Graduation season used to be a celebration of scholarship. Today, it’s a costume party for radical chic. A cursory glance at footage from any major university’s Class of 2025 ceremonies, shows a jarring commonality: the keffiyeh. Not one or two students wearing it in the crowd, but masses of graduates – sometimes entire departments – donning the iconic black-and-white scarf once worn by Yasser Arafat and now standard-issue for Hamas fighters. Faculty joined in too. And at several schools, even commencement speakers wore it ostentatiously, using the occasion not to inspire, but to indict.
The keffiyeh is no longer a cultural artifact. On today’s campuses, it’s become the ultimate symbol of “resistance” specifically against Israel, Zionism, and, implicitly, Jews. Its history makes that clear. The black-and-white keffiyeh, popularized by Yasser Arafat, was adopted by Palestinian nationalists during the 1936 Arab Revolt to conceal identities during attacks, cementing itself as a symbol of violence. From the 1970s through the early 2000s, it was worn by Palestinian terrorists during airplane hijackings, shootings, and suicide bombings that targeted civilians. Today, Hamas militants wear it with their green headbands and rifles slung over their shoulders. It was draped around the shoulders of the terrorists who butchered peaceful civilians in southern Israel on October 7.
The keffiyeh’s rise in American academic culture is not an innocent embrace of Middle Eastern fashion. It is the normalization of a uniform tied to terror.
Consider what happened at Harvard. During the 2024 commencement, more than 1,000 students walked out in protest, many wearing keffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags, and chanting slogans like “For the martyrs” and “For Gaza.”
At Columbia’s satellite commencement ceremonies, the scarf was near-ubiquitous among protesters who lit their diplomas on fire before being arrested. At the City University of New York, students wore it while shouting anti-Israel chants and holding up signs calling for a “global intifada.”
That the keffiyeh has become the graduation garment of choice for progressive students says everything about what higher education has become. Campuses have devolved from places of inquiry into hotbeds of identity performance and radical activism. The students draped in the keffiyeh see themselves as rebels against the fictitious forms of oppression they have learned about for four years or more. The scarf serves as their privileged badge of virtue for an undefined cause with shallow scholarly backing.
The collapse of the university into activism is no accident but the result of deliberate policy. Mandatory diversity statements, politicized syllabi, sprawling DEI bureaucracies, and an ideological monoculture that punishes dissent have transformed campuses into factories of dogma. Students aren’t being educated; they’re being trained to see the world through a rigid moral binary, where history is flattened, nuance is erased, and Hamas scarves are recast as symbols of justice. As Professor Walter Johnson, professor of African & African American Studies and a leader of Harvard’s “People’s Graduation,” admitted bluntly: “Very simply put, our university has punished you for believing in the things that we have taught you.”
The tragedy is that none of this is hidden. Hamas’s genocidal aims are public. The meaning of the keffiyeh in that context is not obscure. But campuses have become places where symbolic literacy is reversed: anything that challenges Western power is celebrated; anything that affirms it is suspect. In this upside-down moral order, the scarf of a death cult becomes a graduation statement.
There is something almost poetic about this. After all, what better emblem is there for the modern university than a symbol of barbarism worn in the name of justice?
Highly articulate article. Did not know much of what Josh Appel writes about.