Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Ido Singer, the child of a Holocaust survivor who writes the newsletter “When I Should Have Died.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In the 56 days after October 7, 2023, keffiyeh sales on Amazon rose 75 percent. Searches for “Palestinian scarf for women” jumped 159 percent. Searches for “keffiyeh palestine” rose 75 percent. Searches for “military scarf shemagh” rose 333 percent.
Louis Vuitton had already sold a $705 version in 2021. The cause had become a product before most of the people wearing it could locate Gaza on a map.
This is how modern performative activism works. The symbol exists. The supply chain exists. Amazon Prime ships in two days. The algorithm rewards visibility. The person wearing the scarf gets social capital at the price of a lunch and no further commitment required, no knowledge necessary, no history required, no skin in any game that has ever cost anyone anything.
The keffiyeh is a genuine cultural artifact with a real and documented history. It originated in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around 3100 BCE. Sumerians and Babylonians used the cloth to protect themselves from the sun and sand. The name “keffiyeh” itself derives from the Iraqi city of Kufa, located on the banks of the Euphrates River.
More recently, it has been worn by Palestinians since the 1936 Arab Revolt against British rule in British Mandate Palestine. It became internationally associated with Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a terrorist in his own right. It is a symbol of Palestinian identity and, for the people for whom it is identity rather than an accessory, it carries real weight and real risk.
That is precisely why its transformation into a $10 Amazon fashion item is not solidarity. It is the consumption of someone else’s suffering as a personality accessory.
There is a behavioral psychology term for what happens when someone posts a hashtag, buys a symbol, or joins an encampment and then considers themselves done.
It is called moral licensing.
Moral licensing is the documented psychological phenomenon in which performing a visible act of conscience reduces the likelihood of further action. Past good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects, leading people to engage in behavior that is less likely to be moral. A deviation from a normal state of being is balanced with a subsequent action that compensates the prior behavior.
In plain language: The person who wore the keffiyeh to the protest has checked the moral box. They are a “good person.” They “stood up.” They showed the world whose “side” they are on. The box is checked and the motivation to do anything further decreases. The cause has been consumed. It served its purpose.
The psychological framework for moral licensing identifies two distinct mechanisms. The first is moral credits: the idea that good deeds accumulate as a positive balance in a moral ledger, which can then be drawn down by subsequent less-virtuous behavior. The second is that the performance of virtue establishes a self-image of being a good person, reducing the need to keep proving it.
The hashtag is the moral credit. The encampment is the withdrawal.
Only 3 percent of active social media users cite online campaigns as a key motivator in their donation decisions. Despite record highs in online advocacy, formal volunteering in the United States fell to a 30-year low of 23 percent by 2021, the same period in which social media activism was reaching its highest recorded levels. Although online activism and commenting is on the rise, it often does not translate into consistent volunteer participation.
The screen is replacing the action. The performance is replacing the commitment. The keffiyeh is replacing the knowledge.
In spring 2024, “pro-Palestinian” encampments spread across more than 130 American university campuses. Over 3,100 protesters were arrested across more than 60 campuses. In May 2024, it was estimated that 8 percent of U.S. college students had participated in the protests, with 45 percent supporting them.
The demands were nearly identical at every campus: divestment, ceasefire, amnesty — pre-packaged, downloadable, templated from Columbia University to Portland State University to Amsterdam to Melbourne. The same chants, the same signs, the same coordinated structure replicated across time zones with the efficiency of a franchise operation.
Then summer came.
The encampments were cleared. The students graduated. The algorithm moved on. Gaza did not change because of a single encampment. The hostages were not freed because of a divestment demand at a university whose endowment has no meaningful exposure to Israeli companies. The cause had been performed. The moral credit had been banked. Life resumed.
Performative activists suppress and silence the voices of those truly impacted by the issues they perform around. They occupy the space without bearing the cost. They generate noise that crowds out signal. They make it harder to distinguish the people whose lives are actually at stake from the people whose Instagram aesthetic briefly required a cause.
The tell is always the same. Ask them about the history. Ask them when Hamas was elected and what percentage of the vote it received. Ask them what the Oslo Accords were. Ask them to name the three official BDS demands. Ask them anything that requires sustained knowledge rather than sustained posting.
The keffiyeh stays on as long as the algorithm rewards it.
Then there is the flotilla.
In June 2025, Greta Thunberg boarded a vessel called the “Madleen” and sailed toward Gaza as part of the “Freedom Flotilla Coalition.” The ship carried 100 kilograms of flour, 250 kilograms of rice, baby formula, diapers, and medical kits.
Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said: “This wasn’t humanitarian aid. It’s Instagram activism. Meanwhile, Israel has delivered over 1,200 truckloads in the last two weeks. So who’s really feeding Gaza and who’s really feeding their own ego? Greta was not bringing aid. She was bringing herself.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry called it the “selfie yacht of celebrities.” Israeli officials said the flotilla carried what amounted to less than a truckload of aid. Thunberg was detained, deported, and flew home to Sweden. She then gave interviews.
This is the pattern in its purest form: a globally famous activist, a camera, a boat carrying less aid than a single delivery truck, and a debrief at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The Global Sumud Flotilla that followed in autumn 2025 comprised over 40 vessels and 500 participants from more than 44 countries, making it the largest civilian-led convoy of its kind in history. It was intercepted too. All of them have been intercepted since 2010. Every single one. The flotilla keeps sailing not because it is delivering aid, but because it is delivering content.
The cause is not the point. The cause is the set.
Here is what makes this something other than a standard political disagreement: The people performing this cause face no cost. They face no consequence. The worst thing that happens to an American college student who sets up an encampment and gets arrested for trespassing is a misdemeanor that gets dropped, a story to tell at dinner parties, and a line in the campus newspaper. The false sense of accomplishment generated through social media advocacy fills the space that real action would otherwise require.
For us Israelis, the cost is not a story we tell at dinner. It is the dinner table missing someone.
I spent twenty years in America building a life here. I know what it feels like to be in a room where the cause is abstract, where the stakes are theoretical, where the suffering belongs to someone on the other side of a screen. I also know what it feels like to watch missile alerts on your phone from 5,000 miles away while your sister is in the country carrying the uneven load. I know what it feels like to have buried people who died in the places that are now hashtags.
There is no symmetry here. There never was. One side is living the thing. The other side is wearing it.
“Anti-Zionism” is not a political position developed through engagement with history, law, or human rights frameworks. If it were, the people holding it would be able to answer basic questions about the subject they claim to care about.
It is something else.
It is the performance of belonging for people who have been taught that belonging to their own civilization is the mark of its worst impulses. It is the borrowed identity of people who have no identity strong enough to carry in public without apology.
Moral licensing research shows that people who perform a virtuous act subsequently behave in ways that are less moral, as though the earlier good deed has earned them a credit that makes later laxity permissible. The virtue was the point. The cause was the vehicle. When the vehicle stops being socially rewarding, it gets traded in for a new one.
That is the definition of a costume.
A $705 Louis Vuitton keffiyeh is more honest about what it is than a $10 Amazon version worn to a campus protest. At least Louis Vuitton is not pretending it is about anything other than fashion.
This is not an argument that every person who expressed solidarity with Palestinian civilians was performing rather than feeling. Some people have genuine relationships with Palestinians, genuine knowledge of the history, genuine grief at civilian casualties on every side of every conflict. Those people exist and they deserve a more honest interlocutor than I am prepared to be about this particular phenomenon. This piece is not about them.
Rather, this piece is about the 75 percent surge in Amazon keffiyeh sales. It is about the encampments where students could not answer basic questions about the demands they were making. It is about the social media posts that generated record engagement while volunteering rates fell to 30-year lows. It is about the cause that burned hottest in the communities with the least historical exposure to what they were performing.
It is about the asymmetry between people for whom this is existential and people for whom it is seasonal.
I wore a Star of David for the first time the day after October 7, 2023. I am still wearing it — not because God told me to, but because my people were under attack and I needed the world around me to know whose side I am on. I wore it because the hiding had cost me something I wanted back. I wore it because Zionism, the actual thing underneath the word the internet spent years turning into a slur, is not a theology. It is a declaration.
It says: We are here, we belong here, we are not disappearing, and we are not ashamed.
The keffiyeh on Amazon ships in two days, costs $10, and is currently moving into storage now that the algorithm has found something new to reward. My Star of David has been on for 19 months and is not coming off.
That is the difference between a fad and a principle; between a cause you wear and an identity you carry; between people who perform belonging and people who have it.
We are not the same.
The keffiyeh is the new swastika. I so love little Jewish girls wearing keffiyehs on campuses and in big city marches. So brave. I often wonder if mommy and daddy approve ( maybe they even have their own , in stylish colors if course). Anyone see the intergenerational foursome with their keffiyehs and cute sunglasses posing outside the Park Slope ( slop) food coop?
Absolutely. They should be ashamed but they're too stupid and egotistical to know it. They'll trip over their hypocrisy yet 🤬