The flag of the Arab League is a green banner carrying, in gold, one of the older seals in international politics: a circle of chain links enclosing an upward crescent, the organization's name written in Arabic within the crescent's horns, and the whole wrapped in two olive branches tied with a ribbon at the base. It has flown over eight decades of Arab summitry, and for a flag that well traveled, remarkably little is on record about where it came from. No designer is named in the League's literature, and even the number of links in the chain has wandered from drawing to drawing.
A seal from the founding era
The League of Arab States was established in Cairo on 22 March 1945, when seven states signed its founding Pact: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan (later Jordan), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It was the first regional organization of the postwar era, predating the United Nations Charter by three months, and its founding purpose was to coordinate the policies of newly independent Arab states while safeguarding their sovereignty, a tension that has defined it ever since.
The seal of chain, crescent and olive branches belongs to the League's early years, and reference works generally date the flag to 1945 itself; Wikipedia gives 8 March 1945, two weeks before the Pact was signed. The League's own publications say little about the design's origin, and no designer or adopting resolution is commonly cited, which puts the flag in curious company: an emblem seen at every Arab summit since the 1940s whose paper trail is thinner than that of many city flags.
Reading the emblem
Each element of the seal does specific work. The chain forms a closed circle, link joined to link, an image of member states bound together as equals. Today the chain is usually described as having 22 links, one per member state, though the correspondence is retrofitted: the seal existed when the League had seven members, and vexillological sources note renderings with different link counts over the years. The chain has simply been reread as the membership grew.
The crescent inside the chain points upward, an old symbol of Islam and of the Arab world's Ottoman and dynastic past. Within its horns sits the inscription "Jami'at ad-Duwal al-'Arabiyya," League of Arab States, in Arabic calligraphy. Around everything curve two olive branches, crossed and tied at the bottom, the standard international shorthand for peace; the United Nations adopted the same device for its own flag at almost the same moment.
The composition is conservative by design. The League represents states that agree on little beyond language and a broad cultural inheritance, and the seal sticks to symbols none of them could object to: unity, faith, peace, and the organization's name.
Green, gold, and the road not taken
The field is green, commonly specified around the hex value 006233, with the seal most often rendered entirely in gold. Green is the color most associated with Islam and appears on the flags of Saudi Arabia and (from 1977 to 2011) Libya; it is also one of the four pan-Arab colors, drawn from the 1916 flag of the Arab Revolt, that recur across the region's national flags.
What the League did not do is instructive. It could have adopted the pan-Arab tricolor of black, white, green and red that Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and others carry in various arrangements. That combination, though, was already the property of particular states and of particular unification projects, from the Hashemite ambitions of the 1920s to Nasser's United Arab Republic. A plain green field with a seal committed the League to nobody's flag but its own.
Standardization has been loose throughout. The flag is manufactured in both 2:3 and 1:2 proportions, and documented variants from the 1950s through the 1970s show the chain in red or black, the inscription in black, and the crescent in white or green. A color-inverted version, the seal in green on a white field, has appeared at summits, notably behind the host's chair at the 2002 Beirut summit.
The flag at the League's low points
A flag for 22 states has flown over a lot of empty chairs. In 1979, after Egypt signed its peace treaty with Israel, the other members suspended it and moved the League's headquarters from Cairo to Tunis; the founding member and host state spent a decade outside its own organization before readmission in 1989, with the headquarters returning to Cairo soon after. Libya's seat was suspended during the 2011 uprising. Syria's membership was suspended in November 2011 as the civil war began and was only restored in May 2023, a twelve-year absence during which the Syrian flag disappeared from summit halls while the League's own flag carried on overhead, its chain officially still 22 links.
That is the flag's quiet irony. The chain admits no gaps: it is a closed circle whose whole meaning is that every link holds. The League's history is substantially a history of links being removed, restored and argued over, while the emblem insists otherwise. The flag flies daily at the headquarters on Tahrir Square in Cairo, at the League's missions abroad, and beside the national flags of the member states at each summit, where the row of 22 flags is itself the more honest membership record: watch which ones go missing.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of the Arab League." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Arab_League
[2] Flags of the World (FOTW), "Arab League." https://www.fotw.info/flags/int-las.html
[3] Flags.fyi, "Flag of the League of Arab States." https://flags.fyi/arab-league/
[4] Pact of the League of Arab States, signed in Cairo, 22 March 1945 (founding treaty; text via the Avalon Project). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/arableag.asp