The Israeli flag is one of the most immediately recognisable national symbols in the world. Two horizontal blue stripes on a white background, with a six-pointed Star of David at the centre. It is simple, striking and — like so much of Israeli identity — layered with centuries of history and meaning.
The Blue Stripes
The design of the Israeli flag was inspired by the tallit — the Jewish prayer shawl. The traditional tallit is white with blue stripes running across it, and it has been a central object of Jewish religious life for thousands of years. When the Zionist movement began designing symbols for the future Jewish state in the late 19th century, the tallit was an obvious and powerful reference point: something ancient, universal and deeply meaningful to Jewish communities everywhere.
The colour blue in Jewish tradition is associated with the divine, with heaven and with truth. It appears throughout the Torah — in the fringes (tzitzit) that Jews are commanded to wear, in the priestly garments described in Exodus, in the ancient dye known as tekhelet that gave the blue its sacred character. The blue of the Israeli flag carries all of that history.
The Star of David
The Magen David — the Shield of David — is a six-pointed star formed by two overlapping triangles. As a Jewish symbol it became widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries and was formally adopted as the central symbol of the Zionist movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. During the Holocaust, Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David as a mark of persecution — a history that makes the same symbol appearing on the Israeli flag a powerful act of reclamation and defiance.
The State of Israel adopted the flag in 1948, four days after declaring independence. Today it flies around the world as a symbol of the Jewish state, of Jewish survival and of a people's return to their ancient homeland.
Wearing the Flag
Our Vintage Israeli Flag T-Shirt gives the iconic image a warm, timeworn feel — as if it has been carried through history rather than newly printed. For Yom Ha’atzmaut, for every day, for anyone who wants to wear that history with pride.