RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. You can buy it on Amazon now.

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. White men wearing their hair in dreadlocks, white women in kimonos, gay men twerking or using black slang – all of it was damned as ‘stealing’, the co-option of the culture of the powerless by the powerful. 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. They’re ‘all over Europe’, as one writer says; every time there’s a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo you’ll be confronted by ‘a sea of these garments’. Even the mega-rich are getting in on the act – Balenciaga once made a high-end keffiyeh that will set you back £3,000. But then, you can’t put a price on virtue-signalling.

Is this cultural appropriation? If Beyoncé wearing a sari and Kim Kardashian styling her hair in braids can induce a frenzy of censure among social-justice warriors – as both of those things bizarrely did – then why not bourgeois Westerners pulling on a scarf that has its origins among the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula? If a student who dons a Mexican sombrero can be branded ‘culturally indifferent’, then why not a student who wraps himself in Arab cloth? As Julie Burchill has wondered, ‘In an age when putting on a sombrero for 60 seconds during a drunken night out at an all-you-can-eat taco bar can be taken as proof of conquistador-level evil… why do these same students swan around wearing the keffiyeh?’.

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. The reason this scarf is ‘worn by non-Palestinians across the world’ is ‘as a sign of solidarity and allyship’, insists Salon. 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. Western supporters of the Quit India movement were not known for wearing white dhotis in the style of Mahatma Gandhi. 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, that the activist class covets this scarf with such relish that there has been an ‘influx of mass- produced keffiyehs’ into our societies, points to a performative streak in pro-Palestine activism. That it has become de rigueur in certain circles to flout all the laws of ‘cultural appropriation’ and pull on this ‘hot accessory [of] the West’ – as the Guardian calls it – suggests the activist set is as keen to say something about itself and its own rectitude as it is about the predicament of the Palestinian people. 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, in the words of Jake Wallis Simons, the great ‘social signifier’ of the radically chic of the Western world. Pitying Palestine, and by extension hating Israel, has become a ‘core part of a suite of views held by the progressives who set the tenor of much of our culture’, he writes. It has become the ‘luxury belief ’ du jour, the means by which one’s social worth is measured. 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.

Keffiyeh chic has been bubbling and brewing for some time. For Palestinians the scarf has been a symbol of resistance since the 1930s, when Palestinian fedayeen (guerillas) started launching attacks on the British rulers of what was then known as Mandatory Palestine. The fighters donned the keffiyeh in order to erase any ‘markers of identity’ between them, says cultural historian Jane Tynan: whether you were a bourgeois or a peasant who had opted to take up arms against the British, you wore the keffiyeh, making you equals. The keffiyeh exploded into global view in the 1960s with the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation by Yasser Arafat and others. Arafat was rarely seen without a keffiyeh draping from his head down his back.

The 1969 photo of Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled wearing a keffiyeh and holding an AK47 was the thing that really ensured the fame – or infamy – of this item of desert headgear. Khaled was the first woman ever to hijack an airplane, TWA Flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv, which she did with her fellow militants in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Visions of this 25-year-old wearing a keffiyeh over her hair were beamed around the world, ‘catapult[ing] the keffiyeh into Western consciousness’, says Niloufar Haidari. The first keffiyeh craze started in earnest. Western radicals wore it as evidence of their edginess. There were handwringing debates about ‘terrorist chic’ and the troubling possibility that some youths think ‘terrorism is cool’.

In later decades the keffiyeh became a fashion statement of general angst, of a moderate anarchic sentiment, rarely having anything much to do with Palestine. The media’s description of a squatter who was evicted from a pub owned by Gordon Ramsay summed up the sort of people who wore it – he was ‘dressed in a bucket hat, keffiyeh face covering and carrying a skateboard’. Virtually every stall in Camden Market sold them. It had well and truly become a ‘commodity of resistance aesthetics’, in the words of media professor Robert G White. Soon it was on the catwalks. We’ve had ‘peasant glamour’ and ‘hobo style’ – now behold ‘urban combat with a Middle Eastern twist’, wrote fashion critic Charlie Porter in 2001, when the keffiyeh became a must-have again. Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons sent male models down the runway in keffiyehs and ‘skinny black drainpipes and bulky army surplus coats’ – a ‘fiery symbol’, the fashion press gushed.

It featured in the fashion shows of Galliano, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton. David Beckham, Colin Farrell and Mary-Kate Olsen took to wearing it. Urban Outfitters stocked them (but later withdrew them following complaints). Even Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City wore a ‘keffiyeh boob tube’ at one point. From being the headwear of female hijackers to the statement top of Western culture’s best-known single girl – such was the curious journey of this old sartorial staple of the Bedouin.

And now the keffiyeh is back. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, ‘urban combat with a twist of Middle Eastern’ has become the look once more in socially aware circles. You declare your pronouns, you take the knee and you wear a keffiyeh. And this time, apparently, it’s not fashion, it’s politics. It’s not style, it’s solidarity. It’s no mere ‘fiery symbol’ – it’s a fiery statement of one’s deep convictions about Israel / Palestine. And it certainly isn’t cultural appropriation. As CNN somewhat defensively explained, ‘non-Palestinians should be careful when wearing the keffiyeh in the traditional style worn by Bedouins’, and should always do their ‘research about the garment before wearing it’, but, generally speaking, putting on a keffiyeh can be a ‘great show of solidarity’.

The hypocrisy is something else. This is the same CNN that threw its corporate weight behind the cultural-appropriation panic. Which published pieces with headlines like ‘Dear white people with dreadlocks: some things to consider’ and ‘Dear white gay men: stop stealing black female culture’. It’s the same CNN whose writers raged against ‘blackfishing’, which apparently is when ‘white entertainers’ appear to be ‘imitating the appearance of black people’. It’s the same CNN which sternly reminded the good people of the United States that cultural appropriation is ‘when people with power and privilege take customs and traditions that oppressed people have long been marginalised for and repurpose them as a hot new thing’.

That might just be the best description of the fad for keffiyeh-wearing: 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’ – as the Guardian says, the keffiyeh truly has been ‘cemented… as a hot item’.

To many of us, ‘cultural appropriation’ was always a cranky, illiberal idea. It was the elite policing of people’s cultural and clothing choices. At its worst, it was dangerously racially divisive, with its hectoring instruction that we all ‘stay in our racial lane’ and never dabble in the fashions and ideas of ethnic groups supposedly less privileged than our own. And yet it is striking that the liberal establishment’s patrician ‘Dear White People’ missives dried up completely in the face of the latest keffiyeh craze. As Michael Deacon of the Telegraph has said, it might be nice if the overlords of correct cultural behaviour would let us know when they ‘decide to make abrupt changes to the rules they’ve sought to impose upon society’. In this case, he says, they might have said: ‘ATTENTION ALL CITIZENS: Cultural appropriation is no longer considered a heinous offence against marginalised and oppressed minorities. Instead, it is now considered a noble expression of solidarity with them. Please update your records accordingly.’

Clearly, a calculation has been made by the cultural establishment. It has decided that in the case of the keffiyeh, more status points can be accrued through the wearing of it than through the policing of its wearing. That those who wear the keffiyeh have entirely escaped the charge of cultural appropriation confirms how useful this garment is to the activist class, how central it has become to their daily displays of righteousness. That we live in an era of such madness that white women can be rebuked for wearing hoop earrings and gay men can be reprimanded for saying ‘Yass’, and yet the armies of bourgeois youths in Bedouin headgear get a free pass, is a testament to the sainted nature of the keffiyeh in virtuous circles.

What holy service does this garment play in the lives of the elites? Its prime role is as a signifier of virtue. It is sartorial shorthand for ethical correctness. It communicates to your fellow travellers in the universe of luxury beliefs that you, too, have contempt for Israel and compassion for Palestine – an entirely requisite credo for access to the cultural establishment in the 21st century. Wearing the keffiyeh in public, or posting photos online of yourself wrapped up in one, is fundamentally a statement of your moral fitness for political high society. Far from being an act of solidarity, keffiyeh-wearing is more about raising awareness of yourself, and your goodness, than it is about raising awareness of the Palestinians and their challenges.

Indeed, you can wear the keffiyeh while knowing next to nothing about the part of the world it comes from. Potkin Azarmehr, the Iranian writer who fled Iran for the UK following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has noted the ‘ignorance’ of many of the keffiyeh- wearing agitators against Israel on the streets of our cities. There is a ‘startling disconnect’, he says, ‘between their strong opinions on the Gaza conflict and their shaky grasp of basic facts about it’. The keffiyeh classes ‘seem eager to make excuses for Hamas’, but they are ‘conspicuously uninformed about exactly what or who this terrorist group represents’. He gives the example of Queers for Palestine, who ‘flirt with justifying Hamas’s atrocities’, which is ‘bewildering’ given that Hamas’s Islamist ideology is ‘clearly antithetical to the rights and values these groups claim to champion’. Hamas’s ‘reactionary agenda’, says Azarmehr, is ‘profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals’.

That the keffiyeh set can be staggeringly ignorant of the backwardness and barbarism of Hamas, that they can wear a Palestinian symbol while being utterly unlettered on the present realities of life in Palestine, confirms that this garment is a signifier of feeling more than knowledge. Indeed, a post-pogrom survey of US students, those most likely to be adorned in the keffiyeh, uncovered an alarmingly frail grasp on the fundamental facts of the Middle East. For instance, only 47 per cent of the students who regularly chant the infamous slogan, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, were able to name the river and the sea it references. Some thought it referred to the Nile and the Euphrates. Others to the Caribbean. Some thought ‘the sea’ was a reference to the Dead Sea, which is a lake. Less than a quarter of the students knew who Yasser Arafat was. More than 10 per cent thought he was the first prime minister of Israel. Mercifully, when shown a map of the Middle East, and informed that having a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would leave ‘no room for Israel’, many of the students downgraded their support for the ‘river to the sea’ slogan from ‘would chant’ to ‘probably not’.

Think about this: radical youths wear the keffiyeh without knowing where it comes from. Without knowing that it was between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, not in the Caribbean, that the fedayeen first wore the keffiyeh as a symbol of resistance, and where Yasser Arafat, who was never the prime minister of Israel, made it a core part of his wardrobe. Again, the cultural-appropriation panic comes to mind. GQ once ridiculed the white appropriators of Native American garb and white men with dreadlocks as ‘utterly ignorant’ – ‘ignorant of a minority culture’s journey and historical suffering’. It slammed the ‘pale, sickly millennials’ who know nothing of the cultures they steal. And yet not a word of such salty criticism has been raised against the TikTok revolutionaries of the Ivy League who wear the keffiyeh without knowing where Palestine is or what Hamas does. The definition of ‘ignorance’, surely, is Queers for Palestine wearing keffiyehs while being blissfully unaware that if they ever set foot in Gaza their pronouns would be was / were quicker than they could say ‘Free Palestine’.

The keffiyeh classes don’t only have a ‘startling disconnect’ from the realities of the Middle East, but also from the true global injustices of the 21st century. Consider where their keffiyehs are likely to come from – China. The great paradox of the cult of the keffiyeh is that, as Niloufar Haidari reports, ‘the more popular the keffiyeh has become in the West, the less this has translated into a boon for the Palestinian economy’. There is only one Palestinian weavery left that makes keffiyehs. The keffiyehs we see in the coffee shops, campuses and art galleries of the West are ‘mass-produced’ items ‘from China’. The last remaining keffiyeh-maker in the Palestinian territories says it has become ‘increasingly difficult to compete with the low prices of the imported counterfeits’. That the keffiyeh craze of the Western bourgeoisie has hurt keffiyeh-makers in Palestine is a dark irony that will not be lost on those of us who know that the virtue-signalling of the powerful often has unintended consequences.

The ‘Made in China’ radicalism of the keffiyeh classes is commodified resistance summed up. Nothing better captures the moral unworldliness of the pro-Palestine set than the fact that their sartorial signifiers of status were likely made by hyper-exploited workers in the world’s largest unfree state. That their noisy displays of moral concern for Palestine are being facilitated by poorly paid weavers in an authoritarian state for whom their moral concern is thin indeed, if not non-existent. It is even possible that Uyghurs made their keffiyehs, given that tens of thousands from this repressed people have been compelled by the Chinese regime to work in factories, including textile factories. Western youths signifying their pain for the oppressed state of Palestine with garments made by genuinely oppressed Uyghurs is surely the most late-stage capitalism thing that has ever happened.

The commodified concern for Palestine over and above every other wrong in the world – including the wrongs visited on the serfs who make the keffiyehs the wealthy wear – speaks to how important luxury beliefs, a term coined by author Rob Henderson, have become to the new elites. As Matthew Goodwin explains, where the ‘old elite’ derived its sense of social status from ‘physical manifestations of wealth, such as fine clothes, jewellery, foreign travel, servants, private carriages and large properties’, the new elite tends to distinguish itself from the ‘low-status’ masses by focussing ‘far more on projecting their “cultural capital” rather than their “economic capital”’. With prosperity ‘spread far more widely across society’ than was the case in the past, ‘ostentatious displays of riches have much less significance’. Instead, says Goodwin, ‘for the sophisticated, financially secure, urban-dwelling, university- educated new elite’, a certain set of ‘fashionable beliefs has become the new signifier of social status’. And chief among them, even more so post-pogrom, is pity for Palestine, combined with dread of Israel. The keffiyeh has become the material expression of this luxury belief. Thus did the headgear of desert-dwelling peasants become the main means through which the rich of the West demonstrate their moral capital and social status. Is that ‘cultural appropriation’?

That the keffiyeh has become a means of moral distinction, a part of the cultural armoury that allows the luxury moralists to ‘distinguish themselves from the “low status” masses’, represents a total negation of what this garment once meant to Palestinians. Where, in Jane Tynan’s words, the keffiyeh was first adopted by the fedayeen to erase any ‘markers of identity’ between them, now it is a marker of identity. Now it is a tool not for burying class differences, but for accentuating them, for saying: ‘I care for Palestine and thus my status is higher than yours.’

In this way, the cult of the keffiyeh is yet another form of ‘radical chic’, to use the term created by Tom Wolfe in his still blistering 1970 essay, ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’. Taking as his starting point a fundraising party for the Black Panthers that composer Leonard Bernstein held in his opulent apartment in Manhattan, Wolfe mused on how, at certain points in history, the self-styled enlightened elite develops an intense resentment for the ‘striving’ working class and instead finds itself drawn towards a ‘romanticised identification with the seemingly primitive lower classes’. That is, they distinguish themselves from the working masses through adopting a refined concern for the hyper-oppressed. And since radical chic ‘is only radical in style’, wrote Wolfe, ‘in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions’ of social climbing. It is an alignment with oppression that in reality advances privilege.

As British art writer Michael Bracewell put it in his 2004 essay, ‘Molotov Cocktails’, Wolfe had diagnosed a trend whereby the ‘patrician classes’ seek to ‘luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start’. This is the keffiyeh classes, too: ostentatiously identifying with an ‘oppressed people’, not to better understand that people’s pain, or to fashion solutions for its easing, but to fortify their own cultural aristocracy at home.

In other ways, though, keffiyeh chic is worse than radical chic. The Lenny Bernsteins of the world might be forgiven for feeling drawn to the drive and passion of ‘street’ movements like the Black Panthers. They must have seemed exciting to an ageing composer in his lonely, cavernous Manhattan flat.

The keffiyeh classes, in contrast, are attracted to the Palestinian people not for their dynamism, but for their wretchedness. Not for their vim but for their victimisation. Where the elite posturing that Wolfe so mercilessly ribbed was ‘vicarious radicalism’, the cult of the keffiyeh is something far more unpleasant: vicarious victimhood. The keffiyeh classes seem keen to ‘appropriate’ not only the clothing of the Palestinians, but their suffering, too. Witness the organisers of the Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City mimicking both Palestinian style and Palestinian privation. One student leader said she and her comrades were going hungry and required ‘humanitarian aid’. Do you want us to die of dehydration and starvation?, she asked university bosses. In a viral clip, a group of keffiyeh-wearing students was seen receiving ‘humanitarian aid’ through the college gates. I say humanitarian aid – it was probably a Starbucks order and blueberry muffins from a nearby bodega. Here we had privileged youths on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis; comfortably off Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the Earth.

It provided a grim insight into the true nature of ‘Palestine solidarity’. It shone a light on why so many of our young chant, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’. 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. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting. It’s less politics than therapy. They seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on Earth. That’s what the keffiyeh has become: the cloth with which the rich seek to scrub away their white guilt.

If the keffiyeh is the uniform of this Palestine politics of victimhood, then its currency is images of Palestinian suffering. Where yesteryear’s purveyors of radical chic revelled in images of revolting minorities, today’s followers of the cult of the keffiyeh savour images of Palestinian destitution. They trade in photos of Palestinian pain, meaning that social media has become ‘oversaturated with traumatic imagery’, as one writer describes it. Log on and you’ll be instantly exposed to a ‘kaleidoscopic view of human suffering without respite’. Not content with commodifying Palestinian attire, they commodify Palestinian trauma, too. They make a spectacle of Palestinian agony. Not to assist Palestinians in any meaningful way – how could it? – but rather to inflame their own satisfying feelings of collective moral revulsion.

Even requests from Palestinians to stop sharing horrific images from their wars have not been enough to slow this grim trade. A few years ago, Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr counselled Westerners against sharing ‘shocking content’ showing ‘shattered people’ in the Palestinian territories, on the basis that such ‘pictures of pain’ violate ‘the privacy and dignity of the subjects’ and can ‘create terror’ among Palestinians who might fear suffering the same fate. These images might ‘provide thrills’ to outside observers, and nurture ‘more “likes” and “shares”’ online, but they can be devastating to ‘public morale’ in the Palestinian territories, Jabr wrote. It was a fruitless plea. Imagery of Palestinian suffering is too valuable to the keffiyeh classes to be sacrificed to trifling concerns about Palestinian dignity. Your pain is ours now, just like your headwear.

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. Witness Yahya Sinwar’s insistence, in the summarising words of CNN, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will likely ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Sinwar, the then military leader of Hamas in Gaza, callously described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’.

Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s 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 cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.

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.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy