Hebrew University Lecturer Detained for Wearing Kippah With Palestinian Flag

A lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has said that he was detained by police for wearing a kippah with the Israeli and Palestinian flags on it. Alex Sinclair said in a post on Facebook on Thursday that he had been sporting the kippah for 20 years due to "a messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity" and it was never a problem. But a few days ago, a man approached him at a cafe in his hometown of Modi'in in central Israel, telling him that his skullcap was illegal and that he was going to call the police, he wrote. Officers arrived some five minutes later. "They immediately tell me that my kippah is against the law and that they are going to confiscate it," Sinclair recalled. The lecturer said he refused to give up his head covering as it "meant so much" to him and he ended up being detained. He was swiftly released, but the police tried holding on to the kippah. When he demanded it back, a female officer returned it to him only after cutting the Palestinian flag out of the head covering, the educator wrote. The symbol is not illegal under Israeli law. "It's hard not to say that this is the kind of thing that fascist regimes do," Sinclair stressed, adding that he is "worried and anxious and frankly devastated that this is the direction that Israel is moving in." He said he filed a complaint with the Department of Internal Police Investigations (DIPI), demanding compensation for the destroyed kippah and "a written commitment that I can walk around Modi'in with it free from harassment. The police confirmed that they had briefly detained a man for wearing a Palestinian flag, but refrained from further comments. Since Israel started its military operation in Gaza in response to a deadly incursion by Hamas in October 2023, the powers of the police to enforce public order have been vastly extended, with multiple incidents of officers removing and seizing Palestinian flags being reported. More than 72,000 people have been killed and over 172,000 others injured by Israeli attacks in Gaza over the past three years, figures from the Palestinian health authorities show.