"Flag" examines the Israeli flag as an instrument of settler-colonial power that inscribes ownership and exclusion onto space, and proposes a temporal, practice-based alternative; grounded in time, naming, and silence, for a shared homeland beyond the territorial logic of flags.
There is a word I have circled for years without the courage to take apart: flag. It is everywhere – stitched into fabric, raised on poles, painted on walls, planted on rooftops, carried through streets with a fervour that feels, to me, less like celebration than inscription. I grew up in a landscape saturated with flags. In Yaffa, where I spent much of my childhood, the flag was not a backdrop. It was a statement addressed to us, to Palestinian families, to Arab residents, to those whose presence the flag was implicitly contesting. Long before I had the vocabulary of Foucault or Said, I understood that this symbol was doing something to space: claiming it, marking it, drawing a line around who belonged and who did not. This paper treats the flag not as a given but as a lexical and political problem. What does this word currently mean and do? What power does it carry? And, more speculatively, what might it mean if released from the frameworks of separation, ownership, and national supremacy that currently define it? These are personal questions as much as theoretical ones, and I think that is exactly why they belong here.