The Watermelon as a Palestinian Symbol: History and Meaning | FALASTIN
The Watermelon as a Palestinian Symbol: History and Meaning
TL;DR
In August 1967, Israeli military authorities issued Military Order No. 101, banning public display of the Palestinian flag in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian artists responded by painting watermelons, whose cross-section displays the flag's four colors exactly: red flesh, white rind, green skin, and black seeds. In 1980, Israeli authorities confiscated a still-life watermelon painting from a West Bank exhibition, formally confirming that the fruit was recognized as a substitute for the flag. Over the following decades, the watermelon moved from a tactical workaround to a permanent marker of Palestinian cultural identity, adopted in diaspora communities and international solidarity movements worldwide. Its agricultural roots in Jericho, one of the oldest watermelon-cultivating regions in the Levant, give the symbol a second layer: the fruit has belonged to Palestinian land and farming practice for centuries.
The watermelon became a Palestinian symbol because of a specific military order. In 1967, following Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli military authorities prohibited the public display of the Palestinian flag in the occupied territories. The ban covered not only the flag itself but any image composed of the flag's four colors: red, white, green, and black. Palestinian artists, prohibited from displaying their national colors directly, began painting watermelons. The fruit's natural coloring, red flesh, white rind, green skin, and black seeds, replicates those 4 colors precisely. The Watermelon Collection carries this history forward in contemporary apparel.
Its path from a tactical workaround to a permanent cultural symbol took place over several decades and involved documented confrontations with Israeli authorities, sustained use by Palestinian artists, and eventual adoption in international solidarity movements. That path begins with the specific legal order that made the flag illegal.
The 1967 Order and the Palestinian Flag
The Palestinian flag has four colors: red on the left triangle, with horizontal bands of black, white, and green across the right portion. The flag was formally adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and had been in use in various forms in Palestinian political life since the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.
Military Order No. 101, issued by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank in August 1967, prohibited political activity deemed threatening to public order, and subsequent enforcement extended to public display of the Palestinian flag. Displaying the flag, or colors associated with it, could result in arrest. The prohibition applied to art, clothing, and public spaces. Palestinian cultural expression was placed under direct legal restriction.
This is the legal context in which the watermelon emerged as a symbol. It was not a spontaneous metaphor. It was a direct response to a specific prohibition, designed to communicate what could not be communicated directly.
Palestinian Artists and the Flag Colors in Fruit
Palestinian artists in the occupied territories began incorporating watermelon imagery into their work in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. The logic was straightforward: the colors of a cut watermelon displayed in a painting or printed image correspond directly to the colors of the Palestinian flag. An image of a watermelon was technically a still life. It was also, to anyone who understood the context, an unambiguous statement of Palestinian identity and political affiliation.
The tactic exploited a gap between what was visually represented and what was legally prohibited. Israeli authorities recognized the tactic quickly. In 1980, Israeli authorities confiscated a still-life watermelon painting from a Palestinian artist's exhibition in the West Bank. The confiscation confirmed what both parties already understood: that the image of a watermelon was being read as a representation of the Palestinian flag, and that Israeli authorities considered it politically significant enough to suppress.
The 1980 incident is documented in reporting from the period and has been cited consistently in academic and journalistic accounts of Palestinian cultural resistance. It represents the moment the watermelon's political function became a matter of formal, recorded confrontation rather than an informal cultural practice.
The Flag Colors: Red, White, Green, Black
The precise correspondence between the watermelon and the Palestinian flag is worth examining directly. The Palestinian flag's colors are: black (top horizontal band), white (middle band), green (bottom band), and red (the triangle on the hoist side). A cross-section of a watermelon shows: green skin (outer rind), white inner rind, red flesh, and black seeds.
The correspondence is not approximate. All 4 colors appear in the correct form in the natural cross-section of the fruit. This is why the watermelon worked as a substitution under the flag ban, and why it continued to be used even as the specific legal prohibition changed over time. The symbol retains its flag-referencing function because the visual correspondence remains unchanged.
From Workaround to Permanent Symbol
By the time of the First Intifada in 1987 to 1993, the watermelon had moved beyond a tactical response to censorship and into established Palestinian cultural vocabulary. It appeared in political posters, in graffiti, in textile art, and in personal expression across Palestinian communities in the occupied territories and in diaspora.
When the Oslo Accords of 1993 permitted Palestinian Authority administration in parts of the occupied territories, the legal prohibition on the Palestinian flag was effectively lifted in those areas. Palestinian flags could be publicly displayed. The watermelon did not disappear. Instead, it persisted as a symbol in its own right, representing not just the flag but the history of censorship, the creative response to that censorship, and the resilience of Palestinian cultural expression under constraint. The symbol had accumulated its own meaning beyond the function it was originally designed to perform. Through the following decades it spread to solidarity movements and artists outside Palestine who recognized its specific history, becoming one of the most widely deployed symbols in international Palestinian solidarity expression.
The Actual Fruit: Jericho and the Jordan Valley
Separate from the symbol's political history, the watermelon has a genuine agricultural history in Palestine. Jericho, located in the Jordan Valley, has one of the longest documented histories of watermelon cultivation in the region. The Jordan Valley's low elevation, heat, and access to water from the Jordan River produces conditions suited to watermelon cultivation, and Palestinian farmers there have grown the crop commercially for centuries. The Jericho watermelon appears in Ottoman-period agricultural records and travel accounts, recognized for its quality in local markets. This gives the symbol a dual significance: the fruit itself belongs to Palestinian land and farming practice, and it was adopted as a political symbol precisely because of its visual properties. Palestinian symbols, whether the olive tree, the Jaffa orange, or the watermelon, consistently draw from the actual agricultural landscape of Palestine.
The Watermelon on Clothing Today
Wearing the watermelon communicates familiarity with its full history. Within Palestinian communities, the symbol requires no explanation. In international contexts, it signals knowledge of a specific history of censorship and creative resistance, and it places the wearer in a tradition of Palestinian cultural expression that dates to the late 1960s. For more on the range of symbols that appear on Palestinian clothing and their origins, see Free Palestine T-Shirts and the symbols they carry and Shirts for Palestine: 5 Designs Rooted in Palestinian History.
The watermelon became a Palestinian symbol through a 1967 military order banning the Palestinian flag, Palestinian artists who painted the flag's 4 colors in fruit form, and a documented 1980 confiscation that confirmed the symbol's political function. Its agricultural history in Jericho adds a second layer: the fruit itself has been part of Palestinian land and farming for centuries. Our mission at FALASTIN is to preserve Palestinian heritage, identity, and culture. The FALASTIN collection carries pieces rooted in the same tradition.