Keeping his head: Educator detained for dual Israeli-Palestinian flag kippa dons replacement |
When Alex Sinclair walked into a well-known kippa store in downtown Jerusalem earlier this month to order a new custom-made kippa, he did not know which way the winds would blow.
He’d vowed to get a new kippa identical to the one that was destroyed by the police in a headline-splashing incident in April. Now, some 20 years after he got the first one — and several years after he bought its first replacement after the first was blown away — he wasn’t sure, in the current political climate, what the store owner’s reaction would be.
The 53-year-old writer and educator, who moved to Israel from the UK in 1998, had unwittingly found himself in the spotlight after two Israeli police officers detained him for wearing a unique kippa featuring a Palestinian flag side by side with an Israeli one. The officers released him a few hours later and returned the kippa to him, but only after cutting the Palestinian flag out.
Under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, the authorities have undertaken a broad crackdown on Palestinian symbols, with police instructed to remove flags, even though they are legal.
After the incident, Sinclair received what he describes as an unexpected and incredible amount of solidarity, even from many who told him they did not like his choice of kippa. He was determined to return to the same shop and find a replacement.
“I went in, and I said to the guy, ‘Hi, do you remember me?’ And he looked at me, and he was like, ‘Not really,’” Sinclair told The Times of Israel over the phone. “I said to him, I once bought from you a kippa with the flag of Israel and Palestine on it. At that point, he remembered.”
Sinclair asked the store owner if he would make another one for him.
“He said ‘Sure,’ and he was very nonchalant, so I asked him if he had heard what had happened to me. He had not,” Sinclair recounted.........