Given that the French-speaking world gave us the science of semiotics, they would be the first to recognise that the Palestine flag, as it is being hoisted and brandished across the French republic at the moment, has come to signify something far more than the aspirant state of Palestine. You don’t have to be Ferdinand de Saussure to appreciate that this signifier has become unmoored from its original meaning. You don’t have to be Roland Barthes to see that this emblem has now assumed a wholly mutated significance: in short, it has become an all-encompassing symbol to denote hatred of the West and of European civilisation.
It serves as a banner for an apolitical, nihilistic lumpenproletariat whose idea of social justice, as we have seen, is looting stores for designer wares, who glory in setting fire to a historic building such as Limoges town hall
Signs and symbols have no intrinsic meaning, of course, only those tacitly, communally and temporarily attributed to them. For many years, and in many niches in society, to fly the Palestine flag was to parade one’s compassionate virtues, to display empathy for a people living under terrible suffering. Under that common interpretation, this flag has been the de rigueur accessory for the kind of shallow, lifestyle leftists who thought it proper to bring it along to Glastonbury, to wave alongside the Progress Pride flag, another symbol deployed to proclaim how vaguely caring you are. This enduring semiotic interpretation has brought forth in recent days the ‘Palestinian Poppy’, an enamel pin which, its designers say, purports to show ‘unity with the beleaguered, oppressed, and occupied people of Palestine.’
Yet, as Bob Vylan’s set at last year’s Glastonbury Festival reminded us, one in which revellers blithely joined in the duo’s chorus of ‘death, death to the IDF’, this flag’s meaning continues to slide and shift depending on context. While it can be owned by harmless, well-meaning, lachrymose white liberals, it has also been increasingly claimed by Islamists grievance-mongers, far-left disruptors and apolitical nihilists whose political concerns are less focused on the Holy Land and gravitate more on a general hatred of western civilisation.
Like the keffiyeh, it has become a symbol for an omnicause generation, a flag of convenience for all kinds of agitators and malcontents. It serves as a banner for an apolitical, nihilistic lumpenproletariat whose idea of social justice, as we have seen, is looting stores for designer wares, who glory in setting fire to a historic building such as Limoges town hall. For a similar and often overlapping cohort of French youths, the latest to be immersed in anti-colonial theory, and abetted today by the Islamogauche apologist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Palestinian flag has also become the standard under which to vent righteous fury at the nation, the state – at European civilisation itself.
It’s significant that one of the most prominent converts to the Palestine cause in recent years has been Greta Thunberg, previously known as a teenage campaigner for the environment. It’s significant because it illustrates the sheer magnetic draw of the Palestinian cause – it permits its adherents at once self-pitying victimhood and self-righteous anger – and because that cause and the environmental crusade are united in their belief that the West has behaved sinfully and must now atone.
Could these riots happen here? The obvious answer is: why not? Conditions are not too dissimilar. We also have a similar younger, demographic who’ve been allured by the self-aggrandising, performative politics of eco-theatre and far-left resentment, thanks not least to an education system which has taught at least two generations to hate western civilisation and hate their country, to instil in them a morbid sense of shame and self-loathing.
Our latest roster of malcontents is likewise drawn to the Palestinian flag on account of it embodying and projecting sanctimonious anti-Western outrage. For many young, white leftists here it serves as a rallying standard of rebellion against a British state that is mired in the sins of the past. For this country’s growing population of youths of Asian extraction, whose parents and grandparents came not from the Holy Land but from the Indian subcontinent, it has become the de facto flag of this country’s assertive British Muslim population, as can be witnessed by it becoming a marker of territory in parts of Birmingham and London, just as the St George’s Flag is now flown in urban areas and enclaves still claimed by white English people.
Eighteen months ago, many of these white Brits, fed up of feeling continually denigrated and belittled, decided to hoist the England the Union flag in their neighbourhood as a gesture of self-affirmation, heritage and pride. They were duly told by leftists that these were symbols of hate. Yet today, if any symbol has come to be twisted and uncoupled from any benign original meaning, it’s the Palestine flag. Today, for many of us, it symbolises destruction, rancour and hatred.
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