Flag of Palestine

How to read it

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in June 1964, met on 1 December 1964 and fixed the flag’s specifications: twice as long as it is high, three horizontal stripes of equal width, black at the top, white in the middle and green at the bottom, and a red isosceles triangle with its longest side along the staff, writes PalQuest, the encyclopedia of the Institute for Palestine Studies. It became the flag of the State of Palestine declared by the Palestine National Council in Algiers in November 1988, and then the official emblem of the Palestinian Authority, set up in 1994. The flag law, Law No. 22 of 2005 as amended in February 2006, makes the flag half as high as it is long, with the red triangle’s base running the full height of the flag at the staff and its point a third of the way along. By resolution 67/19 of 29 November 2012 the UN General Assembly accorded Palestine the status of a non-member observer state.

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From the Arab Revolt flag

The two Palestinian sources tell the start differently. PalQuest traces the flag to the Arab nationalist movement before the First World War, above all al-Fatat, the Young Arab Society founded in Paris in 1911, which chose black, white and green and explained them in a statement: “the blackness of the night, the whiteness of conscience, and the greenness of certain hope.” The red triangle appeared when Sharif Hussein declared the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz on 10 June 1916. The embassy’s “common version” has the colours chosen by an Arab nationalist literary club in Istanbul in 1909, from al-Hilli’s verse, and Sharif Hussein using the flag by 1917 at the latest.

Leaders of the Palestinian national movement adopted the Arab Revolt flag as the flag of Palestine and changed one thing, the order of the stripes, putting black at the top, white in the middle and green at the bottom, PalQuest writes. The embassy dates that order to the late 1930s at least. Both record the flag being adopted again in 1948: PalQuest by the Palestine National Council in Gaza on 30 September to 1 October, the embassy by the All-Palestine Government on 18 October, after which the Arab League recognised it as the flag of Palestine.

Telling it from Jordan’s flag

Jordan’s flag has the same stripes in the same order and a red triangle at the pole, with a white seven-pointed star in the triangle, and its triangle reaches halfway along the flag, under Jordan’s constitution. Palestine’s has no star and a shorter triangle, reaching a third of the way.

Telling it from Sudan’s and the UAE’s flags

Sudan’s flag has the same four colours in another order: red, white and black stripes, red at the top, and a green triangle at the pole that reaches a third of the flag’s length. The flag of the United Arab Emirates has a vertical red band at the pole, a quarter of the flag’s length, beside green, white and black stripes. Palestine’s has black at the top and a red triangle.

What the flag law says

Law No. 22 of 2005, issued by President Mahmoud Abbas on 22 December 2005, has the flag raised on all PLO and Palestinian Authority buildings, at its representative offices abroad, and on holidays and national occasions, PalQuest summarises. No other flag may fly above it at the same site, and it is lowered to half-mast only by a decree of the Council of Ministers, for a set time and for reasons stated in the decree.

The flag at the United Nations

On 10 September 2015 the UN General Assembly passed resolution 69/320, allowing the flags of non-member observer states to be raised at UN headquarters in New York; 119 countries voted for it, eight against and 45 abstained. President Mahmoud Abbas raised the flag there for the first time on 30 September 2015, and named that day Palestinian Flag Day, PalQuest records.