Tatreez & Craft

Wadie Haddad

1927–1978

Physician, co-founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement and the PFLP, and the architect of its aircraft hijackings — expelled by his own front, killed by poison in 1978.

Widad Kawar

1931–

Over fifty years she assembled more than two thousand Palestinian and Jordanian dresses and textiles, saving a village-by-village record of dress that 1948 had otherwise scattered.

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.

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.

Hebron Glass

The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.

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.

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'.

Tatreez

Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, inscribed by UNESCO in 2021, encoding village, region, and memory in thread.

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.

Tatreez

culture

Tatreez is traditional Palestinian embroidery, practiced above all by women, whose cross-stitched motifs and colors on the long dress called the thob signal a wearer's village, region, and social standing. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed the art of embroidery in Palestine on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Al-Majdal

Gaza

Al-Majdal (Majdal Asqalan) was a market town of some ten thousand people, famed for its weaving, on the coastal plain north of Gaza. Captured in November 1948, its remaining residents were held under military rule and finally expelled to Gaza in 1950; the town became the Israeli city of Ashkelon's Migdal quarter.

Tarshiha

Acre

Tarshiha was a large Muslim-Christian town of the upper Galilee, a tobacco-growing and craft center, bombed and captured in Operation Hiram in late October 1948. Most of its people fled or were driven into Lebanon, but several hundred remained or returned; its old core survives inside the merged city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha.

Bethlehem

Bethlehem Governorate, West Bank

Bethlehem — Beit Lahm — carries a double weight: the birthplace of Jesus beneath the sixth-century Church of the Nativity, and a town pressed between settlements and the separation wall that now seals it off from Jerusalem, five miles away.

Hebron

Hebron Governorate, southern West Bank

Hebron — al-Khalil, the city of Abraham — is one of the oldest living cities in the world, built around the Ibrahimi Mosque over the Cave of the Patriarchs, famed for its glass and its hospitality, and divided since 1997 into the sharpest microcosm of the occupation.

Nablus

Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank

Nablus — Roman Flavia Neapolis, nestled between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal — is the northern West Bank's proud commercial heart, famed for its Old City, its olive-oil soap and its knafeh, and shadowed by Balata, the West Bank's most populous refugee camp.

Darzah

embroidery

A nonprofit social-enterprise brand: tatreez and tahriri embroidered fashion and accessories, 100% handmade by women artisans in the West Bank.

Handmade Palestine

marketplace

A fair-trade marketplace for Palestinian-made tatreez, olive wood, jewelry, olive oil, and Nabulsi soap — with training, grants, and materials for women artisans.

Hirbawi

craft

Keffiyehs still woven on the original looms of the Hirbawi factory in Hebron — the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine. This is its official North America store.

Inaash Association

embroidery

Founded in 1969, Inaash produces traditional Palestinian hand embroidery with refugee women in Lebanon's camps — 350+ women working today, 9,000+ supported since inception.

The Nablus Soap Company

craft

Handmade traditional Nabulsi olive-oil soap — the classic paper-wrapped bar and its honey, rose, and pomegranate variants.

Palestinian Elegance

fashion

A Palestinian-owned modest fashion house: thobes, abayas, keffiyehs, and jewelry built around hand-finished tatreez embroidery — heritage made to be worn.

Palestinian Soap Cooperative

craft

A cooperative importing traditional olive-oil soap from Nablus's remaining family soap factories — Shaka'a, Canaan, Tbeleh, Tuqan — with profit-sharing across the industry.

Sunbula

marketplace

A Jerusalem fair-trade nonprofit selling embroidery, basketry, and olive-wood crafts from artisan groups across Palestine — over $2.4M paid to artisans since 2010.

Tatreez & Tea

embroidery

Wafa Ghnaim's Palestinian embroidery and dress-history institute — tutorials, classes, research, and a study collection of rematriated thobes.

Turquoise Mountain — Palestine

craft

A heritage charity founded in 2006 working with artisan communities in Palestine and the wider Levant to revive and sustain traditional crafts.

Women in Hebron

embroidery

A women's cooperative producing traditional Palestinian embroidery and handicrafts to economically empower women and their families in the Hebron area.