Stitching the Palestinian History of Resistance and Sumud
Jehan Alfarra and Jan Chalmers
Oxford is one among many places around the world which have special relationships of various kinds with Palestine and Palestinians. The Oxford-Ramallah Friendship Association (ORFA) was formed in 2002 after volunteer observers from Oxford had witnessed Israeli military assaults in Ramallah. The relationship between the two cities has grown stronger over time. It was formalized in 2019 when the Lord Mayor of Oxford, Colin Cook, welcomed the Mayor of Ramallah, Musa Hadid and the Palestinian Ambassador, Husam Zumlot, to Oxford Town Hall. A twinning agreement was signed, celebrating many years of grassroots friendship between people in the two cities.
Another link between Oxford and Palestine was established in 2009 in response to a devastating Israeli assault on Gaza. It was met with a very muted response from the UK government. To remind people in Gaza that they had not been forgotten in Britain, a group of individuals in Oxford raised money to initiate an annual postgraduate scholarship scheme at Oxford Brookes University. The scheme has resulted in Master’s graduates in development and emergency practice, e-business, engineering, human rights law, computing and public health.6
A couple of years after the Gaza-Brookes Scholarship had been established, the “Palestinian History Tapestry Project” was initiated in Oxford.7 The result was the creation of a substantial history tapestry stitched by Palestinian embroiderers in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan, telling the story of Palestine and Palestinians. In this chapter, we provide two personal accounts of the evolution of the “Palestinian History Tapestry Project.”
Jehan Alfarra
It was 1988. The First Palestinian Intifada was in full swing. My mother, an ambitious young woman, had recently returned to Gaza from Soviet Russia where she had studied for a medical degree. She started working at the Shifa Hospital, only meters away from where she lived in Gaza City. It was there that she met my father, also a doctor, for the first time. By January 1989, they were married. Due to a night curfew imposed by the Israeli Occupation forces in the city of Khan Younis, my parents’ marriage ceremony was a small, muted affair held at home.
I was born the following year. I was too young to remember the events of the First Intifada, but I vividly recall the Second Intifada in 2000. We awoke to the news that Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, had entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque. There was widespread outrage. Mass Palestinian protests and a general strike quickly followed.
I remember, one day, I was on my way back from school and crossing the road when a tank approached from a side street. The sheer size of its gun pointing towards me brought me to my knees in fear. That was one of the first and most unforgettable moments I had to process as a young child. By that point, I was already familiar with the sight of Israeli watchtowers at checkpoints and Israeli soldiers with their crackling radios, loaded rifles and armored jeeps. To this day, in fact, boxy SUVs remind me of Israeli jeeps and soldiers and bring back memories of the Intifada. However, finding myself that close to a moving tank—it must have been just a meter or two away—filled me with dread I had never known before.
By the time I was a teenager, I had grown accustomed to the sounds of bullets and shells. I had seen young men shot by armed soldiers in green uniforms. I had learned what death sounds and smells like. Running out of school wrapped in a blanket of smoke from burning tires became a standard occurrence.
In 2005, the Second Intifada was over and Israeli troops had “disengaged” from Gaza. Israeli settlements were dismantled. For the first time, I was able to visit the beach of Khan Younis, which had been used exclusively by Israeli settlers. Previously, I had only been able to see the beach from rooftops overlooking the coast in the distance. Now, I no longer had to pass through an Israeli checkpoint to go from Khan Younis to Gaza City to visit my grandmother, my aunts and cousins.
Except Palestine was still occupied. The Israeli military still exercised full control. Like many other Palestinians in Gaza, we had a picture of Al-Aqsa Mosque at home, but I had never actually seen the mosque. The idea of visiting Jerusalem was a dream. An impossible dream. Being from Gaza meant that any visit to the West Bank or Jerusalem came with conditions, ones I did not meet. However, something unexpected happened in 2006. I won a scholarship to study for a year of high school in the United States as an exchange student. It was a program funded by the US State Department. To apply for a student visa to visit the US, I was granted a special permit to apply in person at the US Consulate General in Jerusalem.
As part of a group of students on the same program accompanied by US officials, a van took us from Gaza through the Erez Crossing to the Consulate office in Jerusalem, and back. We were allowed out of the van only once, to buy some souvenirs from a shop. I could not simply go out and explore this mesmerizing city of which I had often dreamed, nor speak to fellow Palestinians who lived there. It did not matter that it was part of my homeland, I could only see the holy city from the windows of the moving van. Suffice to say, that was the extent of my experience of Palestine outside of Gaza.
Less than a decade later, I found myself sitting around a dinner table halfway across the world in Oxford with two other Palestinian women, Yasmin from the Naqab and Jumana from Bethlehem. We were nibbling delicious sfeeha, a traditional Palestinian meat pie that our hostess, Yasmin, had prepared, as we shared stories of home and the future. We were joined by Jan and Iain Chalmers, friends of Palestine since the 1960s.
As Jan recounted one of her many stories about Palestinian embroiderers she had met in Palestine, Yasmin brought out a beautiful calligraphy tapestry she had embroidered. It was a verse from a poem by the Palestinian poet, Lutfi Zaghloul. It translates as: “You have a great place in our hearts. Oh Jerusalem, you are beloved.”
It was perfect. There we were, three Palestinian women from Gaza, the West Bank and the Naqab casually sharing a flavorsome Palestinian meal and talking Palestinian embroidery with British friends. We did not have to worry about checkpoints or permits. Now Jerusalem was also present through this beautiful artwork, which was Yasmin’s contribution to the “Palestinian History Tapestry Project.”
It was a truly surreal moment for me. I could not help but think how impossible this would have been to achieve in Palestine, our shared homeland. I know I would have probably never been able to meet these women or learn about their lives.
I had been awarded a scholarship to study for an MSc in Computing at Oxford Brookes University and was hoping to develop a web-based business solution to the land, sea and air blockade that Israel had imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2007. However, after I came to Oxford, I found more than that. Apart from being home to the oldest university in the English-speaking world, this charming city was also the birthplace and home of the “Palestinian History Tapestry Project,” which I now co-chair.
I could feel right away how this tapestry project brought Palestinian women together. Despite our geographical fragmentation and our different experiences of the occupation, we were piecing together the story of Palestine through the ages, one panel at a time. It is fitting that these stories and interpretations of different experiences and moments throughout Palestinian history would be articulated using the embroidery stitches that have long been central to Palestinian culture and which are familiar to us all, wherever we may be.
That is the essence of the Palestinian History Tapestry. It is a battle against the fragmentation of Palestinian society and the Palestinian experience imposed by the Israeli state or, as some of the Palestinian embroiderers have put it, the project serves as a lam shamel (Arabic for family reunification) through art. Whether living under direct military occupation in the West Bank or a suffocating blockade in Gaza, facing displacement in the Naqab and Jerusalem, or in isolation as refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, simple threads have managed to weave us together in a shared manifestation of resistance. The power of thread and its use as a means of resistance is not a novel notion, and I have long been fascinated by the effects of conflict and war on dress and textiles.
Threads have immense power. They certainly have the capacity to shape a nation’s perception and standing. To Palestinians, threads are that, and much more. They embed our identity, heritage, unity and resistance. These effects are not confined to embroidery. The Arab kuffiyyeh, for instance, with its chequered black and white patterns, has morphed over time into a fundamentally Palestinian symbol, deeply associated with the national struggle for liberation.
The historical significance of traditional cross-stitch (tasliba) and the Bethlehem couching (tahriri) embroidery, passed down from one Palestinian generation to the next, lends this artistic needlework a special place within Palestinian culture and heritage.
For centuries, Palestinian women have donned meticulously hand-stitched thobes (traditional dresses) that proudly and distinctly reflected their cultural and regional roots. The style, stitching method and colors of a local Palestinian woman’s dress often identified her status and place of origin within historic Palestine itself. Many of the motifs featured in Palestinian embroidery, traditionally comprised of geometric designs, are indicative of the long and diverse history of the land. Some of them bear names inspired by various periods of Palestinian history, such as the “Canaanite Star” and “Tents of Pasha.”
However, the style of embroidery employed in the panels of the Palestinian History Tapestry marks a shift from the traditional designs. These usually rely on traditional patterns and motifs incorporated in thobes and other household linens and personal items, such as cushions and handbags. The Palestinian History Tapestry Project required that traditional embroidery designs should be used to capture stories and recount historical events, making the Tapestry an extension of the legacy of the traditional Palestinian dress and its great social and symbolic value.
Since the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the Israeli State, embroidery has been widely used to visualize symbols and icons of the Palestinian struggle for independence, thus becoming a valuable way of keeping Palestinian identity and heritage alive. It would not be uncommon to find embroidered tapestries hanging in the homes of Palestinians within Palestine as well as in the Diaspora, displaying the map of Palestine or an image of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. Another commonly stitched image is that of the “Key of Return,” which symbolizes the UN-declared right of Palestinians to return to their pre-1948 homes in historic Palestine, which they were forced to leave in order to make way for the establishment of the State of Israel.
Beyond these national symbols, other folkloric scenes and depictions of everyday Palestinian life before the Zionist Occupation are also commonly stitched. These include the traditional Palestinian wedding and the pre-wedding henna party.
The Palestinian History Tapestry embroiderers have embraced and developed this practice of illustration.
Palestine’s history, since the assault of the Palestinian homeland by Zionist forces in 1948 and the subsequent and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, currently accounts for a large segment of the Tapestry. Events and accounts since that critical juncture are represented under the theme of sumud—“steadfastness”—a concept that has come to define the current stage of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
The Tapestry project continues to grow and evolve as present-day events unfold, with the Great March of Return and the Unity Intifada being two of the most recent episodes in the Palestinian struggle to be represented. Every panel of the project is a compelling piece of art in its own right, recording and interpreting a specific event, place or symbol that tells a story.
Most of the Palestinian women who stitched these panels have never met, except through their embroidery and contributions to the Tapestry. Their embroidery highlights their individual styles, experiences and impressions all of which blend effortlessly. As one of the embroiderers remarked, “Each woman’s special touch and unique character becomes evident in the finished panel.” Many of them proudly “sign off” their panels, leaving their names forever embroidered in the Tapestry’s artistic chronicle of Palestinian history.
Some of these women are remembered in an entirely different way. Samar Alhallaq is one such woman. She was introduced to Jan and the Tapestry Project when she visited Oxford in 2013, when her husband was studying at Oxford Brookes University. She stitched a panel based on an image widely used on social media to express solidarity with Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli jails. The panel reads: Samidun (Arabic for “steadfast”).
Samar, her two children and unborn baby were all killed, a year later, during Israel’s 2014 summer onslaught on Gaza, which killed over 2,200 Palestinians (UN-OCHA).
Her panel, though originally created in solidarity with Palestinian women prisoners and their steadfast determination to attain their rights, now also evokes memories of one of Israel’s most brutal offensives against the besieged Gaza Strip and the hundreds of innocent women and children who lost their lives.
Every thread and every stitch by Palestinian embroiderers tell a piece of the story of Palestine. Every panel narrates a tale of joyous celebrations or of sorrow and struggle but, ultimately, it speaks of our collective hopes and dreams of freedom and justice. This is why the Palestinian History Tapestry Project is critical for us. This project has been a labor of love and solidarity between Palestinians and British friends of Palestine.
Since its inception in 2012, the Tapestry has been widely promoted through its website8 and in talks, publications, and exhibitions. Fifteen eminent Patrons have endorsed the Project. Most important of all, 100 meticulously embroidered panels have so far been created, illustrating the long and diverse history of Palestine and the tribulations of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.
The current leadership of the Project, with two co-Chairs from Gaza, will increase awareness about the Tapestry and the history of Palestine and Palestinians, and help to turn it into an iconic national treasure. Unlike the “Keiskamma Tapestry” which proudly hangs in the South African Parliament Building, at present there is no such possibility to permanently exhibit the Palestinian History Tapestry in occupied Palestine where it would be vulnerable to damage and perhaps destruction. Today, in 2021, as it continues to grow, the Tapestry remains in Oxford, in the hope that, one day, it will be on display in a free Palestine and stand as witness to the record of a rich and turbulent past.
6 “Gaza Scholarship,” Oxford Brookes University, accessed September 30, 2021, https://www.brookesalumni.co.uk/support-us/gaza-scholarship
7 The Palestinian History Tapestry, last accessed September 30, 2021, http://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org
8 The Palestinian History Tapestry, last accessed September 30, 2021, http://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org.