Earlier this month, my mother and I took the train from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to the city of Bukhara, two and a half hours away. While I was waiting in line for the toilet, an Uzbek train attendant approached to express his delight at the hoodie I was wearing, which is black with a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine” in both English and Arabic.
During our ensuing conversation in modified English, the young man advised me to steer clear of Wagon Seven of the train, as it was full of Israeli tourists. He himself had requested to be reassigned from said wagon, he told me, so as to avoid having to deal with them. He proceeded to wonder how people could live with themselves while their government was slaughtering children en masse.
Indeed, of the more than 65,000 Palestinians Israel has officially killed in less than two years in the Gaza Strip – likely a severe underestimate – nearly 20,000 have been children. This is to say nothing of the countless kids who have been permanently maimed, mutilated and traumatised.
Before arriving in Bukhara, the train attendant suggested we document our sweatshirt-based encounter with a selfie. In the photo, he gave the thumbs up for Palestine, and then my mother and I were on our way.
This was not the first time that this particular hoodie had attracted attention. The previous week in the security line at the airport in Istanbul, an Arab woman travelling with her family asked to photograph the shirt. Then the female security guard who patted me down informed me, in Turkish, that I was a “good person”.
Generally having a rather different opinion of myself, I inquired as to how she had possibly come to this conclusion, and was told that any American citizen who supported Palestine was automatically a good person.
To be sure, the United States has not done much for its international reputation by avidly backing Israel’s genocide from the get-go, first under former President Joe Biden and now under Donald Trump. In addition to providing billions upon billions of dollars to the Israeli killing machine, the US has also provided it with far-reaching diplomatic cover, including by vetoing six United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.
Hands down, the most unexpected compliment I have thus far received on the Free Palestine hoodie came from an agent with the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) – which doesn’t exactly have the greatest reputation either – at none other than Dulles International Airport outside the nation’s capital of Washington, DC.
It was last October, one year into the genocidal spectacle, and I was flying to Mexico City. While scanning my passport, the agent, an older white man, said he liked my shirt and lamented the ongoing horror in Gaza. He went on to ask if I had read any books by Israeli anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and other titles, as I stared at him in shock.
Granted, this was several months before Trump reassumed the presidency and went about effectively criminalising opposition to genocide by abducting and disappearing students and scholars who had expressed support for Gaza.
Free Palestine apparel has earned me plenty of other friends, too. There was the Sudanese human rights lawyer-turned-ride-share driver in Washington who gave me a hug, the woman in the Athens airport who commented “Long live Palestine”, and the United Airlines flight attendant who whispered to me almost conspiratorially that he approved of my outfit.
It may appear that the garment’s popularity is restricted to the context of travel by plane, train, and so forth – an impression that has to do with various factors. The first is that I travel a lot, having suffered for most of my life from a pathological inability to sit still. The second is that I am always freezing in airports, which got me to thinking that if I must wear a sweater, it might as well be a Free Palestine one.
And yet it is undeniably grotesque that, thanks purely to a passport bestowed on me by the number one abettor of mass slaughter and enforced starvation in Gaza, I am able to jaunt freely around the world in a Free Palestine hoodie, while the Palestinians of Gaza are trapped within the borders of a tiny strip of land that Israel has converted into an open-air exhibition of some of the worst atrocities known to humanity.
Although the black hoodie is currently serving as my official travel uniform, I have it in blue, as well. I also have a Palestinian flag dress, a Palestinian flag facemask, and two Palestine football shirts, one of which I wore last year when I entered the Darien Gap – the notorious stretch of roadless territory and perilous jungle straddling Colombia and Panama that has become a veritable graveyard for international refuge seekers.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of the world’s have-nots have been forced to risk their lives crossing the Darien Gap in the hopes of eventually reaching the US. During my own brief journalistic incursion, I met two men from Yemen – itself no stranger to US-backed terror – who pronounced my Palestine shirt “very good” and offered their assistance in case I needed anything in the jungle.
Meanwhile, the only negative feedback to the Palestine hoodie that I can recall took place in February of this year in the city of Mazatlan in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, home of the eponymous drug cartel. It is also home to a number of archetypal gringo “expats”, who often do not bother to learn Spanish and who apparently detect no irony in taking advantage of Mexico’s lower living costs while simultaneously endorsing Trump’s mass deportation campaign – which affects a whole lot of Mexicans – just across the border.
One such gringo caricature was personally offended by my hoodie, and took it upon himself to shout belligerently: “So you support Hamas?!” I responded in decidedly impolite fashion, and my Mexican companion and I returned to our beers.
Obviously, my Free Palestine sweatshirt is not going to stop a genocide. It is not going to undo the Israeli strike on the home of 10-year-old Noor Faraj or give the child her two legs back. It is not going to resuscitate Palestinian newborns who have been starved to death.
But in a world that is rapidly going to hell, it has at least made for some fleetingly uplifting moments.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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