In an incident that has ignited fierce debate over civil liberties and state overreach in Israel, a Jewish academic was detained by Israeli police last week for wearing a traditional kippah embroidered with both the Israeli and Palestinian flags, with officers ultimately cutting out the Palestinian emblem before releasing him, local media has confirmed. The confrontation unfolded on Monday in Modi’in, a centrally located Israeli city, according to an account shared publicly by the detainee, Alex Sinclair, a lecturer at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
Sinclair detailed the encounter in a public Facebook post, noting that he was quietly working from a local neighborhood cafe when an agitated ultra-Orthodox man approached him, yelling that his head covering violated Israeli law. Sinclair explained that he had worn the dual-flag kippah for nearly 20 years as a deliberate expression of his beliefs, and tried to de-escalate the situation by inviting the man to discuss the issue. The man refused to engage, however, and threatened to call law enforcement to the scene.
To Sinclair’s shock, officers arrived at the cafe just five minutes later. The two responding officers immediately informed him that the kippah was illegal and that they intended to seize it, he recalled. The pair frisked Sinclair before transporting him to a local police station, where he was held in a holding cell for approximately 20 minutes. When he was taken into custody, Sinclair said, he was told he could leave without his kippah, and when he demanded the return of his personal property, an officer handed it back with the Palestinian flag portion cut cleanly out of the fabric.
“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” Sinclair wrote, alongside public before-and-after photos of the damaged kippah. The lecturer said the encounter left him “shaken, angry and depressed,” warning that the incident is a clear symptom of a broader erosion of basic civil rights across the country under the current Israeli administration. “It’s hard not to say that this is the kind of thing that fascist regimes do,” he said. “It’s hard not to feel worried and anxious and frankly devastated that this is the direction that Israel is moving in.”
The incident comes amid a years-long tightening of restrictions on public displays of the Palestinian flag pushed forward by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which took office in late 2022. The campaign to restrict the flag is spearheaded by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who issued a formal order to Israeli police in January 2023 mandating that all Palestinian flags be removed from public spaces across the country.
Just last month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that police had arrested an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent for displaying the Palestinian flag inside of her own private home. Her family later told reporters that officers forced her to step on the Palestinian flag and hold an Israeli flag for photographs.
For Sinclair, the attack on his kippah demonstrates that Ben Gvir’s crackdown has escalated far beyond public policy, now encroaching on individual religious identity. “Ben Gvir’s unlawful crackdown has escalated to the point where the Palestinian flag was being banned from my head — my kippah, my religious identity itself,” he said.
Israeli police confirmed that a complaint over the incident has been filed with the Police Internal Investigations Department, but declined to provide any additional comment on the encounter when contacted by reporters.
Opposition political figures and civil rights organizations have uniformly condemned the incident, with some calling for a full criminal investigation into the officers’ conduct. Gilad Kariv, a Knesset member from the opposition Israeli Democrats party, highlighted the hypocrisy of the incident in a post on X. “If police officers were to cut off a Jewish man’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would be an outrage here,” Kariv wrote. He added that the encounter “points to a profound institutional failure within the Israeli police,” arguing that some officers have “completely lost their professional ethos, their commitment to serving the public, and their loyalty to the law.” Kariv called for the officers involved to face a criminal probe and civil legal action over their actions.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of the country’s leading independent human rights groups, joined the call for a full investigation. “Once again, the Israel Police is acting in line with the minister’s agenda and contrary to the law,” the organization said in a formal statement referencing Ben Gvir. “This is sheer madness and absurdity, and a serious violation of autonomy, freedom of expression, liberty, freedom of religion, and dignity. There is no legal ban on displaying the Palestinian flag or its various forms in the public sphere.”