Zakia And The Watermelon
2018, Gaza
Thousands gather, pressing against the border fence in what was called The Great March of Return. Across from them stand Israeli soldiers, framed by the alien architecture of metal and concrete. Rifles raised, they fire directly into the crowd — men, women, and children struck down beneath the colors of red, black, white, and green stretched across wood. A simple piece of fabric becomes a target.
Soldiers with rifles; marchers with flags. One fires bullets, the other eclipses erasure, waving above the heads of empire. The Palestinian flag is lethal not for what it can do, but for what it declares: presence, permanence, and the insignificance of the occupier’s power in the face of a people’s pride.
Beyond Palestine, however, another image has taken hold among those estranged from the land. A watermelon split open, its red flesh and green rind echoing the banned flag. On tote bags, murals, and emojis it circulates freely as shorthand for solidarity. Yet unlike the flag at the fence, the watermelon never endangers its carrier. Its safety is precisely its condition of possibility. It punctures nothing; it risks nothing. It thrives because it can be consumed, replicated, displayed without consequence.
How did fruit replace flag? How did a symbol born as a workaround for prohibition come to eclipse the prohibited itself? The answer lies not in the curated aesthetics of gallery walls, carefully written statements of public events events, but in a different watermelon, one carried not on protest placards or Instagram feeds, but through the colonial machinery of domination in Haifa in the early 1970s.
1972, Haifa
A Palestinian woman moves through the machinery of occupation. Her presence appears unremarkable: in one arm she steadies her infant son, in the other she carries a basket of fruit. A mother, slow, vulnerable. Her name was Zakia Shamut, known as “Umm Mas’oud,” and in her basket lay a hollowed watermelon. Poor in nutrition but heavy in substance, its flesh had been replaced with twenty kilograms of explosives.
The watermelon she carried that day was placed in the occupied city of Haifa, detonating in a Bulgarian circus and killing fifteen Israelis, wounding dozens more.
In that moment, the colonial logic of domination was undone. A mother and her fruit basket brought the very infrastructure of regulation — a system built to distinguish danger from safety — into collapse. Not by force alone, but by confronting the patriarchal gaze of empire and exploiting how it sees, and refuses to see, Palestinian women.
Scrutinised under the logic of colonial power and its paranoid obsession with control, the Palestinian body is regulated, contained, and systematically stripped of dignity.
Within this machinery, the Palestinian mother unfolds a paradox: in the immediate encounter she is presumed harmless, her maternal role overriding suspicion of threat, encumbered by life, safely noncombatant.
Yet beyond the present lurks the colonial paranoia of demographic calculus: her fertility provoking existential alarm, her womb a slow-moving peril haunting settler projections of permanence.
By recognising that the survival of the settler regime depends on its ability to render Palestinian bodies transparent, Umm Mas’oud collapsed this contradiction. Her operational brilliance lay not only in disguise, but in how her body repurposed decades of trauma under colonial regulation — shedding its imposed victimhood at the threshold of empire and converting routine humiliation into cover.
Her tactical use of the maternal body as both shield and weapon converged in the watermelon, subverting this machinery of surveillance and creating an opacity empire could not penetrate.
Zakia’s watermelon was never safe. It was never meant for spectacle, never meant for circulation. It disappeared into its objective, unrepeatable once recognised. Its strength lay in its danger and in its ephemerality — keeping resistance alive by refusing to become method, symbol, or heritage.
This is what separates it from the watermelon that circulates today. While framed as resistance, today’s watermelon never endangers its carrier. Its concern is survival within empire’s optics, not rupture of its structures.
To resist erasure is not to invent new ways of existing safely within empire’s prohibitions. It is to confront the machinery that enforces erasure — its bans, its surveillance, its carceral architectures. When the Palestinian flag itself is targeted, when it draws bullets in Gaza and arrests in Jerusalem, replacing it with another symbol does not preserve resistance; it concedes to domination.
The substitution of the flag with the watermelon is thus not a gesture of ingenuity but of obedience. It is a form of self-censorship that internalises the occupier’s red lines, accepting erasure by working around it. This is not resistance outside of empire, but resistance reorganised inside its limits — a reproduction of colonial hegemony under the guise of survival. Each time the flag is displaced by fruit, the violence that banned the flag in the first place is reaffirmed. The symbol becomes complicit in its own suppression.
Here lies the difference: the bourgeois order tolerates, even embraces, symbols that leave its machinery intact. This is why the watermelon is permitted to become a flag, while the gun or the explosive never do. Emptied of danger, it is paraded as emoji solidarity, worn on tote bags, curated for museum walls. A harmless emblem of identity, palatable for liberal frameworks that refuse the story of Zakia, that a Palestinian can be a fighter as well as a victim.
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Zakia Shamut, born in Haifa in 1945, was one of the first Palestinian women in the ’48 territories to join the armed resistance. By the early 1970s she had carried out seven operations against settlers and soldiers alike. For years she eluded capture, only later arrested mid-pregnancy along with her family and sentenced by an Israeli military court to 1,188 years in prison.
Her story exposes the violence of symbolism. It confronts the boundaries between symbol and substance, between décor and intervention. It rejects the safe theatre of resistance that never punctures colonial control.
She teaches us that militant improvisation must remain undomesticated. Resistance can only become heritage if it achieves its goal of complete liberation; otherwise, its embrace is simply domestication into institutional order.
She does not ask for solidarity. She demonstrates its tactical requirements: turning the occupier’s violence against itself, weaponising invisibility, and making survival itself ungovernable.
Her legacy is the watermelon: cradle and bomb, symbol and substance, nourishment and detonation. Proof that the very apparatus of occupation carries within it the conditions of its undoing. And in Gaza, where flags still draw bullets, her story reminds us that symbols retain their force only when they rupture empire’s machinery, not when they circulate safely within it.