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.
How do you display your flag collection?
I keep many of my flags folded up in shelves sorted by category since I don't really have the space to display everything. The flags I do put on display I most often display indoors. From where I'm currently sitting, excluding flags made of paper, representations of flags, or the odd "duplicate flag", I can see some 58 different flags in this room. Some of these flags are affixed to the walls, displayed vertically; some are attached to flag-staffs placed into a little "receptacle" on the floor, like the flags behind politicians when making speeches; and most of the smaller flags are in things like ceramic mugs or dedicated stands on shelves, or have had their stick sort of fed into the hole in the side of a cardboard box at the top of a shelf as a makeshift way to display them vertically.
What’s the highlight of your collection?
It's hard to say without sorting through everything I have, but I will say I'm very glad to have my own little Abkhazian flag.
Oh sick. That’s so cool. I used to be really into vexology.
How into it were you? Doesn't seem like you would've been a pedant about it.
Nice, I have a small collection of flags gifted to me by people I've worked with, but they're all in a bag under my bed while I work out how to display them...