Watermelons are grown throughout the Middle East, and they’re a staple of Palestinian cuisine. They owe their political significance to their colors; with their green-and-white rind, red flesh, and black seeds, they recall the colors of the Palestinian flag.
‘Why don’t you paint flowers?’
“We were not allowed to paint in red, green, black and white: The Palestinian flag was forbidden. And the colors of the Palestinian flag were forbidden,” recalled Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour in a 2021 interview with Al Jazeera+, referring to the 1980s.
After some paintings were confiscated from Mansour’s gallery in Ramallah, he and a group of artists met with an Israeli officer, who delivered the order that exhibitions first needed to be approved by the Israeli censorship office before being shown in the West Bank and Gaza. “He was trying to convince us not to do any political art, saying, ‘Why don’t you paint nice flowers or a nude figure? … I will even buy from you.’”
“If I paint a flower with these colors, what will you do?” asked one artist. “Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated,” the officer replied.
And that was how, according to Mansour, the watermelon idea actually came from an Israeli soldier.
Fruit Becomes a Statement
In the Palestinian territories, the watermelon took on a life of its own. It appeared on walls, T-shirts, posters, and in art galleries.
“This drawing is from [a] Palestinian children’s folklore stories book, and it talks about the story of a mythical toddler who gets out of a watermelon and can speak and act as an adult,” Mansour wrote on Instagram in October 2023. “It seems that this is not a myth; the children of Gaza are being forced into being adults, adults who are living through hell.”
The story of the flag
According to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA), the flag was designed by Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca, in 1916. At the time, the area known as Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. The flag became a symbol of the Arab Revolt against the Turks. Hussein dreamed of an independent Arab kingdom — stretching across today’s Palestinian territories and into Syria, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.
The Turks were defeated with British help, but the dream of a unified Arab kingdom never materialized. Until 1948, Palestine remained under British mandate. After the British withdrew, the flag of the Arab Revolt was revived as the national flag of the Palestinian state.
Less than 20 years later, however, it was banned once more. After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The flag was outlawed. Even posters and old photos showing it were forbidden. Those who raised it risked arrest.
The ban was only lifted again in 1993. During the Oslo peace process, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization agreed to coexist peacefully, and recognized each other. The flag was accepted as the symbol of the Palestinian Authority, which was set up to govern Gaza and the West Bank.
In January 2023 — nine months before Hamas attacked Israel — Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir instructed police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces. “I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel,” said the far-right politician. The move effectively reinstated the ban.
Popular on social media
Today, protesters around the world are using the watermelon as a political statement at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the Hamas attack, use of the symbol also grew on social media. To avoid having posts deleted, many users replaced the Palestinian flag with the watermelon emoji.
Artist Khaled Hourani has been painting watermelons for years. On Instagram, he posted one against a golden background; the artwork was auctioned off to benefit a UK-based foundation supporting healthcare for Palestinians.
Instrumentalized by racists
But the history of the watermelon as a symbol is all but straightforward.
In the United States, long before it became a widespread Palestinian symbol through social media, the fruit had racist connotations. As the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery documents, white US Americans have used it to mock Black people. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, many freed Black people earned a living growing and selling watermelons. The fruit grows quickly, requires little labor, and is easy to cultivate. White racists twisted those aspects in an attempt to stereotype Black people as lazy. Caricature images were disseminated depicting Black people with outlandish red lips, biting greedily into melons with juice running down their faces, to imply they were childish and unclean. Such imagery circulated widely in the South, with the aim of insulting and demeaning the Black community.
That history resurfaced a year ago, when the Democratic Socialists of America used the image of a watermelon in flyers calling on Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to show solidarity with Gaza. But the two different symbolic meanings of the watermelon collided in this case, as it targeted an African-American politician, and the flyer triggered controversy.
This article was originally written in German.
The post How the watermelon became a Palestinian protest symbol appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
