Wherever I go in Israel, I always have a Keffiyeh in my bag. Honestly, I don’t know why it feels like an imperative to me. By saying this I don’t mean I am a wholehearted supporter who stands in solidarity with Palestine unconditionally; instead, I never swear any oaths to any nation but hold an equal aversion to any fixed categories like such. My excuse for doing so might seem pathetic, but I will frankly tell you that it’s because I find it delightful (some may call it “jouissant”).

Like many years ago students playfully shout out that “nous somme tout des juifs allemand” slogan in support of stateless Jews, me wearing the Keffiyeh can be an ahistorical act. It is so ontologically indecent because you probably see that rupture between my assigned identity and what that piece of cloth stands for. Yet it is the point. I cannot find a better way to disidentify myself. The act itself is a form of resistance against identity, by doing so I destabilize the practice of reference (the signifying chain). An Asian face cladded in a Keffiyeh is not something sociologically classifiable.

But my intention here is not to demote the Keffiyeh, together with the Palestinian identity it embodies, to an empty signifier. Akin to the students who associated themselves with “des juifs allemand” decades before, non-Palestinians in their Keffiyeh wish to restore a degraded way of living to its due importance. It is a simple wish to preserve “the right to be different, ” which applies equally to Jews and Palestinians. There will be a moment when the Keffiyeh ceases to function as an icon of identity but turns into a trope of “trans-identity, ” if not “non-identity, ” and I hold this to be entertaining and rewarding.