한 땀으로 새기는 존재의 증명

A Stitch as Proof of Existence

一針ごとに刻まれる、存在の証明

At the beginning of 2026, Palestine and Israel agreed to a ceasefire through U.S. mediation, yet the violence and genocide inflicted on Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel have continued unabated. The brutality of the war, which began in Gaza on October 7, 2023, swept through life in the West Bank like a tsunami. At the time, I was reporting there, and I was often detained by Israeli soldiers and made to stand with my head against the separation wall while they searched me. More difficult still were the moments when I witnessed, before my eyes, the deaths of Palestinians. Those who remained tried to gather themselves by leaning on one another, but the memory of those days and nights—when I could feel my body trembling through the dark—remains vivid.

After returning home from my reporting, I looked for some way to quiet an immeasurable anguish. From September 2024 to January 2025, I devoted one day each week to a one-person protest in Gwanghwamun Square, embroidering Palestinian poppy tatreez—a traditional Palestinian embroidery practice, the word tatreez meaning “embroidery” in Arabic. This act later led to a workshop1 with multinational citizens seeking solidarity with Palestine. Palestinian embroidery became a warm medium for those mourning pain and death. What drew me to tatreez was the sense of one another’s well-being.2 In a time when being well had become difficult for all of us, we needed that sense once again.

Hantol, A Breath, 2025. Palestinian poppy tatreez on white cloth, dimensions variable.

Women and minorities, forced into silence amid countless forms of upheaval, moved their hands instead of speaking. Through sewing, they made a living, held daily life together, and sustained the work of keeping life alive. Beneath our sense of well-being—that we are clothed, fed, and able to sleep—were those sewing hands. Just as we rarely notice the air we breathe, sewing, too, has remained beside us without drawing attention to itself. If the line of stitching was one of care and hospitality, then the line of the separation wall—over 700 kilometers long and 8 meters high—was one of unequivocal discrimination. Faced with such a merciless decision to discriminate against lives bound up with Palestine, I felt like a sinner without end.

During the same period, Rachel Dedman, author of Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine, was at work on a book about tatreez. As I read her essays, I felt as though I were sitting beside the person stitching, watching the movement of her hands. I followed this unexpected connection as though we were exchanging stitches through text.

” I write this at a time of genocide in Gaza, when relentless horrors are unfolding in front of our eyes. Amid incredible human loss and collective trauma, speaking about clothing may seem unimportant, even trivial. However, as I hope this essay will make clear, tatreez — the rich Palestinian tradition of embroidery — constitutes more than heritage.”3

Folklore is political in itself. It means that I exist.

Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine traces the ways embroidery and resistance have been intertwined in Palestine, and, through the exhibition research project Material Power, seeks to understand and articulate Palestinian embroidery as a practice that has continued to evolve from the late nineteenth century to the present. Garments worn on the body are deeply rooted in political, social, and economic dynamics, as well as in the emotional lives of their makers. For the author, embroidery is an intimate medium through which the human history of a place can be unfolded.

Over the course of a decade, Dedman met embroidery artisans, curators, and collectors in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, learning from and researching garments and craft objects marked by tatreez firsthand. Much of tatreez remains alive through oral tradition—as knowledge passed directly from one person to another over a cup of coffee. As Subhiye Krayem, an embroiderer we met in Ein el-Hilweh camp in Lebanon, puts it: ‘Folklore is a politics unto itself. It means that I exist.’

“Tatreez is Palestinian life. In its repetitive binding of thread to fabric, embroidery involves the very simplest of gestures, and is a practice that embodies resilience.”4

WHAT IS PALESTINIAN EMBROIDERY

The exhibition Material Power begins not with exceptional ceremonial dress, but with everyday garments—clothes not usually collected or exhibited. Plain dresses worn daily by women in the late nineteenth century. The openings in the chest panels mark where babies were once nursed, later stitched closed after they were weaned. The patches at the elbows and knees bear witness to the time she spent kneading earth and washing vegetables on her knees. Turn the garments inside out, and their making is revealed in full: a mosaic of layers, additions, and overwriting, through which one begins to discern the changing “hand” of the embroidery. These modest clothes do not appear as “finished museum objects,” tied to a single maker and a clearly defined moment of production. Instead, they come forward as living presences—materially transformed over time, passing through the hands of others. The resistance of these humble garments is quite striking.

“I love the idea that a dress starts life in one form, and over the years has bits added to it or replaced so often that by the end of its life not one patch of the original remains, and yet it is still the same dress.”5

EMBROIDERY AS LANGUAGE

Tatreez is often described as a rich visual language shared among women. In late nineteenth-century Palestine, clothing and embroidery served as important markers of character, identity, and background. Colors, motifs, and stitching techniques also varied from region to region. Hebron, for example, was known for its dense cross-stitching; Bethlehem for the tahriri6 technique; and Galilee for its lighter touch in embroidery. Gaza was known for its vivid pinks and geometric motifs, including the necklace pattern known as qeladeh, which functioned both as a permanent adornment and as an amulet. There is something beautiful, poetic, and tragic in the idea of carrying a form of lasting protection on the body.

Figure 11: Dress from Gaza, 1940s, from the collection of Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi Museum for Palestinian Heritage. Image by Kayané Antreassian, courtesy of the Palestinian Museum. © Common Threads Press

At the same time, the meaning of the thobe—an embroidered ankle-length garment—shifted according to class. For some women, it was the most precious possession they carried with them even into exile; for others, it may have been no more than a costume in an internalized orientalist fantasy. Palestinian embroidery lies at the intersection of identity and class, gender and history; its meaning shifts entirely depending on who wears it.

THE EMBROIDERY WOMAN

If embroidery once functioned as a language that expressed region and identity, how did that language change in the face of mass displacement and diaspora? The Nakba7 of 1948 altered the lives of all Palestinians. That transformation remains sharply visible in the “Nakba dress.” Made by a woman from Ramallah, the dress was given to another woman who had lost her home during the Nakba and walked into the West Bank. Its new owner enlarged it by adding panels cut from a flour sack distributed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Along the side of the garment, the first letter of tahin (“flour”) still remains faintly visible. The materiality of this dress speaks not only of desperation, but also of the generosity and resilience shown in a time of profound hardship.

Figure 14: Dress from Ramallah, 1930s, from the collection of Maha Abu Shosheh. Image by Kayané Antreassian, courtesy of the Palestinian Museum. © Common Threads Press

Embroidery did not disappear after the Nakba; it changed form. In the refugee camps, regional distinctions were flattened, yet at the same time there emerged a revival of traditional heritage in resistance to cultural erasure. The fellahi woman in an embroidered dress became a symbol of resistance, and “the embroidery woman” was popularized by liberation artists in the 1970s. Yet that image also had the effect of reducing her to a simplified symbol. The exhibition makes this clear.

“They speak to the ability of embroidery and textiles to bear witness, hold memory and tell stories, and in so doing constitute a quiet form of resistance in themselves.”8

EMBROIDERY AND THE INTIFADA

From the 1970s onward, the image of the “embroidery woman” circulated through posters and became bound up with Palestinian national symbolism, while the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used embroidery exhibitions as a form of soft diplomacy. Separated from the body, embroidery became a tool for articulating national identity. During the First Intifada9 in 1987, when displaying the Palestinian flag in public was illegal, women began embroidering symbols of resistance directly onto their clothing. The “Intifada dress” was the result of work completed over months, and sometimes years, in villages under siege and at times without electricity. Embroidery continued even inside prisons. Imprisoned men gathered olive pits and pulled threads from towels to make pieces for their wives and daughters. In doing so, they challenged the notion that embroidery could be reduced to “women’s work,” showing that resistance and tenderness can coexist within a single stitch.

Figures 21 [above] and 22 [overleaf]: Intifada dresses, 1987–1993, from the collection of Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress. Photo: Jo Underhill, courtesy of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. © Common Threads Press

FROM LOVE TO LABOUR

Yet embroidery’s emergence as a symbol of resistance does not fix its meaning once and for all. Today, it is more commonly encountered as a commodity—on cushions, bags, and key rings—than as everyday clothing. Since 1948, embroidery has shifted from a labor of love to paid work, and from there into a product for the global market. NGOs speak in the language of “women’s empowerment,” yet embroiderers receive only 10 to 25 percent of the final sale price for work that may take months, while holding little creative authority. The purchase of embroidery is presented as a gesture of solidarity with Palestine, but beneath this lies a capitalist model grounded in precarious labor and unequal access to knowledge. And yet, across generations of displacement, embroidery remains a source of pride for refugee women, offering a meaningful link to home.

The Vibration of Stitching and Solidarity

Throughout the book, I imagined stitches exchanged through text. With each stitch laid down, the line grew taut, and within it I could sense a small vibration. It is a tremor difficult to catch unless one looks with care, and a resonance impossible to hear unless one listens closely. To sit beside the person stitching is to perceive, however faintly, the energy carried by sewing. This book offers that experience of sitting beside her.

Before it was a beautiful heritage, Palestinian embroidery was a language of living bodies, and a testimony carried by women who did not relinquish their generosity even in moments of desperation. Reading Rachel Dedman’s book, I came to see more clearly where the roots of that feeling lay. Stitching has always sustained life quietly at our side, and those hands have not stopped even now. Stitching the Intifada invites us to imagine a gentle yet unwavering solidarity arising from that quiet vibration.

Text. Hantol

Hantol is an activist, documentarian, and visual artist whose work records realities erased or silenced by violence and exclusion, while seeking languages and forms that make other ways of living visible. He has researched methods for recording and conveying the testimonies of Rohingya refugees, and presented the solo exhibition Embroidering Rohingya Voices: The Home We Long For (Forever Gallery, 2025), which traced refugees’ wishes through traditional embroidery techniques. After reporting from Palestine and Israel in 2023, he wrote Landscape of Lines: On the Lines Severed by Violence and the Lines That Reconnect Community, first published through Text Movement Field/Shelf.

He also works as a curator whose practice centers on craft, and has organized A Modest Spoon Case (KCDF, 2024) and Jariida (Museorok, 2025), a solo exhibition by Sun-hee Park, a practitioner of maedeup (traditional Korean knotting) and an apprentice of the National Intangible Cultural Heritage master in the field.

Like his artist name, Hantol—meaning “a single grain,” often used of a grain of rice—his practice imagines an artistic space where the languages of life are gathered and shared, one by one.

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