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.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 signifi...