By Passant Hisham

Nowadays, if you post any Instagram stories that support Palestine, you must have noticed the dramatic decrease in these stories’ views, or even the total prohibition of posting some related content. This is due to Meta’s most recent update that enforced new guidelines limiting your account from posting, sharing, commenting or liking any content about Palestine. But how is this related to watermelons?

These kinds of laws come as no surprise, as the history of such guidelines goes back to 1967, specifically after the Arab-Zionist war. It was at that point of time exactly when the watermelon ceased to be just a regular fruit for Palestinians, but became an icon of resistance that was used as an indirect way to express their silenced voices against all the odds.

That’s when the Zionist government issued a similar yet more brutal law that prohibited all public displays of the Palestinian flag and its colors, which resulted in arresting anyone who gets involved in this act. So protestors decided to raise slices of watermelons high in the sky, as they share the same colors of the Palestinian flag: Red, black, white and green.

Back then, even artists were banned from creating political art about the Zionist entity, so they too decided to symbolize their protests by painting watermelons as a sign of freedom of expression and democracy. The watermelon icon was not only used in paintings, but was also printed on clothes, bags, books and even on walls, until it became one of the official acts of supporting Palestinians worldwide.

After the advent of social media, specifically in 2021, the use of the watermelon has taken a modern approach, as Palestinian citizens and supporters started posting online images, emojis and artworks of watermelons in the hope of bypassing online censorship and content moderation that would result in deleting their posts that purely included the flag of Palestine.

In an interview with Vice magazine, Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, shared her childhood experience with the controversy surrounding the Palestinian flag and its colors through one of her visits to Gaza. Just like every child who has a sense of belonging to their origins, she found herself innocently engrossed in drawing the picture of the flag on a piece of paper, only to find her relative forcing her to throw the drawing in the trash out of fear of the young girl getting caught by the Zionists.

Commenting on the ban on the flag, Haddad said: “It was devaluing you as a people and your history, but also your identity and erasing that identity completely. That’s what it was attempting to do.” If anything for sure, this short anecdote just confirms the fact that Palestinians have long suffered from being silenced and prevented even from basic means of expressing their identity. And it’s obvious how this tough experience has taken many forms, from arbitrary arrests to social media censorship.

Now, every time Palestinians eat a slice of watermelon, they are hit by the bitter memories of numerous arrests, confiscation of artworks, taking down of flags, and oppression of innocent people. All of which makes it more like a reaffirmation, that this piece of fruit will always represent the existence and unwavering resistance of Palestine.