“Your kippah is against the law.” The sentence was spoken this week in a café in Modiin. Alex Sinclair, a lecturer who had worn the same kippah for twenty years, was working on his laptop when a stranger approached him, angry, and delivered this line. The stranger called the police. Within the hour, Sinclair had been detained, searched, locked in a cell, and released without it. The kippah was returned to him later, with part of it cut away.

The kippah was embroidered with two flags, Israeli and Palestinian. When it returned to his hand, the Palestinian flag was gone. The Israeli flag, beside it, was left in place.

There is, of course, no such law. Displaying the Palestinian flag in Israel is not a criminal offense. The prohibitions that exist concern incitement or support for terrorist organizations, and they depend on context. None were invoked. What took place was the use of legal language in the absence of legal ground, authority wearing the costume of law.

And before any of this – before the question of law, before the question of the flag – a man was sitting in a café, working. He was doing nothing at all. What was taken from him first was the ordinary freedom to occupy a public space without being interrupted by the state.

But the legal question is not what this incident most reveals. What matters is what the kippah held, and why that particular combination could no longer be worn.

Sinclair is a religious, observant, Zionist Jew. He has articulated his position explicitly: that Jewish self-determination and Palestinian self-determination are not mutually exclusive, that recognizing the full humanity and legitimate connection of Palestinians to this land does not make him less Jewish, less religious, or less Zionist. The kippah, embroidered with both flags, was the physical form of that position. He wore it, in public, on his head, for twenty years.

This combination has become unusual in Israeli public life. Not because it is contradictory. It is not. There are organizations, movements, and individuals in Israel who hold religious observance and humanism toward Palestinians together, and they have done so for decades. But in the dominant public imagination, the two have been sorted into separate camps. Religious observance is treated as affiliation with one political side. Humanism toward Palestinians is treated as affiliation with another. A person who wears his kippah and his humanism on the same head, in the same public space, breaks the sorting.

That is what the stranger in the café encountered. Not a dangerous opinion, not a provocation, not an incitement. A position that did not fit the categories he had available. His response, and the response of the officers he summoned, was to dismantle the position until it did fit. An Israeli flag alone belongs on the head of a religious Jew. A Palestinian flag does not. The combination was illegible, and so it had to be corrected.

The cutting was selective for this reason. It was not punishment or destruction. It was extraction. The kippah was returned to its wearer with the foreign element removed, as if cleansed. The irony is impossible to ignore: in setting out to remove a symbol they believed offensive, the officers destroyed a religious object, damaged an article of clothing, and vandalized the private property of the citizen in front of them. Three real harms in the service of undoing one imagined one. The state whose police force is meant to protect religious objects, personal possessions, and the dignity of its citizens took scissors to all three at once, and called the act enforcement.

What made the incident possible is not only a single confused detention. It is a public sphere that has grown so contracted, especially since October 7, that positions refusing to align with one camp are no longer read as positions at all. For a significant part of the public, the public sphere itself is now treated as if it ought to be mobilized, as if speech and symbols and ordinary acknowledgments should align with a single national mood. Others push back, protest, and insist on complexity. But the expectation of alignment is widespread enough that a kippah with two flags on it, in a café, can bring the police.

The deeper problem is not about a particular political solution or a party platform. It is something more basic: the simple acknowledgment that the other side is made of human beings. When even that recognition reads as betrayal, when a kippah that holds it must be cut apart to be worn, what has been lost is not a debate. It is a foundation.

This does not demand agreement. It demands something smaller and harder: the willingness to let a position one rejects remain intact. Not to reach for the scissors, actual or rhetorical. To read Sinclair’s kippah as a legitimate statement, without necessarily agreeing with it, is itself already a restoration. Without that, no complexity is possible. With it, the rest becomes thinkable again.

What was cut from Alex Sinclair’s kippah was not a flag. It was the possibility of holding both.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)