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 …
