JTA — Alex Sinclair had no idea what would follow when he posted a picture of his mutilated kippa to Facebook on Thursday.

Sinclair, who lives in central Israel, described being detained by police officers who told him that his kippa, which had both the Israeli and Palestinian flags woven in, was illegal. When he was released from their custody, he was allowed to take his kippa home — but only after the Palestinian flag was cut out, leaving him with roughly half a head-covering.

To Sinclair, a British-born writer and educator whose books include “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism,” the situation was galling, and not just because he had been accused of breaking a law that does not exist.

“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” he wrote about the officer who returned his kippa. He added, “That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed.”

A day after publishing his account of the encounter, eliciting hundreds of almost universally supportive comments, Sinclair said he had not heard from anyone in the government about his Facebook post or the complaint he filed on the Israel Police website.

But he had gotten offers of legal aid; calls from left-wing politicians, including Yair Golan; and even Shabbat flowers from a prominent liberal activist. His phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists, and someone he barely knows is making plans for a rally outside the police station in Modiin, where he was detained.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sinclair said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday afternoon.

The Israel Police has acknowledged the incident, saying publicly that a man had been detained after they were contacted about his kippa and had been released “following a clarification process.” They said the official complaint about the incident prevented further comment.

Sinclair said he thought the image of the defiled kippa was resonant for Jews who instinctively associated it with centuries of antisemitism. But he said he wondered whether the depth of the response reflected something else, too.

After the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis were “beginning to be able to breathe a little bit and look above the parapet and just sort of see, OK, maybe we can start to think about the future in a way that we really weren’t able to as a society for the past couple of........

© The Times of Israel