https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... -kaffiyeh/
The power of putting George Washington in a kaffiyeh
Student protests connect the plight of Gaza to fundamental American values.
Perspective by Philip Kennicott
Senior art and architecture critic
May 3, 2024 at 4:55 p.m. EDT
A Palestinian flag hangs from a statue of George Washington, whose head is draped in a kaffiyeh scarf, inside the pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University.
The statue of George Washington that stands in University Yard at George Washington University is one of many copies of an original marble likeness made by Jean-Antoine Houdon, the leading sculptor in France at the end of the 18th century. It shows the Founding Father in a classical and aristocratic pose, one leg slightly bent, his posture erect. His cape is draped next to him, he holds a cane lightly in his right hand, and he is staring into the distance, a reference no doubt to both his perspicacity and the prospects of the new nation.
Houdon based the face of Washington on a life mask he made during a visit to Mount Vernon in 1785, but Washington’s face is now obscured by a kaffiyeh scarf, and his military uniform is partially covered by the Palestinian flag. The protest encampment that surrounds him is orderly and quiet, with a medical tent, a library and a media section. Some graffiti has been painted on the statue’s base — “genocidal warmongering” is one of the messages — and stickers affixed to the metal cast.
But what is most striking is the symbolic incorporation of the statue into the wider messaging of the protest. This isn’t iconoclasm, and the statue hasn’t been torn down or dumped in the Potomac. Rather, it is the repurposing of a familiar American symbol. The students have dressed up Washington like the school mascot, adding new political symbols to existing ones.
Washington, an enslaver and plantation owner, is no doubt a controversial figure among many of the people who are protesting American support for Israel as it pursues a brutal war against Hamas, which launched a deadly attack against Israel on Oct. 7. But for now, Washington has been symbolically appropriated as a defender of the Palestinian people.
Anyone inclined to dismiss these protests as the irrational exuberance of privileged students with an incoherent ideology should stand back and consider the iconography. When national symbols are incorporated into a group’s identity rather than rejected, something significant is happening. The students may be making inconvenient or even irrational requests of the institution and the country at large, but they are framing those demands as part of a continuum of American values.
It’s worth remembering that the students who have taken to the pro-Palestinian encampments have lived almost their entire, politically conscious life with Benjamin Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel. Films like Otto Preminger’s 1960 “Exodus,” which dramatized and mythologized the founding of Israel, belong to their grandparents’ generation. Yigal Amir, the right-wing Israeli extremist who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, is old enough to be their father. Do they even remember Rabin, who signed the Oslo accords in 1993?
Like the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the pro-Gaza encampments are both a site of protest and a place of invention. The students are creating communities ex nihilo, and in the process, learning how to anticipate and respond to basic needs, like food, water, sanitation, fire safety, social coexistence and mental health. As they invent their own communities, they are also reinventing the symbolism of American politics. It would be foolish to imagine that these protests will simply evaporate when the school year ends. The “rethink everything” mentality, an essential part of a liberal education, will likely mean a realignment of the symbolism and narratives that have governed American thinking about Israel for generations.
Israel isn’t losing the symbolic war on American campuses, it has already lost it. Amid that clamor, there are antisemitic voices that should be hounded past the margins and into the gutters. But with the death toll in Gaza now near 35,000, with Israel unable or unwilling to protect aid workers and humanitarian organizations, with famine spreading, with an imminent threat to the civilians in Rafah, there is an urgency that requires rethinking all of the old assumptions about the alliance between the United States and Israel.
A sticker affixed to the base of a statue of George Washington, at George Washington University in Washington, reads simply: “Look up 'Nakba.'”
The statue of Washington is already doing that work. Next to the flag-draped image of Washington is the library tent, dubbed the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, named for the Palestinian poet and writer who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December. Alareer’s last poem, “If I must die,” has become the elegy, the rhetorical kaffiyeh, of the pro-Palestinian movement. Translated into dozens of languages, and reproduced in the encampments and online, it is a powerful statement of both helplessness and hope: “If I must die/let it bring hope/let it be a tale.”
That last line is important, let it be a tale.
Americans have processed the history of Israel through narratives, symbols and myths. The old stories and tales — about the heroic defense of a nascent Israel against overwhelming odds and military power, the communal and collective aspirations of the kibbutzim, the daring and bravado of Israeli commandos defending Israeli civilians around the world — belong to a generation that is passing from political relevance. The new tales will be about a military colossus with American weapons attacking the World Central Kitchen aid workers, firing at the first car, then the second and then the third, until seven people were dead.
Is that fair? Is it nuanced? Is it the truth? Affixed to the statue of Washington is a sticker that reads, simply, “Look Up ‘Nakba.’” The word, Arabic for “catastrophe” and a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the war for Israel’s independence, may be new to many passersby, and not just students. It isn’t regularly used in mainstream journalistic discourse in this country. Go to the Wikipedia page for Nakba and you find a history of Israel’s early fight for survival — or conquest, depending on your point of view — which includes cruel, ugly chapters and atrocities on both sides.
In the early history of the United States, the David and Goliath story was invoked to legitimize and mythologize the United States’ war against the colonial power of Britain. The same myth has been fundamental to discourse about Israel and its hostile neighbors. Now the myth is being repurposed once again, to legitimize Palestinian aspirations for a viable homeland and state. It’s a volatile myth and was seized on by the Confederacy when slave states rebelled against federal power. It’s not the sort of myth that clarifies history, but it does help cement ideology.
It may seem absurd that Washington wears the kaffiyeh, a new David defending the Palestinians against militarism and aggression funded by the United States. But if you look up Nakba, the gulf between the reality of what is happening in the Middle East and the stories that are commonly told about that reality in the United States will seem absurd as well.
A new set of stories, new tales, are emerging, and they are already being incorporated into the mainstream of American politics. It won’t take a generation for that to have an impact. The reckoning is already underway.