A Flag Without a People, for a People Without a Flag

Feature image by TOMO

Rehau – The Palestinian flag is everywhere.

Painted on faces. Draped across shoulders. Waving above crowds in London, Paris, New York, Sydney.

But here’s the strange truth: for most Palestinians, that flag has rarely carried the power people project onto it.

Its red, black, white, and green are arranged like so many other Arab flags born from the Anglo-Hashemite–led Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. They once belonged to a short-lived Nahda — a renaissance that dreamed of reviving a long lost “Golden Age”.

That dream collapsed quickly.

The Anglo-Hashemite alliance broke after the Ottomans fell. The Hashemites were expelled from the Arabian Peninsula, swallowed into what became Saudi Arabia like a black hole devouring its past.

Without leadership, Arab nationalism fractured and radicalized, even as in Palestine another revival took shape — the Zionist dream, pulling from a different thread of history. To the Arabs, Israel looked like a second black hole: smaller, denser, impossible to see through. So they hurled a flag at its edge, as if planting it on the event horizon could freeze a lost dream in place.

That was how the Palestinian flag was born.

It surfaced in the 1920s, carried in the 1936–39 Arab revolt under British rule. Later, it was the banner of an Egyptian-backed puppet state in Gaza, then adopted by the Arab League after the 1948 war. Soon after, the West Bank was absorbed by Jordan; Gaza, by Egypt.

Then came 1967.
Six days that broke Arab armies and buried the last breath of Nahda.

Still… the flag survived.
Through the rise of Islamism in the 1970s. Through Kissinger’s cold realism. It became a rallying cry from the Atlantic to the Gulf — not because it could solve the region’s problems, but because powerless people cling to symbols when they cannot change the systems that rule them.

The flag became a placeholder for a victory no one could deliver.

Through the late 20th century, Israel crushed Arab armies again and again, yet Arab regimes kept pushing Palestinians into endless wars of attrition. Civilians on both sides lived in fear; each generation hardened further. Walls rose in the West Bank and around Gaza — but the thicker walls were always psychological. Once those barriers hardened, the possibility of peace between people — Palestinian and Israeli, neighbor to neighbor — all but vanished. The only “peace” left on the table was the kind negotiated between Israel and fragile Arab regimes, treaties signed in place of reconciliation lived.

By the 2020s, Arab leaders openly sought normalization with Israel.

Hundreds of millions of broken Arab souls carried little weight in their calculations.

Then came October 7, 2023.

For Palestinians, it was a desperate gamble to wrench their cause back into the Arab agenda. But Arab capitals fell silent. The echo came instead from Western streets. That was the day the Palestinian flag stopped being an Arab banner and became the symbol of Western discontent.

It didn’t happen by accident.

It was carried by Palestinians in the diaspora, raised in the West but still bound to family and culture back home. It was amplified by the collapse of trust after Bush’s “War on Terror,” after Obama’s interventions, after NATO’s failures – after Trump. And it was accelerated by something deeper: the collapse of Western politics itself.

Deindustrialization.
Big corporate, big banks, big tech.
The hollowing of the middle class.
A political class bought outright by big money.

And so, for many in the West, Palestine is no longer about Palestine. It is a flag for the alienated: the overqualified but underemployed, the indebted, the politically homeless. Just as Arabs once waved it when their own renaissance had already died.

This is why Israel worries. But Western governments should worry more. Because what looks like an anti-Israel protest may be the tip of a much larger iceberg: a revolt against the Western political order itself.

Yes — Palestinians have faced over a century of injustice from colonial powers, from Israel, and from Arab regimes that exploited them.
Yes — Western citizens have every right to protest the neoliberal order that gutted their societies.
Yes — Israelis deserve real security.
And yes — the dream of an Arab Nahda should be carried into Western capitals, to remind Europe of its own renaissances — where revival meant human dignity, not domination.

But here’s the warning: Palestine and Israel alike have been turned into instruments of containment by global powers that want order in an ungovernable region. The same applies to Ukraine: invaded, shattered, and yet held up as another flag to wave in Western streets.

And the same might soon apply to the European Union itself — the place where more Palestinian and Ukrainian flags have been waved than anywhere else.

Raising someone’s flag does not shield them from harm. More often, it amplifies their suffering and distorts an already distorted war. The only way forward — for Arabs, Israelis, the Europeans, and beyond — is the hard way:
Build alliances that bypass governments.
Forge transnational civil rights networks.
Return to real economies and rebuild a global middle class with a real stake in peace.
Rally around universal human rights — not just the colors of a flag.

What the Arab Nahda once dreamed of, and what the West now aches for, is the same thing: a renaissance of human dignity. That will not come from waving flags — it will come from raising people.

A flag can rally a crowd, but it cannot rebuild a society. Until we remember that, both Palestinians and Israelis, and their Western supporters will remain trapped in someone else’s containment strategy.

This is how we ended up with a dead flag in the first place.

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Relevant links
When God Plays Dice with the Universe
The Thin Line Between Us And The Enemy
What War and Terror Do to Principles

Feature image:
Protesters Holding Posters during their Rally
Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia
by TIMO