The Intimate Story of the Palestinian Thobe
Lina's first handmade thobe hung on the back of the door as she got ready to wear it to her Katib Kitaab (Islamic wedding ceremony) on Sept. 10, 2022.
I come from a long line of Panamanian seamstresses. When I was little, my mother taught me how to cross-stitch, a form of counted thread embroidery characterized by X-shaped stitches. Up close, each stitch may seem inconsequential but together, when viewed as a collective, the group of Xs using different colored threads form their maker’s expression.
When I was younger, to pass the time, I made patterns that looked like pixelated images by using a color-coded index of threads and basic counting. In time, I began to bring life into these images (or, maybe, tried to bring those images to life). Once, when I was 10 years old, I made my cousin a gift for her first birthday: a pastel-yellow duckling, wearing a baby blue knitted hat, dancing on grass.
In my teenage and college years, I set aside the hobby in favor of other pursuits. After I graduated university, though, my mother proposed we take an embroidery class together. She thought it would be a great, shared activity. And, well, she figured that one class in particular would capture my attention given my then-budding enchantment with my father’s homeland after a visit to the West Bank: a Palestinian embroidery class.
She was right.
As it turns out, we were weaving the threads of my heritage together: the stitch most common and most strongly associated with Palestinian embroidery – tatreez, in Arabic – was the same one that my mother had taught me, as her Panamanian ancestors had taught her before. Palestinian women have also passed tatreez on down from generation to generation, much like the Panamanian women who ultimately guided me to this other part of my heritage – and, indeed, inheritance.
Of course, no two people or peoples are the same. Unlike the more complicated and representational patterns of living creatures and objects that I grew up bringing to life, Palestinian embroidery design is distinguished by its much simpler and geometric practice, usually through an assortment of repeated motifs which are sometimes stitched using only one single color. What’s more distinctive is this form of embroidery serves as a key marker of Palestinian costume, thobe in Arabic, objects that have survived to tell the untold stories of Palestinian women over the last century.
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Before 1948, a Palestinian woman would have had a very localized identity, one that she would have tied to her wealth, region, village, and family. Through the embroidery on her garments, moreover, she’d have showcased the components of that identity: the threads’ colors, for marital status; the amount of embroidery for indicated economic position, with lavish patterns for prosperity and simple ones for scarcity or hardship; and motifs, revealing her origins. Because people used particular and localized geometric designs, they and others could know where a woman was from (down to her village) by simply glancing at her garments. In the villages of the southern Palestinian plain, for instance, women notably cross-stitched a “cypress tree” motif. Meanwhile, in central Palestine, women often embroidered the “tall date palm” motif on their garments.
From at least the late Ottoman era, peasant women in hundreds of small villages kept up these traditions. Aside from displaying creativity, good taste and skill, they also did so to exhibit village identity and pride.
The wearers of Palestinian dress tended to make their own garments, with few women using their skills in sewing and embroidery in a professional capacity before the mid-20th century. For a lot of these women, constructing their first dresses began with embroidery lessons as a child, sometimes as early as six years old. During these lessons, mothers, grandmothers and the other women of a child’s village would also share the collective catalogue of village patterns and motifs and like her ancestors, a child would commit these to her memory to also pass down to her daughters one day. Once a woman had built this repertoire of motifs, she would begin to embroider the panels of what would be her wedding garments (while, ideally with little departure, using her mother’s measurements as a proxy for her own measurements).
In addition to a woman’s ability to master this craft, a couple of factors played into how much of this labor was done by a woman herself versus how much would be outsourced to professional embroiderers and dressmakers. The first of which depended on her desires, or how large and lavish a woman hoped her array of dresses dedicated to her wedding would be. The second was tied to her circumstances: how quickly a wedding is arranged, the economic circumstances of the woman’s family and her soon-to-be husband’s for materials required to construct the wedding trousseau, along with the amount of non-dressmaking work that occupied the woman’s availability to embroider.
Ultimately, it has been a long-standing tradition that the circulation of embroidery and dress-making knowledge was and continues to be preserved generationally among Palestinian families. Style, method, and motifs were shared and copied from mother to daughter, and only subtly altered to reflect the specific, individual experiences and preferences of the woman conducting the work.
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Everything changed in, and after, 1948. Following what is known by Palestinians worldwide as the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, Palestinian women no longer saw their dress and embroidery as simply a form of personal expression and a rite of passage into womanhood. While they kept their traditions, Palestinian women increasingly used embroidery to also express the harsh realities of displacement, material [need], and their own resilience, generosity, and resourcefulness.
The Nakba saw over half of the rural population, comprising of nearly 900,000 individuals, expelled, and registered as refugees according to the United Nations. The women who faced this catastrophe lost both home and means of livelihood, and their dresses preserved from this time depict this account. Mismatched cloths woven and patches of asymmetrical motifs in distinctly different hues of the same color (or different colors altogether) make up the dresses of refugee women to prioritize size and fit. As they could no longer afford the time nor the funds to embroider beautiful and colorful luxury garments for themselves, these women relied on their own ingenuity and access to any form of material available, even if it meant incorporating the cloth used by flour sacks distributed by UNRWA to enlarge dresses they’ve inherited.
However, unlike many of their ancestors and due to the proximity of life in refugee camps, women were now exposed to a myriad of patterns and design arrangements from villages across historic Palestine. Motifs and styles were now shared and copied between not just mother and daughter, but between women representing their hometowns across the Palestinian region, creating a form of cultural exchange in the domain of Palestinian dress and embroidery.
It was through this cultural exchange that there would, for the first time, be the development of a style that is now recognized as simply Palestinian and not attributed to any specific region or village: the “6 branch” design, sometimes referred to as the shawal, a design centered around a structure of six vertical embroidered bands, “branches,” that run from waist to hem. This design structure provided women the ability to embroider within their own economic constraints either by adjusting the number of panels making up the bottom half of the dress (ranging from one and two panels up to six panels total) or the width of each panel embroidered. In serving as the first Palestinian style to develop along non-regional lines, the “6 branch” design initiated a collective identity spanning and connecting women and villages across Palestine.
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Over time, Palestinian women began using embroidery to preserve what was lost or threatened – including their sense of identity. As war broke out once again in 1967, camp life became a new reality, and Palestinian women, like those who became refugees due to the Nakba, looked to their embroidery to preserve the sense of identity that they had before becoming refugees. Figurative divisions within refugee camps were created by their inhabitants, recreating a symbolic map of historic Palestine whereby the embroidery worn on women’s dress served as markers of identification of their original home villages.
In newly occupied Palestine, Israelis now gained access to Palestinian-embroidered dresses that had not been available before the war, as refugees recently displaced by the 1967 war sold many of their embroidered dresses to support themselves and their families. Leila Khaled, member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, reported witnessing Israeli tourists dressed in Palestinian thobes as far as Europe, where she traveled to Berlin for a conference in 1970.
As more instances of cultural appropriation were observed, Palestinians, both male and female and across the social strata became more enraged. The Palestine Red Crescent Society, Inaash El Usra Society in El Bireh, Benevolent Art Society of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, and the Association of Women’s Committees for Social Work in Palestine were just a few of the NGOs founded around this time. These entities were not only humanitarian reactions to the masses of people driven from their homes into refugee camps, but also served to debunk the statement that “Palestine was a land without a people” through the deployment of wage labor specifically aimed at promoting embroidery as culturally Palestinian.
On December 9, 1987, Palestinian frustration exploded into what is known as the first Intifada, a collective sense of “shaking off,” after an Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) truck plowed into a line of oncoming cars in Gaza, killing four Palestinians and wounding seven others. As the popular uprising was coordinated across a set of resistance strategies that aimed to refrain from the use of weapons, Israel employed severe administrative measures in an effort to contain the Intifada, including school and university closures, heavy curfews on entire communities (sometimes for a week or more), house demolitions, and confiscation of Palestinian flags at protests, along with a ban of the display of Palestinian colors.
Palestinian women were beginning to participate more, and more overtly, in political life. Expanding beyond supportive roles in the home, they began producing evocative embroidered “Intifada dresses” or “flag dresses.” For a while, they made more nationalist motifs: the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque; checked patterns of the keffiyeh, itself increasingly symbolic; the letters “P-L-O” for the Palestine Liberation Organization; maps of historic Palestine; and Arabic calligraphy, with different slogans and statements. And, they often did so using the colors of the banned Palestinian flag: red, black, white, and green.
Taking on new power as a tool of Palestinian resistance, these thobes were worn directly on the bodies of Palestinian women, preventing their occupier from continuing mass confiscation of symbols pertaining to national identity and protest. Moreover, through the defiant act of embroidery itself, even if it meant under candlelight during curfews, Palestinian women prevented the erasure of their identity and preserved their ancestral craft for generations to follow.
While less explicit, ceremonial costumes embellished with traditional Palestinian embroidery also underwent a revival in weddings among Palestinians. Until recently, Palestinian women, both urban and rural, preferred western dress for wedding events but following the politicization of Palestinian dress and embroidery, the wedding outfit became an additional gesture to Palestinian national consciousness and pride.
These political urgencies were also reflected in the NGOs created and dedicated to embroidery projects. Some more outwardly political organizations like Inaash al-Usra were shut down by the Israeli army who claimed that the association was “inciting violence in support of the Palestinian uprising[1] .” Other new organizations were founded by women like Serene Husseini Shahid (co-founder of INAASH) after realizing that women were selling their dresses to make ends meet and these same dresses were being culturally appropriated by Israelis. Embroiderers themselves looked to employment by these organizations as not only a form of income, but as a means of expressing political resistance and by extension, continued existence, through the needle.
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A people without a place (or, rather, state) of their own, Palestinians now live around the world like other Levantines with far-flung diasporas. Outside of Palestine geographically, those in the diaspora have made valuable contributions too (at the very least shedding light onto Palestinian existence in spaces outside their indigenous territories, and often shaping stories long told by others in the area). They have used, and promoted the use of, Palestinian dress and embroidery in personal and political statements. And they have helped make such a dress a commodity, across borders and other barriers, as an art, a practice, and a business.
Becoming the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in the U.S. Congress, Representative Rashida Tlaib wore a heavily embroidered Palestinian dress for her swearing-in ceremony in 2019. Novelist Susan Muaddi Dajjaj, who is also of Palestinian descent and residing in the United States, then launched a call to action with the online hashtag #TweetYourThobe. Responding, Palestinian-Americans across the country went public on their social media accounts wearing their Palestinian clothes. Additionally, after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Palestinian women across the diaspora used social platforms to share, learn, and build community through Palestinian dress and embroidery.
While hundreds of thousands of Palestinian individuals, families, and communities have been displaced multiple times over the course of the last 73 years, the essence of what it means to be Palestinian continues to be preserved in the symbols made up in threads crisscrossed. The evolution of this identity has been molded by the women of Palestine, women who came face to face with the inconceivable realities of displacement, war, cultural appropriation, and whose voices are rarely heard in the narratives surrounding Palestinian resistance.
What is exceptionally noteworthy is that these women were able to pull from within the wreckage endured by Palestinian society remarkable resilience, a resilience so tenacious that it has literally been forged into material now culturally recognized on a global scale as the embodiment of Palestinian national identity and resistance.
Manifested at the seams of Palestinian traditional dress is the Palestinian identity, and while I learned the art of cross-stitch from my Panamanian mother, I carry on the Palestinian woman’s voice through my own embroidery.
And I also carry a bit of home with me, too: Should I ever yearn to visit my homeland, I need only to thread my needle.
