Amos Brison
+972 Magazine / May 1, 2026
A mutilated kippah and a confiscated Hungarian flag betray the deep sense of insecurity underlying Israel’s delusions of military grandeur.
The mere sight of a Palestinian flag has long troubled the powers that be in Israel. But over the past week, two seemingly minor episodes revealed how the authorities’ growing anxiety toward even the faintest expression of Palestinian national identity has moved beyond the realm of straight-forward repression and into that of the absurd.
The first took place in the city of Modi’in, where police officers detained 53-year-old British-Israeli Alex Sinclair, a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for wearing a kippah embroidered with both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag. After being locked in a cell, Sinclair was given back the kippah — with the Palestinian flag crudely cut out.
In the second incident, which took place at an anti-government protest in northern Israel, police officers confiscated a Hungarian flag carried by an Israeli demonstrator — an allusion to the recent ousting of the country’s far-right prime minister and the hope for a similar change at home — on the grounds that it resembled a Palestinian flag and could therefore cause a “provocation.” When the protester pointed out that it was not a Palestinian flag at all (even though, it should be noted, waving one is not illegal in Israel), an officer replied: “You may understand that, but others won’t.”
On their face, these incidents could be dismissed as isolated overreactions by individual police officers. Yet when placed in a broader context, they are symptomatic of a political psychosis that has gripped Israeli authorities — and Israeli society at large — over the last few years.
Since the shock of the October 7 attacks, Israeli society has been grappling with a profound sense of vulnerability. Beyond the intelligence and military failures on that day, the attacks shattered the deeply ingrained Israeli illusion that Palestinian resistance could be indefinitely contained and effectively ignored.
Other illusions have eroded since. Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip have sought to physically eliminate Palestinian presence in the territory. That project has failed. Despite Israel killing tens of thousands and reducing much of Gaza to rubble, Palestinian existence there remains an indisputable fact. So, too, does the existence of Hamas, despite Israel’s repeated insistence that the group’s destruction is only a matter of time.
Israel’s wars with Iran and its allies — both the “12-Day War” of last June and the more recent one that has now settled into a tenuous “ceasefire” — have also failed to deliver the decisive outcome long promised by Israel’s leaders. On the contrary, these wars have exposed the limits of Israeli force and the resilience of its regional adversaries. For many Israelis, as recent polls suggest, the result is a creeping sense that the state’s military dominance is less assured than it once seemed.
In such an atmosphere, symbols take on heightened significance. The Palestinian flag, nothing more than a marker of national aspiration, becomes a reminder that no amount of military force — not even genocidal violence — will make the Palestinians disappear, or offer Israelis an escape from the bloody conflict that has defined their political life for decades. For now, it is easier to try and suppress the symbol than to confront what it represents.
Indeed, the more aggressively Israeli authorities attempt to erase or criminalize Palestinian symbols, the more they reveal their own insecurity. A state confident in its legitimacy does not need to police colours on a piece of cloth, nor does it perceive existential danger in a cafe-goer’s headwear. Such a disproportionate response reflects fragility rather than strength.
In this sense, the incidents in Modi’in and at the protest reflect the profound unease of a society struggling to reconcile its self-image as a secure, democratic, and dominant regional power, with a reality increasingly at odds with that narrative. Rather than addressing the underlying causes of that tension, authorities target the symbols that serve as a visual reminder of it.
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as those living in the West Bank and Gaza, none of this will come as a surprise. Israel has policed their identity for decades, whether through restrictions on speech, assembly, or symbolic expression. What may be new is the extent to which this now spills over into areas that were previously less affected: a university professor sitting quietly in a suburban cafe, or a Jewish-Israeli citizen holding a flag with no connection to this piece of land.
The first incident contains an additional layer of irony. The kippah is among the most recognizable symbols of Jewish religious identity. That agents of a state that endlessly claims to act in the name of the Jewish people would confiscate and mutilate such an item is deeply revealing; it suggests the imperative to erase Palestinian presence has come to override even the state’s professed commitment to protecting Jewish life and culture.
The spectacle of police disfiguring a Jewish religious item or confiscating a Hungarian flag merely for resembling a Palestinian one should prompt a moment of reflection — less about the danger these symbols actually pose, and more about what it means when a society begins to see them everywhere, and cannot bear their presence anywhere.
Amos Brison is an editor at +972 Magazine, based in Berlin
