Palestinian art lives in thread, glass and stone. Across generations, craftspeople have used these materials to record places, preserve traditions and carry cultural memory through periods of upheaval. The Nakba, meaning "catastrophe," began after the UN's 1947 partition plan for Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel's creation, when Zionist militias and later the Israeli military expelled Palestinians from their homes and destroyed hundreds of villages. Around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced between 1947 and 1949, reshaping how some of these craft traditions were practised and preserved.
Tatreez — Arabic for "embroidery" — is the word for traditional Palestinian hand-stitching, worked mainly onto the thobe, a loose-fitting dress. Cross-stitch motifs of flowers, trees and birds once identified a maker's village, region and social status. Passed from mother to daughter, it remains a real source of income for women today, and UNESCO inscribed it on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2021. The Nakba changed what the thobe meant. As displacement scattered communities, embroidery became a way of carrying regional identity into new places. During the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation from 1987 to 1993, women further used their dresses to express national identity, stitching flags, maps and other symbols of homeland into the fabric.
Hebron, or Al-Khalil in Arabic, is the largest city in the West Bank and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — though giving an exact population figure is difficult given the scale of ongoing displacement and unrest since October 2023. Its glassmaking tradition is still alive, although much of today's production has moved beyond the historic Glass-Blower Quarter, or Haret al-Qazazeen. Palestinian families continue to practise the craft, shaping molten glass by hand with techniques passed down through generations. Traditional production relied on materials including sand and soda ash, while contemporary workshops commonly melt recycled glass instead.
Palestine's most striking mosaic legacy sits at Hisham's Palace, an 8th-century Umayyad site near Jericho. Its bathhouse floor covers roughly 825 square metres across 38 mosaic scenes, including the celebrated "Tree of Life" — a lion attacking a gazelle beneath a fruit-laden tree. Unlike tatreez and Hebron glass, mosaic survives here mainly as archaeological legacy rather than a continuously practised trade — though smaller Bethlehem studios now revive the technique in micro-mosaic jewellery.
Email: anoushkakundu@newindianexpress.com
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