Myth: The keffiyeh is Palestinian, and Jews who wear it are appropriating it.

“The keffiyeh is Palestinian, and Jews who wear it are appropriating it.”

Jews wore the sudra, a near-identical woven head-scarf, for two thousand years; it is described in the Mishnah and was still worn by Yemenite Jews into modern times. Then, after the 7th-century Arab conquest, dhimmi dress codes barred Jews from turbans and head-scarves as “crowns of the Arabs.” Fourteen centuries of Arabs policing what Jews could wear, then a cry of “appropriation” when a Jew wears the scarf of his own ancestors. The charge is exactly backwards.

Origin of the claim

The garment itself has no single owner. The checkered cotton scarf, called a keffiyeh in Arabic, was plain Bedouin desert wear across the Levant, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula for centuries, distinguishing herders from town-dwellers, not Palestinians from anyone else. Its turn into a specifically Palestinian political emblem is datable: during the 1936 Arab Revolt against British rule, revolt leaders ordered urban men to put on the keffiyeh so British patrols could not pick out the rebels hiding among the general population. By the 1960s Yasser Arafat had made the black-and-white pattern his personal trademark, draping it over one shoulder in a fold Palestinian lore says was meant to evoke the map of Palestine, and fedayeen fighters, including hijacker Leila Khaled, wore it into the world’s newsreels. That is a real, 20th-century political history. The “appropriation” charge is a much newer overlay on top of it: a campus and social-media accusation that surfaced over the past decade and sharpened sharply after the October 7, 2023 attacks, when Jewish and Israeli students who wore the scarf, sometimes in solidarity, sometimes because it was already theirs, were told they had no right to it.

The sudra came first

The claim treats the keffiyeh as ethnically Arab from time immemorial and Jewish use of it as theft. The documented record runs the other way. The sudra, a woven cloth wrapped as a turban or draped as a scarf, appears repeatedly in the Mishnah, the codification of Jewish oral law completed around 200 CE in Roman Palestine, where it is discussed as ordinary daily headwear for Jewish men, Torah scholars especially. It did not disappear. Mizrahi and Yemenite Jewish communities, indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Middle East, continued wearing the sudra as both turban and neck-scarf into the 20th century, centuries before the black-and-white keffiyeh became a nationalist symbol at all. A Jew who ties on a checkered head-scarf today is not borrowing a stranger’s costume. He is picking up a thread his own ancestors never fully put down.

Dhimmi law: when Arabs banned the scarf

The historical irony is sharper than a shared garment. Under classical dhimmi law, the legal status imposed on Jews and Christians after the Arab conquests, non-Muslims were routinely required to wear distinguishing marks and barred from clothing associated with Muslim status and rank, including certain turbans and head-scarves reserved to Muslims. The Pact of Umar, the foundational text of these codes, has dhimmi communities agree “not to imitate them in their dress” as one of the conditions of their subjugation, on pain of forfeiting the protection of the pact. Later regional decrees went further, at times explicitly forbidding Jews from turbans and headgear coded as Arab or Muslim prestige items, on the theory that such garments were “crowns of the Arabs” no non-Muslim was entitled to wear. See dhimmi for the fuller legal picture. The community that spent fourteen centuries telling Jews what they could not put on their heads is not well positioned to police a Jew’s scarf today.

Who pushes the charge today

The accusation lives mainly in two venues. On university campuses it travels alongside the broader wave of anti-Israel activism documented in the campus surge, where the keffiyeh is treated as a uniform of the cause and a Jewish student wearing one, especially a Mizrahi or Yemenite Jewish student with a direct family claim to the sudra, is met with suspicion rather than solidarity. On social media it circulates as a “who gets to wear this” callout, usually stripped of any of the history above, treating the keffiyeh as though it sprang into existence in 1960s Beirut with no antecedent. Neither venue engages the Mishnah, the Pact of Umar, or the Yemenite record; the charge depends on nobody checking.

Where the claim has a point, and why it still loses

The black-and-white keffiyeh in its specific Arafat-era fold is a genuine, earned twentieth-century Palestinian political symbol, and most Jews today, Ashkenazi Jews especially, have no personal sudra lineage to point to.

Neither fact rescues the “appropriation” charge as a blanket rule. A Jew draping on that fold to make a nationalist statement he does not hold is a different act than a Mizrahi or Yemenite Jew wearing the scarf his grandmother’s community wore before Arafat was born, and “my ancestors wore this too” is a real answer for that Jew, not a universal pass for anyone. The reply to the myth was never “Jews own the keffiyeh.” It is that the keffiyeh’s underlying garment predates any exclusive Palestinian claim on it by two thousand years, and the people best positioned to say so are the ones who were once forbidden to wear it.