The Watermelon
البطيخ
A fruit that carries the flag's four colours — adopted as a Palestinian sign under Israel's ban on the flag, and revived online when the ban returned in other forms.
Cut a watermelon open and it shows red, black, white and green: the four colours of the Palestinian flag. That coincidence is the whole of the symbol, and it exists because the flag itself was made illegal. After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, public display of the Palestinian flag was banned in the occupied territories, and enforcement extended over time beyond the flag to artworks that combined its colours at all.
The best-documented origin story belongs to the painters. In 1980 the Israeli army shut down Gallery 79 in Ramallah — founded by the painter Issam Bader — which was showing work by Sliman Mansour, Bader and Nabil Anani that used the flag’s colours. Mansour has told the story on the record many times since. As he put it to NPR, the officials gave the artists two orders: no exhibition without their permission, and no painting in red, green, black and white. A fellow artist asked what would happen if he painted a flower in those colours. Mansour recalls the answer: “Then that will get us — then we will confiscate it. Even if you paint a watermelon, we will confiscate it.” The remark travelled further than the exhibition did; in Mansour’s telling the colleague who asked the question goes unnamed.
Historians of the period are careful here. The watermelon story circulates in several versions, some of them retold without provenance, and it is not the only account of the symbol’s beginnings — Mansour himself has said the watermelon only began to be used as an image in 2007, when Khaled Hourani made one for a “Subjective Atlas of Palestine” project. What is documented beyond dispute is the ban itself and the censorship of Palestinian artists under it; Mansour was detained and interrogated, and says it was after that that he started painting watermelons. Israel’s restriction on the flag in the occupied territories was lifted following the Oslo Accords in 1993, when the flag was recognised as representing the Palestinian Authority.
The image returned in 2021, when Palestinians and their supporters used watermelon emojis and imagery to evade automated moderation and content suppression on social platforms, and again after October 2023, when it spread worldwide on placards, stickers and profile pictures. Its usefulness is precisely its deniability: it is a fruit, and it is not.