Flag People

In September of 2001, our house was the one without an American flag.

I don’t think it was a conscious choice on the part of my parents. They simply weren’t flag people. And so, as the rest of the neighborhood filled up with displays of red, white, and blue, our house conspicuously resisted the new patriotic zeitgeist.

As an adolescent, being conspicuous was among my worst fears, and so I prevailed upon my parents to rectify the situation. They looked at one another and shrugged. Within a few hours, a massive American flag was hanging from the front of our house.

I remember all of this quite vividly. What I don’t remember, however, is when we took it down, or if we took it down early or late relative to our neighbors. All I know is that one day, the flags were all gone.

Years later, I would remember this incident with embarrassment. I had grown into someone for whom the American flag evoked a vague uneasiness, a sense that I had stumbled into enemy territory. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but the flag is partisan.

When I made aliyah and moved to Tel Aviv after college, I found that I had no more interest in being a flag person in Israel than I did in the United States.

I saw the Israeli flag people on Independence Day, drunken and rowdy, swinging inflatable Israeli flag hammers as they bustled and shoved their way down Rothschild Boulevard.

I saw them also when I attended anti-occupation protests, standing across the street, waving their flags at us and shouting that we were traitors.

On Jerusalem Day, I read how they arrogantly paraded through Arab neighborhoods, chanting violent and racist mantras.

I saw no reason why these people should have a monopoly on this symbol. Israel didn’t belong to them and my sense of alienation from them was suffused with resentment about this fact. I was not a flag person, but I loved Israel all the same, and I wondered what it would be like to have such a simple and tangible way to express that fact.

Now I know. At the pro-Democracy protests in Israel today, we—the protestors—have become the flag people. It is us who hold the blue and white banner aloft and wave it back and forth.

There are those who interpret this embrace of the flag as insincere. In Haaretz, writer Noa Osterreicher claims that the flags are a desperate attempt to curry favor with the right—a trojan horse meant to “blue & whitewash” the fact that we are “smolanim,” leftists, a word with the valence of a slur in Israeli political discourse.

Perhaps that’s the case for some people. For others though, I suspect that something else is at play. Quite simply, it is joyful to wave a flag—joyful also to feel love, and not shame, about one’s country. And so the protestors wave flags, reveling in their talismanic power, and savoring for the first time, without irony or guilt, these particular joys.

What will come of this? Will this, as some people hope, help unite Israelis under a single symbol? Or will the right make a play to reclaim the flag? Perhaps also they will surrender it to us, Israel’s new flag people, and it will remain as partisan as ever.

At the last protest, as I looked out at the sea of flags, I was reminded of the Israelite camp described in the book of Numbers—a people arranged in the wilderness under their respective tribal standards, referred to in that chapter not with the typical modern Hebrew word for flag, “degel,” but rather with a less common word, “nes.”

In modern Hebrew, the word “nes” is more often used to mean “miracle.” The two meanings of the word are etymologically connected, derived from a root which means to lift up as a sign for others to see.

There is a bluntness shared by both flags and miracles—a lack of subtlety in the circus tent aesthetic of the stars and stripes; and an ugliness in the indiscriminate violence of the plague of the first born.

There is also a divisiveness inherent in both flags and miracles. A flag, by its nature, represents an “us” in relation to a “them.” A miracle, too, is not for everyone, a fact made clear by a famous midrash about the crossing of the red sea. The parting of the sea was no doubt a miracle for the Israelites, but as they celebrated their freedom, God mourned in heaven for the destruction of the Egyptians, who were also His creations.

Still, there is something moving about the sight of flags lifted up against the night sky in Tel Aviv. In these moments of protest—as at the crossing of the red sea—there is a sense that history has meaning and that something powerful is being wrought in our midst.

I won’t attempt to say what that something is. After all, the most concerning thing about flag people is their certainty that the flag means one thing only, and that they know what it is.

If there is a danger inherent in my political camp’s sudden adoption of the Israeli flag, it is that we will come to believe this too.

In truth, a flag is like a dragnet. Waving in the air, it catches our sundry dreams and fears. Like a miracle, it is a far more ambiguous sign than we’d like to admit. If there is anything beautiful about these garish banners, it is this.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.