Nakba

"In many cases, all that was left of a village—the only way you knew there had been a village—was the dresses on women's backs." -Farah Munayyer

The practice and production of embroidery in Palestine became heavily politicized following the foundation of the State of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian war in 1948. The disruption to the land resulted in the migration of around 700,000 Palestinians to the West Bank, Gaza, and surrounding Arab countries, mainly Lebanon and Jordan. As hundreds of thousands of people sought safety in other regions, hundreds of Palestinian coastal villages ceased to exist, and many others were destroyed and repopulated by Jewish immigrants. In these new refugee camps, poverty vastly increased, and the tradition of embroidery was abandoned by the younger generation, and those few portable items such as jewelry and dresses were eventually sold to survive.

six-branch dress

dress

Date: 1970S

Medium: Synthetic, cotton

courtesy of Textile Research Centre

A Palestinian woman in Syria wearing a six-branch dress.

Courtesy of Embroidered textiles: a world guide to traditional patterns by Shelia PAINE.

towards the 1970s, tatreez slowly began to find itself in Palestinian garments, with stylistic regional differences becoming blurred in favor of a communal style. Workshops set up by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and other NGOs in refugee camps taught women to turn embroidery into a professional skill by which they can earn a living while keeping the traditions of their homeland alive.

a new design known as the "six-branch" dress emerged. This style was influenced by a pre-1948 design from the Ramallah region and featured six vertical bands of embroidery that ran from the waist to the hem. Economic scarcity drove the emergence of this new design, as it provided flexibility in embroidery that reflected one's economic necessities. For instance, the "branches" could be embroidered thinly during tough times, but broadened when more money was available for small luxuries.

Fatima al-Qasim in a Palestinian Traditional Thobe, the 1960s

COURTESY OF THE PALESTINIAN MUSEUM

Annual Party at Birzeit Preparatory Girls School, 13 May 1974

COURTESY OF THE PALESTINIAN MUSEUM

intifada or 'FLAG' DRESS

Young women began to look towards embroidery as a way to resurrect tradition and find a sense of belonging during the first Intifada (1987–1993). The Intifada was a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, during which more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, including 237 children under the age of 17 (IMEU). Wearing traditional Palestinian embroidery came to express Palestinian women’s national pride. Embroidery during this time became a critical tool, as Israel banned Palestinian garments associated with the resistance such as the keffiyeh. Thus, women began to embroider motifs such as verses from Palestinian poems, the Palestinian flag, the Dome of the Rock, and boys throwing stones as an act of symbolic protest.