-posts-isra-rcna154555
13. Mosab Shawer, 'The only Palestinian factory making keffiyehs is going strong', Al Jazeera (6 January 2024), on the Hirbawi factory founded in Hebron in 1961, the olive-leaf, fishnet and line motifs and the surge in demand after October 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/1/6/the-only-palestinian-factory-making-keffiyehs-is-going-strong
14. Al Jazeera, 'Dutch MP sent out of parliament for wearing colours of Palestine flag' (19 September 2025), on Esther Ouwehand's return in a watermelon-patterned outfit: https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/9/19/dutch-mp-sent-out-of-parliament-for-wearing-colours-of-palestine-flag
15. Emojipedia, 'Watermelon' (https://emojipedia.org/watermelon), for U+1F349 in Unicode 6.0 (2010) and its use to reference the Palestinian flag
16. Annelys de Vet (ed.), Subjective Atlas of Palestine (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), catalogue record: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/library/publication/175647392

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