Apparently it had been bought for my world flag collection before the al-Aqsa flood, and ever since then it's just been kinda sitting there all folded up at the back of the gifts-to-give shelf for over a year, because giving the Zionist flag to me on any occasion would be incredibly tone-deaf, and has only continued to become progressively more tone-deaf as... *gestures broadly at everything*
So finally it was decided to just give the flag to me today because "that's where the Christmas story happened" — and I said to this justification, "Bethlehem is in the West Bank, you have to go through like eight checkpoints to get there from Nazareth nowadays."
...But in any case the deed is done: I am now in possession of the flag of a settler-colonial vassal of empire currently committing an active, brutal genocide, to realize its expansionist ambitions under its racist ideology of ethnic supremacy. In other words, I have basically been given the equivalent of the Hakenkreuzflagge for Christmas of 1944.
After reviewing my options for things I can do with this gift, I have decided that I want to try redyeing the flag into either the Palestinian flag or the flag of the PFLP. I haven't dyed any fabric in nearly a decade so it'll be a good opportunity to practice that sort of crafts skill, I think.
To be clear, the reason why I wanted to point out that "being American" is a different thing from "living in the USA" was really just to poke at how people in the USA think of national identity vis-a-vis land/birthplace/residency.
Which is to say, I feel like many people in the USA have practically umbilically tied their sense of national identity to the land: they consider themselves Americans because they live in or were born in the USA, right? And I feel like this conception makes the continued rule of the land by the USA both completely natural and absolutely necessary in their eyes: any threat to the USA's rule is also on some level a threat to their own personal identities.
Likewise those like me, who manage to be American without this umbilical cord plugged into the land, end up triggering cognitive dissonance among the USA's patriots. Patriots loathe the idea that you can be American without having been born in nor ever having lived in nor even desiring to live in the USA, because if you can just do that — i.e. if Americans can basically just become a diaspora minority group laying claim to not even a single square inch of land — then what the Hell's even the point of the USA continuing to exist? There is no answer to this question other than that the USA has no reason to exist, and in fact should not continue to exist. But if this is a conclusion that you cannot accept, then, well...
In any case, use of the terms America or American to refer to the whole continent from Tierra del Fuego to Greenland is a different matter.