Palestine Jersey Watch: Do Al-Fida'i finally have an aesthetic identity?
Several remarkable things have happened in Palestinian football over the past two years- including the embrace of a white kit emblazoned with a keffiyeh pattern
The subject of what color jersey Palestine should wear has been debated by fans of Al-Fida’i for the past two decades.
In 2025, Palestine contested 13 matches. On 11 occasions they wore white. The jersey was front and center as Palestine came from behind to beat Iraq 2-1 in World Cup qualification. Over the course of Round 3 of World Cup qualification White was the color of choice for eight of the ten encounters. The team also wore the jersey for all five of their games at the FIFA Arab Cup.
Younger fans will associate red as being Palestine’s primary color although that was not the case when Palestine first joined the ranks of FIFA in 1998.
For their first three official fixtures against Lebanon (1-3), Syria (1-2), and Jordan (1-1). The team wore a white shirt with black shorts. The following year, Palestine debuted green kits at the 1999 Pan Arab Games and it was in that jersey they collected their first win (1-0 vs. Qatar).
The national team debuted in World Cup qualification for the 2002 against Hong Kong in green shirts in March 2001. That month, they collected their first win of the campaign against Malaysia in Green. Three years later, on the road to Germany 2006 Palestine plastered Chinese Taipei 8-0 while wearing Green. They went three better two years later recording their largest ever win (11-0) against Guam in, you guessed it, green.
As a result, there was no shortage of controversy when after ten years Palestine all but ditched the shirt. The 2008 WAFF Championship in Tehran kicked off with Palestine wearing a red jersey against the hosts.
While no official reason was given, it was easy to read between the lines. Green was the color of Hamas and the new PFA President Jibril Rajoub was a Fatah man.
More than just switching colors, Palestine looked like a team without an identity. You never knew what the team would be wearing when they took to the pitch. While the early years produced some iconic kits Part of that had to with the fact that the team had no official supplier.
So, Palestine went from this:
To This:
Much to the chagrin of this writer, the green jersey is unlikely to return but perhaps we can now ditch the red jersey.
Red is incredibly overused and up until recently all Palestine’s neighbors wore red and white- Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria (who now have switched from red to green). Cast an eye a little further in West Asia and the color scheme is also used by Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, and UAE.
The FIFA Arab Cup has left indelible images in the collective memory. For many these matches will be the first time they have interacted with the team and perhaps it can be the start of something new.
Palestine’s last two kit providers opted to do something creative with the white jersey. A keffiyeh pattern making it not just any white jersey.
Kelme will release a new jersey for the national team before the start of the 2027 AFC Asian Cup in January of that year. One would hope they could meld the old with the new. Should Palestine revert to the black shorts they wore on their international debut it would give them a color scheme not used by any other team in Asia. The keffiyeh pattern should become a permanent fixture something that makes the team instantly recognizable just like Peru’s red sash, Argentina’s stripes, or Croatia’s checkers.
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