Palestinian flag

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.

History