Israeli man detained for wearing kippah bearing Palestinian flag

(SeaPRwire) –   Alex Sinclair has alleged that officers cut the symbol from his religious head covering before returning it to him

A lecturer at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University stated that police detained him for wearing a kippah featuring both the Israeli and Palestinian flags.

In a Thursday Facebook post, Alex Sinclair shared that he’d worn the kippah for two decades because of “a messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity” and that it had never caused any issues before.

However, a few days prior, a man approached him at a cafe in his hometown of Modi’in (central Israel) and told him the skullcap was illegal, saying he would contact the police, Sinclair wrote.

Police officers arrived about five minutes later. “They immediately tell me that my kippah is against the law and that they are going to confiscate it,” Sinclair remembered.

The lecturer stated he refused to surrender his head covering since it “meant so much” to him, resulting in his detention. He was released quickly, but police attempted to keep the kippah.

When he asked for the kippah back, a female officer returned it only after cutting out the Palestinian flag, the educator noted. The symbol is not prohibited under Israeli law.

“It’s hard not to say that this is the kind of thing that fascist regimes do,” Sinclair emphasized, noting that he is “worried and anxious and frankly devastated that this is the direction that Israel is moving in.”

He said he submitted a complaint to the Department of Internal Police Investigations (DIPI), seeking compensation for the damaged kippah and “a written commitment that I can walk around Modi’in with it free from harassment.

Police confirmed they had briefly detained a man for wearing a Palestinian flag but declined to provide more details.

Since Israel launched its military operation in Gaza in response to a fatal Hamas incursion in October 2023, police powers to enforce public order have been significantly expanded, with numerous reports of officers removing and seizing Palestinian flags.

According to figures from Palestinian health authorities, over 72,000 people have been killed and more than 172,000 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza over the past three years.