The insane case of the blacked-up Palestine activist

We have a late entrant for the maddest news story of the year. It concerns one Hannah Gann, yet another drip in a keffiyeh who’s been running round Philly telling anyone who’ll listen that she’s part black, part Tunisian, part Palestinian and all angry. ‘Free Palestine!’, she yelps with an Afro-American twang, a Pally flag flung over her shoulders like a luxury pashmina. Just one problem: Ms Gann is actually white. And Jewish. And incredibly wealthy. And – my God, this is the best bit – she has family in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Is this delicious or what? Rest easy, Rachel Dolezal, everyone’s favourite fake-tanned wigga who convinced even the NAACP that she was a woman of colour. For your race-faker crown now passes from your own faux Afro to the dizzy head of a spoilt rich girl who cosplayed as the wretched of the Earth. ‘I have been lying for years’, wrote Ms Gann in a mea culpa on Instagram. ‘I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage.’ She metaphorically ripped off her keffiyeh to reveal she’s actually a ‘white woman with significant privilege and wealth’. Forget coming out as gay – coming out as white is the thing these days.

There isn’t one part of this story that doesn’t tickle me pink. Gann is a teacher at the Workshop School, a hip high school in Philadelphia. For years she’s been bringing her whole self to work – these people always do – even helping to set up ‘Philly Educators for Palestine’. She became a noisy fixture of the Philly wing of the keffiyeh cult, frequently hitting the streets to wail about ‘genocide’ in what one friend called ‘African-American vernacular English’.

But this week the LARP fell apart. After being confronted by two fellow Israel-haters who’d heard whispers about her true, demonic nature, Gann fessed up. She’s a ‘wealthy white woman’ who grew up in a $1.8million house in the suburbs. An old pal told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Gann underwent a ‘sudden transformation’ after visiting Africa with the Peace Corps. She started ‘using make-up and fake tan’ to make herself look darker and then adopted a mad blaccent. Guys, we now have keffiyeh minstrels.

The dishonesty involved in Gann’s Gaza blackfacing was staggering. She makes Dolezal look like an upright citizen. Far from a part-black, Arab-heritage woman of fury, she’s a preppy white Jewish girl whose own family is part of the ‘white supremacist occupation of Palestine’ (how insane Israelophobes refer to Jews living in Judea). She told friends she was hard-up because she was ‘sending cash to family in Palestine’. Some of them gave her money to help out. As for that Palestinian-born grandfather from whom she apparently inherited her proud spirit of resistance – he was actually born in Baltimore. Someone commission the Netflix doc already.

Gann isn’t the first trust-fund twat to pose as oppressed. She’s not the first person to brownface for moral clout. There’s the aforementioned Dolezal. And one of my personal favourites, Jessica Krug: a Kansas-born white lady who climbed the greasy ladder of the modern university by playacting as a black, Latino, Bronx-descended broad who loves saying ‘Y’all’. ‘I absolutely cancel myself’, said Krug when she was outed as white. And there have been a whole host of ‘pretendians’ – American and Canadian writers and activists who falsely claim Native American heritage to add a little spice to their lives.

It’s not hard to work out what lies behind such ‘progressive’ blacking up. In an era when whites are reprimanded for their supposed privilege, and ethnic-minority folk are creepily indulged as the possessors of a unique, folksy wisdom, some honkies are going to feel tempted to overdo the spray-on tan and embrace ‘blackspeak’ in the hope that they might be mistaken for non-whites, and thus oppressed and interesting. Such race-faking is most commonly found on leafy campuses and in woke circles, where whiteness is tantamount to original sin. It is our culture’s crazy sacralisation of victimhood that leads people to plunder the ‘suffering’ of others in search of a costume to pull on.

But here’s the thing: such trauma-mining is not incidental to the keffiyeh cult – it’s the cult’s whole raison d’être. Gann is an outlier only in the sense that she went the whole hog by darkening her skin and inventing a family tree in order that she might feel the cheap, fleeting thrill of Palestinian victimhood. But in one way or another they’re all at it. Every rich brat who has made hating Israel their entire personality is a kind of grief grifter, desperately hoping their devotion to Palestinianism might help to wash away their sins of whiteness and Westernism and bless them with the holy glow of Third World authenticity. They seek not ‘freedom for Palestine’ but absolution for themselves.

Witness how the keffiyeh has become a kind of holy shroud, worn by the well-off to signal their high-status pity for the downtrodden. And who can forget the hilarious scenes at Columbia University during the Gaza encampment of 2024, when silver-spoon leftists in Arab headwear begged the university administration for ‘humanitarian aid’. They meant refreshments. Across the West we’ve seen privileged youths not quite ‘blacking up’ but certainly ‘Arabbing up’: wearing desert clobber, and in some cases even Hamas headbands, while hollering for intifada and dreaming of the Jewish State’s destruction. All that Gann really added to this bourgeois hobby of oppression play was a little St Tropez.

Some people call the Gaza movement ‘radical chic’. It’s worse than that – it’s victim chic, a kind of boutique martyrdom giddily embraced by self-hating Westerners. With all the fervour of a doomsday sect, they brand Israel as the demonic zenith of ‘whiteness’ and then march against it in their culturally appropriated sacred veils. It’s a cleansing ritual masquerading as activism, a vain display of penitence by a generation taught to hate the West and everything it represents. Hannah Gann just took things a little further. She went full method.