How some in Palestinian diaspora find connection, identity and resilience in traditional embroidery

Decades later, Samar Kabouli still fondly recalls gathering with women in her family and sipping cardamom-spiced coffee as they embroidered fabric with colorful 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 displacement 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-Hamas war in Gaza, some have also used it to raise funds for people there or 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 organization provides Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon with much-needed income through tatreez, while also aiming to help 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 Center 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.

In New York, Lina Barkawi, whose small business teaches tatreez, said the “constant fight for liberation and having a Palestinian identity that’s recognized globally is really what has been driving a lot of this documentation.”

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 color 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 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 embroideries copied from that dress.

Tatreez also can 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.

Stitching, mourning and documenting

After the war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, fashion designer Hama Hinnawi expressed grief through tatreez work. Tatreez is usually colorful, she said. But that was no moment for color.

The result? Black embroidery on black fabric, a statement of mourning for the killings, destruction and displacement in Gaza. She’s also experimented with turning some iconic scenes from the war into new embroidery motifs.

“We have a big responsibility on our shoulders to tell this story, not to be buried for the next generations … through tatreez, through art, through speaking.”

Born in Jordan to Palestinian parents, Hinnawi wanted to bring awareness to heritage through her fashion brand by marrying tatreez with contemporary fashion.

To her, tatreez simply means home. It’s “identity, pride, storytelling,” said Hinnawi, who shuttles between Chicago and Jordan.

She’s provided embroidery work opportunities to Palestinian women in refugee camps in Jordan and talked in the U.S. about tatreez. Before the war, she also worked with women in Gaza.

Barkawi runs an online community of Palestinian and non-Palestinian embroiderers, some of whom have created designs sold to raise funds for Gaza families. One incorporates a “water and seeds” motif with an embroidered message to “Feed Gaza Now.”

Members in different countries recreated a tapestry that once hung in a bombed Gaza home, each stitching a part and mailing it to another.

Born in the U.S. to a Palestinian father and Panamanian mother, Barkawi said learning about tatreez deepened her Palestinian identity.

New dresses with woven stories

Embroidering her first thobe took two years. Barkawi incorporated motifs with personal meanings, such as palm trees that represent her name in Arabic. She added orchids, the national flower of Panama, for her mom.

Technically imperfect, it was the perfect dress for her Islamic marriage ceremony.

“I embedded my story as a Palestinian in the diaspora into this dress.”

In Lebanon, Kabouli, too, once dreamed of owning a tatreez piece for her wedding trousseau. She couldn’t afford one.

After their parents died, an older sister had turned to tatreez with Inaash to help support the large family. Kabouli learned from her.

Now a production supervisor at Inaash in Beirut, Kabouli sees her younger self in the women working in refugee camps in Lebanon, many in the south, which was hard hit by the latest Israel-Hezbollah war. The vibrancy of tatreez often contrasts with harsh living conditions in camps amid employment and other restrictions the refugees face. Contending with power cuts, women, eager to finish a piece and get paid, may work on rooftops to grasp the last ray of sunlight, Jaafar said.

Besides the income, Kabouli said doing tatreez can be grounding, almost meditative.

She has another yearning: to see her parents’ homeland. They came from an area in what’s now Israel.

For now, tatreez provides her with hope.

“I don’t feel like I am far away. I keep working on Palestinian heritage, following the cause,” she said. “It connects me to my homeland, especially since we’re deprived of it.”

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