I wear the traditional black and white scarf to celebrate my heritage. That’s enough to make you a target in the US today
What’s black and white and a threat all over? A keffiyeh, of course. It may look like a harmless piece of fabric, but it’s actually a weapon of mass distraction. According to an awful lot of anti-Palestinian voices, the mass graves and forced “full-blown famine” in parts of Gaza are not what you should be outraged about now. The thousands of dead children and calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza are not what should be keeping you up at night. No, what should really upset you are people wearing keffiyehs – the traditional black and white scarf that has long been a symbol of Palestinian identity.
Being a British-Palestinian living in the US has never been a barrel of laughs. Anti-Arab bigotry has long been normalised in the US – although it’s hard to quantify the extent of this because the FBI did not properly track anti-Arab hate crimes between 1992 and 2015. Long before this current iteration of violence in Gaza, I’d grown used to people telling me Palestinians were terrorists while simultaneously proclaiming that “Palestinians don’t exist”: a phenomenon I’ve dubbed Schrödinger’s Palestinian.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
