Bethlehem (Palestine)

Bethlehem is a very ancient city located in West Bank. It's known to be place where Jesus Christ was born, as well as David was born and crowned king of Israel, reportedly. Another popular site is Rachel's tomb. As such, Bethlehem is one of most import pilgrimage places in Middle East.

As far as I know, Bethlehem doesn't flag a flag. My first thought was designing a flag including the silver star, inside the Church of the Nativity, that marks the exact place where Jesus is believed to have been born. However, I haven't figured out a way of making a compelling, but still self-evident, flag.

So I looked at city's logo:


I noticed Christmas Star was the perfect element for the flag. The logo also contains a wheat ear, as Bethlehem's comes from Hebrew and Aramaic for "house of bread".

That was my first attempt at completing a flag for Bethlehem:

Star of Bethlehem in night sky, border yellow like wheat... all very simple, but very attractive. I think adding the border was a good idea to make it less boring.

But it wasn't still as good as I wished. So I transformed the border in an orle:

I guess the second proposal is much more effective.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Sorry for recurring delays. I've acquired a new computer, so I'll try to post more often.

One-state solution

"One-state solution", often called "Isratine", is one of the proposed solutions to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, through the unification of the two countries in a single (often federated or confederated) multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. The theme of this post was proposed on the blog comments by Aj Marohom.

The usual way of designing flags on this topic is combining Israel and Palestine flags. The flag just below, for example, was designed by me using this pattern.


Those flags, though, may seem too artificial and, in the opinion of many, are more divisive than opposite, but I have to admit some of them are aesthetically pleasing designs.

I searched for a symbol with appeal enough to be carried on street marches (many national flags were born from popular movements'), that was emphatically aggregating and wouldn't offend any concerned party. For my surprise, the words in Hebrew and Arabic for "peace", respectively shalom (שָׁלוֹם) and salaam (سلام), had a common root and very similar calligraphies, as you can see on image below:

Source: Justin Watt of justinsomnia.org. Work licensed under CC-BY license.
Hebrew word is in blue and Arabic is in green.

Based on it I made the following design, using a stylized version of the words.


White is a peace color, and present on both Israel and Palestine flags. The golden color is neutral. As the symbolism is all related to peace, this flag wouldn't be, in my theory, offensive to any minority either. Israelis could find a connection between the colors and Exodus 33:3, that describes Canaan as "a land flowing with milk and honey", while Palestinians could associate the white background, a pan-Arab color, to Umayyad Empire.

Comments are welcome. Please, leave a comment.
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Please, no comments about politics or other delicate themes. Keep them about vexillological or aesthetic merits.
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