What survives
Culture & Artifacts
A people survives in its stitches, songs, kitchens, and cinemas. These are the artifacts of Palestinian life — each with the Arabic name it is actually known by.
44 artifacts · 42 named in Arabic · 7 kinds
- كوفية
Symbol Keffiyeh
The black-and-white checkered headscarf that became the most recognizable emblem of Palestinian identity and resistance.
Image: Yeghishedaviti (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - تطريز
Craft Tatreez
Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, inscribed by UNESCO in 2021, encoding village, region, and memory in thread.
Image: Ma'moun Othman (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - ثوب الانتفاضة
Craft Thob al-Intifada
The Intifada dress: when the Palestinian flag could not be flown, women cross-stitched it — with the map, the word Palestine, and the letters PLO — onto the dresses they wore in the street.
Image: Ma'moun Othman (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - دبكة
Dance Dabke
The communal line dance of Palestine and the Levant, performed at weddings and celebrations, with stamping steps that shake the earth.
Image: Sarah Canbel (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - فرقة الفنون الشعبية الفلسطينية
Dance El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe
A volunteer troupe founded in 1979 that carries Palestinian folk dance and song into staged work, schools, community centers, and new generations of performers.
- حنظلة
Symbol Handala
Naji al-Ali's barefoot refugee child, back turned to the viewer, who has watched over Palestinian political cartoons since 1969.
Image: Friends123 (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons - مفتاح العودة
Symbol Keys of Return
The house keys carried out of Palestine in 1948, passed down through refugee generations as deeds to homes and to memory.
Image: Jj M Ḥtp (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons - برتقال يافا
Symbol The Jaffa Orange
The Shamouti orange, bred by Palestinian growers near Jaffa in the mid-nineteenth century — Palestine's great export, and after 1948 a brand without its farmers.
Image: Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons - الصبر
Symbol The Sabr
The prickly pear, whose Arabic name means patience: planted as a field boundary before 1948, and now growing in hedges that trace the outlines of villages that are no longer there.
Image: Artemas Ward, 'The Encyclopedia of Food' (1923), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons - البطيخ
Symbol The Watermelon
A fruit that carries the flag's four colours — adopted as a Palestinian sign under Israel's ban on the flag, and revived online when the ban returned in other forms.
- الخزف الأرمني في القدس
Craft Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem
A craft born from two catastrophes: Armenian genocide survivors brought to Jerusalem in 1919 to retile the Dome of the Rock, whose workshops became a Palestinian tradition.
Image: Deror Avi (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons - الصدف البيت لحمي
Craft Bethlehem Mother-of-Pearl
Nacre carved into crosses, rosaries, and models of the Church of the Nativity — a Bethlehem trade at least four centuries old, and for much of it a women's trade.
Image: Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons - زجاج الخليل
Craft Hebron Glass
The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.
Image: FlightlessTofu (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - الصابون النابلسي
Craft Nabulsi Soap
Ivory cubes of olive oil soap stacked in drying towers — an industry that made Nablus the soap capital of the Levant, and that has been dismantled by earthquake, border, and occupation.
Image: Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons - الفخار الفلسطيني
Craft Palestinian Pottery
Red clay thrown on a hand wheel in Gaza and Hebron — cooking pots, water jars, and plant vessels made by families whose surname is simply 'the potter'.
Image: Randa107 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - تطريز بئر السبع
Craft The Blue Thread of Beersheba
In the Beersheba district the colour of the thread stated a woman's marital status: blue for the unmarried and the widowed, red and pink added when she married again.
Image: Ma'moun Othman (CC BY-SA 4.0), photographed at Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, Amman, via Wikimedia Commons - جمعيات التطريز
Craft The Embroidery Cooperatives
The societies — In'ash al-Usra in al-Bireh, In'aash al-Mukhayyam in Beirut — that turned tatreez from a village skill into paid work, and in doing so kept it being taught.
Image: Randa107 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - مصنع الحرباوي
Craft The Hirbawi Loom
A weaving shed in Hebron, opened in 1961, that is the last place in Palestine where the Palestinian keffiyeh is still made.
Image: TrickyH (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - القبة
Craft The Qabbeh
The embroidered square at the chest of a Palestinian dress — worked separately, moved from dress to dress, and the single clearest statement of which district a woman came from.
Image: Ma'moun Othman (CC BY-SA 4.0), photographed at Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, Amman, via Wikimedia Commons - الشطوة
Craft The Shatweh
The tall coin-covered cap of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Lifta — worn by married women, and carrying the coins of her own dowry on her head.
Image: Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (no known restrictions on publication), via Wikimedia Commons - الصمادة
Craft The Smadeh
The Ramallah coin cap — a padded ring packed with silver, worn under the veil, and a woman's own cash reserve carried on her head.
Image: Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (no known restrictions on publication), via Wikimedia Commons - الثوب
Craft The Thobe
The Palestinian dress and its regional grammar — the chest panel, the coin headdress of Ramallah, the gold-couched malak of Bethlehem — and what happened to that geography after 1948.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons - كنافة نابلسية
Cuisine Knafeh Nabulsiyeh
Nablus's dessert of salty white cheese under orange pastry, drenched in syrup and cut from a tray the width of a table.
Image: Guillaume Paumier (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons - مفتول
Cuisine Maftoul
Palestinian couscous, rolled by hand between the palms from bulgur and wheat flour — a grain that has to be made by somebody, and so is made in kitchens from Jenin to Kuwait to Amman.
Image: Salwa Farwaneh Dameh (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons - مسخن ومقلوبة
Cuisine Musakhan and Maqluba
Two emblematic dishes of the Palestinian table: sumac-and-onion chicken over taboon bread, and the 'upside-down' rice pot.
Image: Amaiursancho5 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - الصاج
Cuisine The Saj
The domed iron griddle set over an open fire, and the paper-thin shrak baked on it in seconds — the other Palestinian bread oven, the one that travels.
Image: Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons - الطابون
Cuisine The Taboon
The clay oven of the Palestinian village, its floor lined with stones that dimple the bread — the vessel that made taboon bread, and made bread-making a shared women's labour.
Image: Photograph by Jak (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons — taboon oven at Kufr Jammal - الزعتر والعكوب
Cuisine Za'atar and Akkoub
Two wild plants at the centre of the Palestinian table — and the Israeli nature-protection laws that made picking them a criminal offence.
Image: Davidbena (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - دمي فلسطيني
Music Dammi Falastini
Mohammed Assaf's modern Palestinian identity song — catalogued as a 2014 single, carried by a title that says it without euphemism: My Blood Is Palestinian.
- الهيب هوب الفلسطيني
Music Palestinian Hip-Hop
Rap in Arabic, from Lydda to London — a generation that took the newest available form and used it to keep the oldest available thing, the language.
Image: Camilla Lorentsen for Riddu Riđđu (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - الموسيقى الفلسطينية
Music Palestinian Music
From the improvised verse of zajal and the laments of the mawwal to the hip-hop of DAM — a music that carries memory, celebration, and defiance.
Image: glichfield (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons - أغاني ثورة 1936
Music Songs of the 1936 Revolt
During the Great Palestinian Rebellion the fighters' communication system ran partly on singing. Women passed British troop movements along in chants that sounded like children's rhymes, and a printer's apprentice from Haifa turned the whole revolt into colloquial verse.
- أغاني السجن
Music The Prison Songs
Palestinians have been singing about the inside of prisons since the British hanged three men at Acre in 1930. The songs name names, travel by memory rather than print, and are still sung at vigils held for people currently in cells.
Film Palestinian Cinema
A national cinema without a state — films that carry Palestinian stories from Paradise Now to The Present onto the world's screens.
- البذور البلدية
Tradition Baladi Seeds
The heirloom varieties Palestinian farmers saved from harvest to harvest — jadu'i watermelon, abu samra wheat, baladi tomato — and the seed library in Battir working to put them back in the ground.
Image: Idobi (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons — the terraced village of Battir - الدقّ
Tradition Deqq
The tattooed marks worn on the chin, lips and hands by village and bedouin women in Palestine — recorded in photographs far more thoroughly than in writing.
Image: Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (no known restrictions on publication), via Wikimedia Commons - يوم الأرض
Tradition Land Day
30 March 1976 — the general strike against land confiscation in the Galilee in which six Palestinians were killed, and the day Palestinians have marked every year since.
Image: ISM Palestine (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons - ليلة الحنّة
Tradition Laylat al-Henna
The women's night before a Palestinian wedding — henna ground and mixed, patterns worked onto the bride's hands, and the songs that go with it.
Image: Manintheopt (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - موسم النبي موسى
Tradition Mawsim al-Nabi Musa
The week-long season of pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the shrine near Jericho — prayers, drums, banners and dancing — that became, under the Mandate, a Palestinian political gathering.
Image: Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons - يوم النكبة
Tradition Nakba Day
Fifteen May: the day Palestinians everywhere stop and count what was lost. Marked informally from 1949, made national in 1998, and mandated by the UN General Assembly for the first time in 2022.
- صمود
Tradition Sumud
Steadfastness — the Palestinian ethic of remaining on the land and enduring, turned from a posture of survival into a way of life.
Image: Badarin (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons - وصية الشهيد
Tradition The Martyr's Testament
The last letter, written the night before an execution and published in the newspapers the day after. Three men wrote them at Acre in June 1930, in three different registers, and set the shape of a Palestinian genre that has not stopped being written.
Tradition The Olive Harvest
The autumn gathering of olives — a season of family, economy, and rootedness in a land where some trees are centuries old.
Image: Badarin (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons- الحكاية الشعبية الفلسطينية
Tradition The Palestinian Hikaye
The winter-evening tale told by women to women and children — a folk narrative form inscribed by UNESCO in 2008, and a critique of society delivered from inside the household.
Nothing of this kind yet.