In a Letter to the Editor last week, Ramsey Alsheikh ’26 questioned the manner by which Jewish campus organizations chose to commemorate Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s official memorial day honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. I understand and agree with his skepticism. I do not know that it is necessary or even appropriate to commemorate another nation’s memorial day in such a manner. The flags stuck into the Dartmouth Hall lawn felt far more prominent than most American Memorial Day commemorations that I have seen. My issue with Alsheikh’s piece is not his weariness of the flags, but the decontextualization of a quote from Yehuda Amichai that comes at the end of the article and serves as the piece’s title, a distortion that ignores the nuance of flag misuse by both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Alsheikh wrote that he was “reminded of two lines from a poem by Yehuda Amichai: ‘They have put up many flags / To make us think that they’re happy.’” These two lines do appear as the second and third lines in the final stanza of an Amichai poem titled “Jerusalem.” But there is also a first line to the stanza. And in the fourth. In its entirety, the stanza reads: “We have put up many flags, / They have put up many flags. / To make us think that they’re happy. / To make them think that we’re happy.” Amichai’s entire thesis is the we/they juxtaposition here: Both sides are putting up a front and hiding their pain behind flags. To selectively exclude the surrounding lines and portray the poem simply from the “they” point of view is both journalistically dishonest and contrary to the core sentiment of the poem. To be clear, the decision to cut the surrounding lines of the final stanza was made for word count reasons by editors at The Dartmouth, and that blame should not be cast on Alsheikh. But it remains a questionable choice by Alsheikh to tease out those two lines for a punchy title.
The first stanza of “Jerusalem” includes the lines “Laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight / The white sheet of a woman who is my enemy, / The towel of a man who is my enemy.” The middle stanza of the poem reads, “In the sky of the Old City / A kite / At the other end of the string, / A child I can’t see / Because of the wall.” The entire poem is about the tragedy of Jerusalem, a city built out of cousins and kinship, divided by war and enmity, but full of people who simply want to go home and do their laundry side-by-side.
Both Israelis and Palestinians corrupt the usage of their flags. I remain confused as to why there were Palestinian flags stuck to an igloo on the Green to protest Laura Ingraham ’85’s campus visit in February. I am even more confused as to why the associated protest in Moore Hall was partially led by the Palestine Solidarity Coalition and displayed many Palestinian flags.
I am weary of such heavy usage of the Palestinian flag because I am intensely conscious of the danger that desensitization to suffering poses. I believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza since 2023 can only be called a genocide. I also believe that it is heinous when politicians default to citing “the genocide in Gaza,” without any additional discussion or call to action. They use the phrase as a time filler to signal their progressivism without doing real work. Eventually the words lose meaning, and they become buzz phrases. The same thing happens with the over-usage of flags. Invoking Palestine in response to Ingraham’s visit was both nonsensical and irresponsible. A protest directly addressing the Israeli genocide of Gaza would have been far more productive and posed fewer of the dangers that I discussed.
I despise the over-usage of the Israeli flag. I hate it when it is used for Jewish events that have nothing to do with Israel or co-opted as a symbol of the Jewish faith itself. I am Jewish, and my Judaism is entirely independent of Israel; I have never been there, and I have no family there. I feel no more connection to Israel than I do to almost any other country. By invoking Israel or using the Israeli flag to represent Judaism as a whole, non-Zionist Jews such as myself are erased and made to feel distanced from the rest of the community. The overuse of flags has real, tangible effects.
A quote that I have been thinking about a lot lately comes from the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / There is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, maybe we can all fly kites together, maybe I can wash the clothes and you can wring them out. Maybe we can all lay down our flags and we’ll see that none of us are as happy as we appear. There is a Green. I’ll meet you there.
Becca Davis is a Jewish student who does not identify as a Zionist. She supports a peaceful future for both Palestine and Israel. Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
