From the Keffiyeh to the Watermelon: Symbols of Solidarity Between Agency and Consumption

Foreign languages crossing over a cup of coffee. So many words pass beside me while I watch faces that resemble one another, and not me. Everything around me looks ordinary. Even the chill in the room resembles the ice that genocide leaves inside you when you witness it from far away, as though you were only a spectator living in a world running parallel to the catastrophe.

Then my eye catches something small: a watermelon printed on a laptop nearby. A brief moment stretches a thick rope between me and someone I have never met, and undoes the sense of being invisible, undoes the loneliness. As if this simple symbol opens a passage of safety between the one living the experience and the one carrying it from a distance.

I don't know the person behind the laptop, or whether they are Palestinian at all, but the watermelon is enough to say that the cause is alive in this faraway place, and that I am not the only one holding it. In that small moment, the symbol becomes a way of easing the larger separation: a narrow bridge of familiarity, reminding you that you still belong to a memory wider than place and language. 

This is why we draw Palestine. Every time a flag is raised, a watermelon drawn, or a keffiyeh worn, a point of contact forms between memory and political action, between the individual and the collective, between those living the tragedy and those on whom its effects land from afar.

In a time when solidarity has become a digital act that fades quickly, art remains one of the most enduring forms of expression, because it does not stop at saying but gives a person back the sense of capacity and meaning.

Art works as a way of regulating the self and reordering the chaos inside; it gives a person the capacity to turn fear and anger into a form that can be understood and controlled. In drawing, in writing, in playing music, people find a safe space to express and to breathe, and a kind of coherence forms between what they feel and what they are able to say or show. So we can say that art in the Palestinian experience is a practice of survival, and a way of protecting meaning in the face of loss and violence.

Creativity, in this context, carries a clear therapeutic function: it restores a person's sense of agency after they have lost control over the course of their life, and offers a way to give pain a form instead of swallowing it. When someone draws their country or sings about it, they take direct part in building a coherent collective memory that affirms existence and ties the present to the past. They are not only summoning the past; they are rebuilding it in a way that lets them live alongside it. In this way art becomes a tool for building identity and reclaiming it: not only national identity, but psychological and personal identity too, reminding a person that they are still able to move and to have an effect under the weight of oppression.

Studies in community psychology show that collective creative practice eases anxiety, reduces the sense of helplessness, and creates social bonds that give people back a sense of belonging.

Community art workshops are spreading across Palestine as a therapeutic tool; in these safe spaces people use color, sound, and movement to express a reality that words are too narrow to hold. Participants describe such workshops as "a way of ordering the chaos inside", and as a space of "release" and "freedom". Art here does not work on the aesthetic level but on the psychological and political level: turning raw feeling into disciplined movement, and replacing helplessness with a symbolic act that can restore balance. 

But the deeper value of art shows itself when it moves from an individual act to a collective one. In songs, murals, group workshops, and dabke, we see the idea of steadfastness (Sumud), which liberation psychologists describe as a form of resistance: turning daily existence itself into a psychological, collective, and political stance that refuses to break. Collective art gives people back a sense of belonging when social and political structures come apart, and turns pain into a shared bond that keeps memory and meaning alive, rather than leaving the individual alone in isolation.

On the other side of the wall, the symbol becomes a psychological extension of art, a means that lets memory cross the distance between those living the experience and those standing with them.

In the Palestinian context, symbols do work that goes beyond political meaning. They call up what is sometimes called the unconscious response to a symbol: the feeling that rises the instant a familiar shape is seen, with no need for explanation. Seeing a keffiyeh, or the colours of the Palestinian flag, stirs an immediate sense of belonging, memory, and continuity, as though it were carrying a silent message between the conscious and the unconscious.

The keffiyeh began as a piece of cloth farmers used against the sun and the dust, but with the revolts of the 1930s and the Palestinian intifadas it became a marker of identity. In the popular imagination it stood for steadfastness, then crossed the boundaries of geography to become an expression of human solidarity. When a protester in London or Barcelona wears it, they are not imitating a distant culture; they are taking part in a universal meaning that has to do with justice, freedom, and belonging to humanity before borders.

The watermelon, by contrast, drew its symbolic presence from simplicity. Its four colors (red, green, black, and white) recall the colors of the Palestinian flag, but they do it with a quiet cleverness. The symbol was born in moments of repression, when raising the flag was banned, and the watermelon became a space of soft resistance; a visual expression that slips beneath censorship to say aloud what is not permitted. As it spread around the world, it became a mark of solidarity shared o

This kind of spread opens a new door for psychological contact. When a Palestinian sees their symbol somewhere far away, they feel that their memory has not been sealed off, and that what they are living is no longer a private experience. The symbol, at that moment, works on collective trauma from a different angle: it creates a relationship of sharing instead of isolation, and gives the pain a meaning that can be borne, by letting it be seen and understood by others. "I see you, I hear you, you are not alone."

Art and symbols together make this shared space between the Palestinian who is subjected to injustice, the Palestinian in exile, and those who stand with them. It is a space that moves the experience from private pain into a collective memory held in common from different positions. This sharing can be understood as a symbolic working-through of collective trauma: turning trauma from a silent burden into visible material that can be worked with and reshaped in public awareness. And when suffering is seen and understood, the first steps of recovery begin, not as forgetting but as the capacity to turn pain into meaning and agency, and that in itself is a political act.

But symbols do not stay alive on their own. They need an awareness that protects them from becoming form without content. The wider the presence of the keffiyeh or the watermelon in public space, the greater the chance of their slipping into easy consumption. Used without knowledge of their history or their meaning, they gradually lose the capacity to carry the memory they were born from.

The keffiyeh, for instance, which for decades stood for steadfastness and belonging, found its way into the global fashion industry. It is sold now in many colours and worn in contexts far from its origin, and this shift does not cancel its value, but it does expose its fragility. Whether a symbol keeps its force depends on how it is used and on the awareness that comes with it.

The watermelon is on a similar path. Its spread through social media gave it a wide presence, but that spread has at times also turned it into a simple slogan that loses its political and psychological meaning. Its use may come close to a comfortable kind of solidarity (Comfort Solidarity), the quick expression of support that leaves the person feeling satisfied but adds nothing to understanding the experience or facing its reality.

On the other side, the artists and activists trying to keep symbols honest live under mounting psychological pressure. Continuing to carry meaning, and to produce it again within the accelerating rhythm of digital solidarity, creates a state of burnout and a loss of the sense of purpose. When art or the symbol turns into a media routine or a repeated moral duty, many people lose the emotional bond that gave them strength at the start. Some describe the feeling as "the emptiness after the surge", a moment when hope is drained by repetition without any visible effect.

This depletion is no less dangerous than the original trauma, because it produces a slow loss of meaning. Symbols and art do not heal simply by being there; they need renewed reflection and a conscious tie to their roots in order to recover their role as instruments of connection, meaning, and agency. When a symbol is used as a quick gesture, it is consumed; but when art is practised as an act of thinking and of continuity, it returns to being a space of political and psychological action that revives hope instead of draining it.

The power of Palestinian symbols was never in how far they spread, but in how truthful they were. Their value comes from the stories they came out of, and from the people who kept using them while knowing what they weigh. When they are taken up again in a context that is aware and respects their roots, they remain able to do what they were made for: to open a window onto memory, and to give whoever sees them a meaning that renews itself rather than hardening into an empty habit.

In the Palestinian experience, the psychological is not separate from the political, nor the individual from the collective. The attempt to hold on to inner balance is at the same time a defence of collective existence. Art and the symbol work in this shared territory: art rebuilds the inside so a person can bear it, and the symbol opens the outside to a wider sharing of memory.

Art here is not only a personal experience but a collective act that creates a shared language for survival. When people draw together, or sing, or fill walls with their colours, they are reordering pain into a shape a person can carry. At the same moment, the symbol (the keffiyeh, the watermelon, the song) becomes a means of contact between those living the experience and those standing with them, and suffering shifts from isolation into relationship.

The power of art and of the symbol does not come from their beauty, but from the way they bind people to one another in the face of disintegration, and turn a simple human act into coherent resistance. In this overlap between feeling and politics, between the inner life and the collective, the real meaning of solidarity takes shape: that we keep acting, not because we have hope, but because through it we hold on to our existence.