When political iconography jumps from posters and protest walls onto consumer goods, it stops being ambient symbolism and becomes a reputational test: what looks like design to one audience reads as endorsement to another.
At a Glance
- Rama Duwaji, a New York–based illustrator and spouse of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, created label art for boutique olive oil bottles tied to a brand highlighted for anti-Israel themes.
- Separate resurfaced posts from Duwaji’s early adulthood featured imagery and a quotation associated with Leila Khaled, a PFLP militant involved in late-1960s and 1970 airplane hijackings, sparking accusations of glorifying terrorism.
- The controversy exemplifies how political art and fragments of social media become proxies for broader fights over identity, legitimacy, and acceptable expression.
- For public figures and their families, the boundary between historical reference, solidarity, and perceived endorsement narrows sharply once artwork circulates beyond activist spaces.
What set the controversy in motion
The spark is straightforward: Duwaji’s illustration work appears on high-concept olive oil products marketed in New York’s culture-forward food scene, with reporting linking the brand’s positioning to anti-Israel sentiment. The labels—dark glass bottles, hand-drawn portraits, premium pricing—carry the visual language of limited-run art objects, not supermarket staples. In parallel, archived social media activity from 2017 shows Duwaji, then about 20 years old, posting an image of Leila Khaled to a Tumblr account under the handle “diimashq,” accompanied by text echoing one of Khaled’s militant declarations about self-sacrifice for the cause. Mainstream outlets summarized and amplified the resurfaced posts, framing them as celebration of PFLP-linked figures.
Those two tracks—artwork in the market and past political imagery online—interacted predictably. Once the artist is attached to a piece of consumer design, curatorial questions about symbolism and reference get recast as corporate and civic ones: What is being sold here, and what does the face on the label stand for? In a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, the bar for clarity is high and the margin for misinterpretation narrow.
Who Leila Khaled is, and why that matters for symbols
Leila Khaled is not an obscure figure within the iconography of Palestinian militancy; she became globally known after participating in airplane hijackings in 1969 and 1970, and her image—most famously with a keffiyeh and a rifle—has circulated widely in posters, photography, and later reinterpretations. In visual culture, she occupies a role akin to an emblem: instantly legible shorthand for armed struggle as a form of political identity. That semiotic power is precisely why designers and activists reuse her portrait—and also why, when that portrait shows up near a cash register or on a household product, it draws immediate scrutiny from anyone who sees the line between depiction and endorsement as vanishingly thin.
For an illustrator, invoking Khaled can mean many things—historical reference, commentary on resistance, or solidarity with Palestinians as an oppressed people. For a buyer who associates the subject with aircraft terrorism, the reading collapses to one conclusion: you are glorifying violence. Both readings are anchored in the same image; the battleground is context and intent, neither of which travel reliably once the art is untethered from an artist’s statement and distributed as packaging.
How political artwork migrates—and why migration changes meaning
Art long predates social media in sparking political backlash, but platforms and productization have made translation errors more frequent and more public. The same portrait that resonates in a gallery of agitprop or an activist feed can acquire a different charge on a commodity, because packaging implies curation for commerce and repeat handling in intimate spaces like kitchens. Scholars and critics have pointed out that political art’s meaning is contingent, often forged by audience reaction and institutional setting rather than artist intent; every act of public display renders a new interpretation possible—and sometimes dominant.
Once a work moves from the circuit of movement culture into retail, stakeholders multiply: brand owners, retailers, customers, journalists, and civic leaders. Each assigns risk differently. Museums can lean on contextualization, wall text, and programming to balance provocation and responsibility; consumer goods cannot. A bottle on a shelf has to stand on its own, and when its symbol is an individual synonymous with aircraft hijacking, the reputational consequences are foreseeable.
The specific claims and their evidentiary footing
Published reports attribute the olive oil label art to Duwaji and connect the products to a boutique brand positioned in New York’s culinary market. Separately, outlets summarized an earlier investigation indicating that Duwaji’s Tumblr account featured a 2017 image of Leila Khaled paired with text mirroring a Khaled quotation about accepting death for the cause. Subsequent coverage in mainstream publications repeated the core facts of the social posts and their timing in Duwaji’s early adulthood. Those claims are concrete: an identifiable handle, a date, a widely known subject, and a verbatim line that is part of Khaled’s public record.
No specialized inference is needed to see why critics characterize the posts as celebratory; in the grammar of political iconography, to curate, caption, and broadcast a militant’s portrait inside one’s personal feed is a strong affiliative act. Whether the intent was historical citation or solidarity does not erase the obvious reputational risk once those artifacts are recirculated years later and juxtaposed with commissioned commercial art.
The broader pattern: from symbol to referendum
Controversies like this rarely stay confined to the content of a single drawing or post; they convert quickly into referenda on the artist’s character and, when the artist is adjacent to power, on the public figure’s judgment. That conversion is not accidental. Political imagery invites audiences to overlearn: to treat a symbol as a total theory of a person. The modern art-and-politics ecosystem—where every work is instantly captured, reframed, and mobilized—amplifies that dynamic, pushing artists and commissioners into roles they may not have intended to occupy.
In this case, the collision is particularly sharp because Khaled’s notoriety rests on acts—aircraft hijackings—that Western publics regard as paradigmatic terrorism. When that emblem appears within the ambit of a civic leader’s household, the reading tightens further, regardless of the artist’s stated portfolio focus on women of color and healing spaces. The lesson is not that political art should retreat from difficult subjects, but that the medium and venue dictate how much nuance survives contact with the public.
Zohran Mamdani is mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. His wife, Rama Duwaji, is not a private person on this file.
As a teenager she wrote that Tel Aviv should not have existed and called its residents occupiers. She praised Leila Khaled and… pic.twitter.com/rYpnK2uhjO— RhetoricandLogic🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇮🇱🇮🇱 (@RhetoricLogic) October 6, 2026
What it means for artists, brands, and public figures
Three practical takeaways follow. First, if a symbol draws its power from violent action, assume that depiction will be widely read as endorsement when context is sparse or commercial. Second, brands commissioning politically inflected art must anticipate not only first-order meaning but second-order associations—what critics will say it means—and build or forgo projects accordingly. Third, public figures and their families cannot rely on the private, dated, or “art world” nature of imagery to insulate them; in the current media environment, everything circulates, and circulation resets context and intent.
Sources:
smobserved.com, celebswiki.info, jfeed.com, hidabroot.com, ynetnews.com, timesofisrael.com, palestineposterproject.org
