How the Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity
The use of the watermelon as a Palestinian symbol is not new. It first emerged after the Six-day War in 1967, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza, and annexed East Jerusalem. At the time, the Israeli government made public displays of the Palestinian flag a criminal offense in Gaza and the West Bank.
To circumvent the ban, Palestinians began using the watermelon because, when cut open, the fruit bears the national colors of the Palestinian flag—red, black, white, and green.
The Israeli government didn't just crack down on the flag. Artist Sliman Mansour told The National in 2021 that Israeli officials in 1980 shut down an exhibition at 79 Gallery in Ramallah featuring his work and others, including Nabil Anani and Issam Badrl. “They told us that painting the Palestinian flag was forbidden, but also the colors were forbidden. So Issam said, ‘What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?’, to which the officer replied angrily, ‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated,’” Mansour told the outlet.
Israel lifted the ban on the Palestinian flag in 1993, as part of the Oslo Accords, which entailed mutual recognition by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were the first formal agreements to try to resolve the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The flag was accepted as representing the Palestinian Authority, which would administer Gaza and the West Bank.
In the wake of the accords, the New York Times nodded to the role of watermelon as a stand-in symbol during the flag ban. “In the Gaza Strip, where young men were once arrested for carrying sliced watermelons—thus displaying the red, black and green Palestinian colors—soldiers stand by, blasé, as processions march by waving the once-banned flag,” wrote Times journalist John Kifner.
In 2007, just after the Second Intifada, artist Khaled Hourani created The Story of the Watermelon for a book entitled Subjective Atlas of Palestine. In 2013, he isolated one print and named it The Colours of the Palestinian Flag, which has since been seen by people across the globe.
The use of the watermelon as a symbol resurged in 2021, following an Israeli court ruling that Palestinian families based in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem would be evicted from their homes to make way for settlers.
The watermelon symbol today:
In January, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gave police the power to confiscate Palestinian flags. This was later followed by a June vote on a bill to ban people from displaying the flag at state-funded institutions, including universities. (The bill passed preliminary approval but the government later collapsed.)
In June, Zazim, an Arab-Israeli community organization, launched a campaign to protest against the ensuing arrests and confiscation of flags. Images of watermelons were plastered on to 16 taxis operating in Tel Aviv, with the accompanying text reading, “This is not a Palestinian flag.”
“Our message to the government is clear: we will always find a way to circumvent any absurd ban and we will not stop fighting for freedom of expression and democracy,” said Zazim director Raluca Ganea.
Amal Saad, a Palestinian from Haifa who worked on the Zazim campaign, told Al-Jazeera they had a clear message: “If you want to stop us, we’ll find another way to express ourselves.”
Words courtesy of BY ARMANI SYED / TIME
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helloooo my friend~ (hehe is it okay if i call you that?)
just thought i’d pop in and share some pretty art ^^
the old gate to the city, ibrahim hazimeh // tamra, nabil anani // yaffa, sliman mansour // the camp, alaa albaba // olives from west ramallah, nabil anani // illegal inhabitants, ahmad canaan
personally i think the camp, and tamra are my favourite. just… wow.
Ohhh, I love ALL of these, they're so beautiful!! Thank you so much for sending this in!
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Day 3 of Global Strike Posting!
Today's topic- The watermelon symbol!
You might have seen the familiar icon a lot on social media recently as a way to show support for Palestine that gets around Meta's filters and content suppression, but the symbol is anything but new. Sliman Mansour, a Palestinian artist of great renown, credits the idea to an Israeli soldier that was trying to shut down a collaborative art gallery he had with Isam Bader and Nabil Anani in 1980. Thirteen years prior to the exhibit, the Israeli government had banned the use of Palestinian flags across the West Bank and Gaza, going so far as to forbid the use of the colors red, black, green, and white together in paintings. The art gallery, which depicted the struggles of the Palestinian people, was to be confiscated. The artists were told to instead paint fields of flowers, or beautiful nude people- the Israeli soldier told them he would buy the artwork if they did. Bader asked what would happen if they used the colors of the Palestinian flag to do so, and the solider told him they would confiscate it. "Even if you paint a watermelon, we will confiscate it."
The idea of the watermelon as a symbol of resistance spread quickly, and people took to the streets with slices of the fruit. It's been used many times since then- it was painted on busses, shown in art exhibits, and used during protests. When the ban on the Palestinian flag was lifted in 1993, then reinstated in 2023, the use of the iconic symbol only spread further. It's been used recently as a way to show support or talk about Palestine without being shadow banned or blocked from social media, as a watermelon emoji is a lot harder to screen for than specific keywords relating to the current genocide.
So yeah! There's some deeper nuance and meaning that I won't get into here for the sake of time(there's some deeper cultural relevance I don't know as much about), but here are some of the articles I read on the subject! Feel free to check em out and do your own research!
NPR- "Why Watermelons Are a Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity."
Aljazeera- "The Fruits of Palestine and Their Symbolism."
APNews- "How the Watermelon Became a Global Sign of Palestinian Solidarity."
Hyperallergic- "How Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Resistance."
See you tomorrow, and as always, Free Palestine!
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