Even decades after the fact, Samar Kabouli treasures the memory of sitting among the women in her family, sharing cardamom-spiced coffee while they worked colorful threads through fabric in distinctly Palestinian patterns.
Kabouli was born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees and had never set foot in her parents’ homeland. Yet with every stitch, she was weaving something deeper than decoration — a bond with her roots.
That craft is called “tatreez,” and Kabouli, now 48, began practicing this traditional Palestinian embroidery as a teenager as a way to earn money. Beyond the income it provided, tatreez became a pathway connecting her to the land her parents were forced to leave during the 1948 mass displacement that Palestinians refer to as the Nakba — meaning catastrophe.
During the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s founding, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from or abandoned their homes in what is now Israel. They were never allowed to return.
Through her work, Kabouli communicates a message of endurance and 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.”
Whether in refugee camps, community stitching circles, museum galleries, or virtual classrooms, tatreez holds a significance for Palestinian diaspora communities that goes far beyond its visual appeal.
Practitioners view it as a celebration of their cultural roots, a link to their homeland and to scattered communities around the globe, and — through its many symbolic motifs — a visual form of storytelling. For many, regardless of whether they are refugees, tatreez has become an emblem of Palestinian identity and pride, a means of recording history, and an act of resistance.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, some have used tatreez to raise money for people there, while others have stitched designs intended to draw attention to Palestinian suffering in the territory.
“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 is employed. The Lebanese organization gives Palestinian women living in refugee camps in Lebanon a source of income through tatreez, while also working to preserve and promote the tradition. It markets embroidered fashion, home decor, and artwork, and presents the craft in exhibitions and museums.
Broader efforts to keep tatreez alive and raise its profile among Palestinian communities both locally and internationally are part of a larger mission to protect a heritage and a connection to history and place that many fear could be wiped away.
“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. She noted that antique embroidered thobes — traditional dresses — serve as evidence of Palestinian presence in specific locations before the widespread displacement of their people. “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 tradition was added to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.
In New York, Lina Barkawi, who runs a small business teaching 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.”
In Arabic, the word tatreez refers broadly to embroidery as well as to the specific Palestinian tradition, which is typically passed down through generations — from grandmothers to mothers to daughters. Some also seek out formal instruction.
The motifs Palestinian women historically drew from their natural and cultural surroundings mean that old embroidered thobes can reveal details about a woman’s personal story, her environment, and her regional identity through patterns, design, and color, according to Saca.
In the Palestinian context, those connections to specific times and places — including areas that now fall within Israel — carry added weight as proof of what once existed. “How do we have a Jaffa thobe if we hadn’t been in Jaffa?” she said. “We write history on our thobes.”
There is also a thread of continuity running through the craft. Saca’s grandmother’s embroidered wedding thobe bears the distinctive characteristics of Bethlehem dresses, she noted. Embroideries copied from that dress were later incorporated into her own granddaughter’s baptism gown.
Tatreez can carry political weight as well, both through its preservation and its creation.
“Just being able to have some of the dresses from pre-1948 is a political act,” Barkawi said.
There is also the tradition of the so-called “intifada thobe,” which featured embroidered political and Palestinian symbols including the flag. It is associated with the “first intifada,” or uprising, which began in 1987 against Israel’s occupation and was met with a forceful Israeli response.
Following the outbreak of the war in Gaza — triggered by Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel — fashion designer Hama Hinnawi channeled her grief into tatreez. The craft is typically vibrant with color, she noted, but the moment called for something different.
The outcome was black embroidery on black fabric — a statement of mourning for the deaths, destruction, and displacement unfolding in Gaza. She has also experimented with transforming iconic images 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 set out to bring awareness to Palestinian heritage through her fashion brand by blending tatreez with modern design. To her, tatreez simply means home — “identity, pride, storytelling,” said Hinnawi, who divides her time between Chicago and Jordan.
She has created embroidery work opportunities for Palestinian women in refugee camps in Jordan and has spoken about tatreez in the United States. Before the war, she also collaborated with women in Gaza.
Barkawi leads an online community of Palestinian and non-Palestinian embroiderers, some of whom have produced designs sold to raise funds for families in Gaza. One design incorporates a “water and seeds” motif alongside an embroidered message reading “Feed Gaza Now.”
Members living in different countries also collectively recreated a tapestry that once hung in a Gaza home that was bombed, with each person stitching a section and mailing it to the next.
Born in the United States to a Palestinian father and a Panamanian mother, Barkawi said that learning tatreez strengthened her sense of Palestinian identity. Completing her first thobe took two years. She wove in motifs with personal meaning — palm trees representing her name in Arabic, and orchids, Panama’s national flower, in honor of her mother. Though technically imperfect, it became the perfect dress for her Islamic marriage ceremony.
“I embedded my story as a Palestinian in the diaspora into this dress,” she said.
Back in Lebanon, Kabouli once dreamed of owning a tatreez piece for her wedding trousseau but could not afford one. After their parents passed away, an older sister had turned to tatreez work with Inaash to help support the family, and Kabouli learned the craft from her.
Now working as a production supervisor at Inaash in Beirut, Kabouli sees echoes of her younger self in the women laboring in refugee camps across Lebanon — many in the south, a region heavily affected by the most recent Israel-Hezbollah war. The richness of tatreez often stands in sharp contrast to the difficult conditions inside the camps, where residents face restrictions on employment and other aspects of daily life. With frequent power outages, women eager to complete a piece and receive payment may climb to rooftops to catch the last light of day, according to Jaafar.
Beyond the financial benefit, Kabouli said the act of embroidering can be grounding — almost meditative. She also carries a deeper longing: to one day visit the homeland her parents came from, in what is now Israel.
For now, tatreez gives her 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.”
