Like layers of history, handcrafted Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez, traditionally used to adorn Palestinian clothing, speaks of lost peoples, abandoned old customs, past lives, and survival.
The designs once served almost like an identification card. The rooster, an ancient Christian symbol, indicated the bearer’s faith. A red bird on a blue-threaded tunic worn by widows meant the woman was ready to remarry. An image of a particular plant or fruit suggested the origin of the garment, such as orange blossoms adorning the tunics of Jaffa or cypress trees on those from Hebron.
“The embroidery of each city has a special characteristic,” said Baha Jubeh, conservation manager and collections at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, standing among a row of these dresses, known as thobes, some of which date back over a century. “But all together they combine to create a historical Palestinian identity.”
In 2021, UNESCO added tatreez to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing it as “a widespread social and intergenerational practice in Palestine.”
The “Tatriz,” or traditional Palestinian embroidery, thus becomes a popular Palestinian art traditionally practiced by women and has become a symbol of Palestinian culture, identity, and resistance. The word “tatriz” literally means embroidery in Arabic, and while the term is used to refer to embroidery in general, in the Palestinian context it specifically refers to cross-stitch. Beyond clothing, dresses, and scarves, it is used in drawings, artwork, and signage. In addition to being an art form and a means of survival, it is a practice and a space for interaction led by women, shared with similar customs and artistic practices in other regions of the Arab world and the Mediterranean.
But like other indigenous crafts, it faces threats, including mechanization and the abandonment of ancient styles. There is now a push to revive it among younger generations, including plans to reintroduce embroidery in Palestinian schools, include it in school uniforms, and open an academy in Israeli-occupied West Bank dedicated to this craft.
Historically, Palestinian embroidery was taught at home and passed down through generations. Decades ago, the thobe was an everyday item worn and made primarily by rural women. Its colors and designs were drawn from the plants and animals surrounding them.
In 1948, around 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes during the war surrounding the creation of Israel, a period Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe. Most ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries and throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Many women had to become the breadwinners for their families and turned to embroidery. However, the designs and colors became more homogenized. Today, thobes are worn only on special occasions.
At the Surif Women’s Cooperative, in a small village on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Hebron, Halima Fareed, 58, added the finishing touches to a green and black embroidered pillowcase. Around the edges were small cypress trees resembling the tall cypress outside the cooperative.
It is one of the few local symbols that the cooperative, which produces embroidered home goods but not thobes, still preserves in its designs.
Through this embroidery, the culture and identity of Palestine are reconstructed, along with the stories of resilience of this people in the face of Israeli occupation since 1948. Dina Asfour, a cultural embroiderer and founder of Tatreez Collective, who has a Palestinian father and a Spanish mother, states that this date marks a before and after for tatreez, “because the history of this embroidery is the political memory of Palestine,” she expresses.
“This marks the history of our parents, of our grandparents, of our identity. The diaspora, exile, the trauma of war appears, but so does the love for the land,” Asfour outlines. She references that, after 1948, more than half of the Arab Palestinian population was expelled from their lands to flee to the new state or neighboring countries. A figure that, before the October 2023 war, amounted to 6.3 million displaced people settled in Arab countries, about 1.7 million in the territories of 1948, another 5.3 million in the State of Palestine, and 750,000 from countries abroad, according to 2021 data from the Arab Center Washington DC.
