Decades later, Samar Kabouli still fondly recalls gathering with women in her family and sipping cardamom-spiced coffee as they embroidered fabric with colourful threads in traditional Palestinian patterns.
Born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees, Kabouli had never seen her parents’ homeland. But more than just making pretty designs, the threads in her needle were stitching a connection to her heritage.
It’s known as tatreez, and Kabouli, 48, started doing the traditional form of Palestinian embroidery in her teens to make money. Besides an economic lifeline, tatreez has provided her with a bridge to the land her parents fled during the 1948 mass expulsion that Palestinians call their Nakba – or catastrophe.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes in present-day Israel during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israel refused their return.
Kabouli’s work allows her to send a message of resilience, of survival. “We’re still here,” she said. “All what has been happening in Gaza … and we’re still standing and we’ll not forget the cause.”
From refugee camps to stitching circles and from museum halls to online classes, many in the Palestinian diaspora communities worldwide engage with tatreez as far more than a decorative aesthetic.
They’re finding in it a celebration of cultural heritage, a bridge to their homeland and dispersed communities and – with its myriad embroidered symbols – a visual language of storytelling. To many, refugees or not, it’s become a symbol of Palestinian identity and pride, a vehicle for documenting history and a form of resistance.
With the Israel war in Gaza, some have also used it to raise funds for people there or have stitched designs to focus attention on Palestinian suffering in the enclave.
“We had a lot of people who came and they’re like, ‘OK, we want to do a T-shirt with a Gaza chest or we want to do a scarf with the Gaza motif,’” said Ali Jaafar, general manager of Inaash Association, where Kabouli works.
The Lebanese organisation provides Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon with much-needed income through tatreez, while also helping preserve and promote the heritage. It sells embroidered fashion, home decor and art pieces, and showcases the art form in exhibitions and museums.
Protecting heritage and ‘struggling through culture’
Efforts to preserve and raise awareness about tatreez in Palestinian communities at home and abroad are part of a larger push to safeguard a heritage and connections to a history and a place that many fear are at risk of being erased.
“Palestinian tatreez is an identity and a document of our presence in every Palestinian village and town,” said Maha Saca, founder and director of the Palestinian Heritage Centre in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, adding that old embroidered thobes, or dresses, show the presence of Palestinians in particular locations before the dispersal of many.
“The Palestinian woman has written the story of her village through motifs from her surrounding environment and her beliefs,” Saca said. “We’re struggling through culture and saying we have roots.”
The Palestinian embroidery art form was added in 2021 to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
A generational practice and window into history
In Arabic, tatreez refers to embroidery in general as well as the specific Palestinian form, which is often a social practice taught through generations by grandmothers and mothers. Some seek formal training.
With motifs that Palestinian women had historically adopted from their surroundings, the old embroidered thobes can offer clues through stitched patterns, design and colour about facets of a woman’s personal story, her environment and regional identity, Saca said.
In the Palestinian context, such connections to time and place, including areas now in Israel, gain added importance as a testament to what was, she said. “How do we have a Jaffa thobe if we hadn’t been in Jaffa?” she said. “We write history on our thobes.”
There’s also an element of continuity. Saca said her grandmother’s embroidered wedding thobe bears the hallmarks of Bethlehem dresses and that her own granddaughter’s baptism dress included embroidery copied from it.
Tatreez can also be political, both through preservation and creation. “Just being able to have some of the dresses from pre-1948 is a political act,” Barkawi said.
There’s also the making of the so-called “intifada thobe” that included embroidered political and Palestinian symbols, such as the flag. It’s linked to the “first intifada,” or uprising, which erupted in 1987 against Israel’s occupation and was met with a fierce Israeli response.
