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Like everything that is “Palestinian,” the keffiyeh comes from somewhere else. Its name is derived from an Italian word, cuffia, or headdress. It originated among the Bedouins as a protection from the sun, and not just Palestinians, or Arabs in general, wear it; Kurds and Yazidis sometimes sport it as a non-political statement. Nevertheless, the close identification of this headdress with the Palestinian jihad against Israel has made it unmistakable: the keffiyeh is today what the broken cross of National Socialism was in the 1930s and 1940s. It is a symbol of an irrational and violent hatred of Jews, and a determination to destroy them.

On Saturday morning, yet another incident made this clear. A man went to the Beth Yaacov synagogue in the seaside French resort of La Grande-Motte, where he set two vehicles on fire. The fire spread to the doors of the synagogue and injured a police officer. A French intelligence official stated: “The suspect is Arab with a Palestinian flag tied around his waist and a handgun on his belt.”

Surveillance video, however, showed that he was also wearing a keffiyeh, and that was no surprise at all. Wearing the keffiyeh is an indication today that one stands for the principle that is so succinctly and clearly enunciated in the ubiquitous battle cry “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As all of Israel lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, this is a call for the total destruction of the Jewish state and a new genocide of the Jews.

The association of the keffiyeh with this genocidal cause began about ninety years ago. Initially, some Jews who moved to British Mandatory Palestine donned the keffiyeh, as they saw doing so as part of trying to fit in with their neighbors. However, during the 1936-9 Arab Revolt against British rule, Arab commanders ordered Arab men to wear the keffiyeh as a symbol of their “resistance.”

In a report to the British Foreign Office, Harold MacMichael, the British Mandatory High Commissioner in Palestine, wrote: “This ‘order’ has been obeyed with surprising docility and it is not an exaggeration to say that in a month eight out of every ten tarbushes in the country had been replaced.” Keffiyeh-wearing jihadis murdered around 500 Jews, and the Jews of the region, as they were the targets of those who were wearing the keffiyeh, stopped wearing it themselves.

No one at the time of that uprising called the Arabs “Palestinians.” The Palestinian people, as a distinct ethnicity and nationality, was invented by the KGB and Yasir Arafat in 1964. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had served as acting chief of Cold War–era Communist Romania’s spy service, “the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”

Arafat and his fellow jihadis worked to popularize the propaganda fiction that the “Palestinians” were a people who were distinct from the other Arabs of the region, the keffiyeh became the national symbol of the spurious new people. Arafat cemented the link by making a black-and-white keffiyeh with a fishnet pattern his personal trademark. Wearing the keffiyeh became a symbol of one’s “solidarity” with the struggle of this new and yet supposedly indigenous people, and so it has remained to this day.

The association of the keffiyeh with the Palestinian Arab jihad has become so universally accepted that it is now commonplace to see leftists who are not “Palestinians” or Arabs wearing it to demonstrate their loyalty to the left’s cause du jour. Arabs and Kurds who wear it today will likewise be assumed, especially in the West, to be expressing their support for the jihad against Israel, even if that thought never crossed their mind.

The Palestinians as a people were invented in order to be used as a weapon against Israel. Instead of fighting to destroy the world’s only Jewish state in order to establish a twenty-third Arab state, the Palestinians were a people even smaller in numbers than the Jewish people, fighting for their indigenous homeland. Instead of being given refuge and starting new lives in the neighboring Arab lands, the Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 remain perpetual refugees. So do their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, longing for a fictional homeland that none of them have ever seen. Aside from the jihad against Israel, this new people has no existence.

It is fitting that the symbol of this fake nationality would be a headdress that has been appropriated from elsewhere, and which Palestinian Arabs themselves did not wear for the most part until less than a hundred years ago. Nonetheless, the association is now unbreakable. The person who puts on a keffiyeh now is endorsing Jew-hatred, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The keffiyeh is this century’s Nazi symbol.