Since the horrifying images of the October 7th pogrom and the subsequent violent war of retaliation launched by Israel against Islamic militants in the Gaza strip, images of pro-Palestinian supporters, many not connected to the Middle East, demonstrating their anger towards the plight of Palestinians caught in the crossfire, but also many ultra-left militants visibly sympathizing with terrorists, including LGBT community members declaring themselves pro Palestine, proudly raising the Palestinian flag as a symbol of unity of struggle.
Did they ask themselves where did the flag originate from? And why does it resemble other Arab states national flags?
The first bearer of this flag was a British agent, Thomas Edward Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence was born in Tremadoc (Caernarfonshire) in North Wales on August 16, 1888. His impassionate adventure from Cairo to Mecca and from Mecca to Aqaba and later to Damascus is inseparable from the turbulent modern history of the Middle East. As Hannah Arendt best described it, “Lawrence had drawn the conclusion that his greatness had been the result of the Game and not a product of himself. (..) He had been the ghost of a force, and he became a ghost among the living when the force, that is to say the function, had been taken from him.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
In his Letters, the former British spy, who had accomplished the unthinkable against the Ottoman Empire, raising an army that brought together tribes, who often literally hated each other, against their occupiers, Lawrence had this reflection: “I had pushed my cart across the current, and so it went faster than those pushed across the stream or further upstream. Ultimately I never believed in the Arab movement: but thought it necessary in its time and place.”
This flag was most probably designed by British diplomat Mark Sykes, with the aim of arousing a sense of “Arabism” in order to fuel the revolt (see William Easterly — The White Man’s Burden). According to one version, Sykes, wishing to challenge the French flag that flew in the Arab territories under French control, proposed several flags to the Sharif of Mecca Hussein ben Ali al-Hashimi, who chose the one that was then used.
As a Lacan, a French philosopher once put it, is the real when one bangs into it. And indeed aspirations of the Lawrence led tribes who arrived triumphantly in Damascus had collided suddenly and head-on with the principle of reality at the Versailles Conference. What followed was a struggle for influence in the form of a race against time (transcribed in James Barr’s book, “A line in the sand”) between the two mandatory powers, each relying on local communities. The promised empire gave rise to states under mandate, and the Hashemites had to accommodate their ambition with Jordan and the Hijaz before being overthrown from Mecca by the Saud’s. This quote from Governor Gouraud declared to Churchill before the failed attempt on the life of General Catroux sums up that context very well: “The British were fashioning (in Faisal), like Frankenstein, a monster that would eventually devour us.”
The scene of disorder around the council table in Damascus and crystallized in the film “Lawrence of Arabia” narrates the inability of this heterogeneous coalition of fighters that came out of its original habitat to manage the supply of fallen cities. Very quickly the Arab leaders who had been appointed were replaced by British political officers, whose task was to “ensure the supply of food”. Consequently, their flag later became a symbol of pan-Arab pride (and resentment) because of the perceived British betrayal. It accompanied those in Iraq who would later establish the Baath Party and is currently floating in large format in its Jordanian national version at Aqaba.
The anti-Western grudge was subsequently instrumentalized by the Third Reich against its British and French enemies in a well-stitched anti-Semitic propaganda taken up in the local newspapers, with some notorious collaborators such as the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al Husseini, taking up the classic conspiracy theory of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a text invented from scratch by the tsar’s secret police and published for the first time in Russia in 1903, which stipulates an imminent role of the Jews (here in support of the mandatory powers), for the purpose of global hegemony.
👇 Cockade of the Iraqi Air Force from 1941 to 2004 in the colors of pan-Arabism, with which the planes of the Fliegerführer Iraq were adorned.
On 1 April 1941, a military coup launched by Rashid Ali al-Gillani overthrew the pro-British regime in Iraq. The four putschist generals worked closely with the Nazi intelligence services and accepted military aid from Germany. Hitler had asked Turkey for permission to pass through Turkish territory to provide military aid to Iraq. Turkey had territorial claims around its border with Iraq, which were all accepted by the Third Reich. From that moment on, the original pan Arabist movement that had transformed into an anti-colonial activism espoused antisemitic rhetoric leading to the Farhud, the equivalent of anti-Jewish pogroms in Central and Eastern Europe. The Farhud that was carried out by pro-Nazi Arabs left 140 Jews dead and more than 700 wounded, thus influenced by Nazi foreign policy (Robert Rosen, Saving the Jews—Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust).
It was in this loaded context that, at the end of the war, the United Nations proposed the partition of Palestine into two states following the failure of proposals for a confederation or a binational state (promoted in particular by Judah Léon Magnes). The Arab countries speaking for the Arab population living in Palestine rejected partition altogether and attacked the young state of Israel with the dramatic consequences of exodus of refugees to neighboring Arab countries and within what later became known as the Occupied Territories.
“History is a collection of facts that didn’t have to happen.” This quote illustrates the catastrophic series of events that occurred in a context already heated by disillusionment and fed by Nazi antisemitic propaganda.
This flag, therefore, was born in this loaded context and marked by the ideological hegemony of pan-Arabism and became associated with the pan-Arabist Baath party (whose leaders Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Al Assad established socialist dictatorships aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War). The Flag was adopted by the PLO, a militant organization founded in 1964 by an Egyptian student in Cairo later known as Yasser Arafat, and at the initiative of Egypt. The PLO (and its sponsors) however, was more interested in destabilizing Amman (1970) and Beirut (1975) than in liberating the people of Palestine.
One day will come when Palestinians would ask themselves what flag do they want for their national identity. They will certainly have very different ideas.