Palestinian flag

Palestinian flag: three equal horizontal bands, black on top, white in the middle and green at the bottom, with a red triangle extending from the hoist.

Designer: Disputed. The 1916 Arab Revolt design is credited variously to an Arab nationalist club in Istanbul, to al-Fatat, and to Sir Mark Sykes. No designer is credited for the Palestinian arrangement · Arab Revolt flag 1916; current arrangement formalised 1 December 1964; State of Palestine 15 November 1988

The national flag of Palestine: black, white and green horizontal bands with a red triangle at the hoist, in the pan-Arab colours. The design descends from the banner of the 1916 Arab Revolt. Its authorship is genuinely disputed between an Arab nationalist literary club in Istanbul (1909), the Young Arab Society al-Fatat (founded Paris 1911), and Sir Mark Sykes of the British Foreign Office; reference works decline to settle it. Palestinians used a reordered version from the early 1920s. The PLO Executive Committee formalised the current arrangement on 1 December 1964, and it was declared the flag of the State of Palestine at Algiers on 15 November 1988. Israel banned public display of the flag for decades; the prohibition was lifted after the 1993 Oslo negotiations. The dynastic readings of the four colours come from a thirteenth or fourteenth century verse, "white are our deeds, black are our battles, green are our fields, red are our swords", and are a later symbolic gloss rather than strict documentation. No official colour specification exists. Palestinian Authority Flag Law No. 5 of 2006 contains none, and the 1964 PLO resolution fixed geometry only: a 2:1 ratio, three equal bands, and a red isosceles triangle at the mast. The Pantone values given here are from the London 2012 Olympics protocol sheet, which is the nearest thing to an authorised specification we could find. The hex codes circulating online come from colour-aggregator sites, not from any Palestinian document.

Farbcodes: Palestinian flag
Streifen HEX RGB CMYK Pantone Bedeutung
Black band #000000 0,0,0 C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:100 n/a The Black Standard of the Rashidun and Abbasid caliphates
White band #FFFFFF 255,255,255 C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:0 n/a The Umayyad caliphate
Green band n/a PMS 355 (London 2012 protocol sheet, not an official Palestinian specification) Islam generally, often attributed to the Fatimids, though that attribution is contested
Red hoist triangle n/a PMS 032 (London 2012 protocol sheet, not an official Palestinian specification) The Hashemite dynasty; added when Sharif Hussein proclaimed the Arab Revolt on 10 June 1916

Geschichte

Four colours that predate the flag by centuries, arranged into a national symbol in the twentieth.

The pan-Arab colours

Black, white, green and red are shared across many Arab flags, each conventionally tied to a dynasty: Abbasid, Umayyad, Fatimid and Hashemite. The pairing is a retrospective reading of an older verse rather than a documented heraldic scheme, and the Fatimid attribution for green is contested, since the Fatimid dynastic colour was in fact white.

From revolt banner to national flag

Sharif Hussein raised the Arab Revolt banner against Ottoman rule in June 1916. Palestinians used a reordered version from the early 1920s. The PLO fixed the current arrangement in 1964 and it was declared the flag of the State of Palestine in 1988.

No official colours

Unusually for a national flag, there is no published colour specification. The 2006 flag law describes the shape and says nothing about shade. Any hex code you find online for this flag is somebody's approximation.