Walk into almost any Palestinian home, and you’re almost guaranteed to find two items: An embroidered thobe and a black-and-white keffiyeh. For many Palestinians, these garments aren’t only part of their tradition, they’re what remains of a stolen homeland.
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba — the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish a Jewish-majority state — the Zionist occupation continues to kill, displace and erase: The land, the people and even the culture. And yet, every July 25, for nearly a decade, Palestinians have turned to their traditional dress — not just in remembrance, but in resistance.
In Palestine, the streets of Ramallah, Gaza and refugee camps bloom in color. Women wear thobes, many stitched by their grandmothers. Men wrap keffiyehs around their heads and don qumbaz robes passed down across generations. In cities abroad, from Chicago to Amman, the ritual is repeated: Wear the dress, tell the story, refuse to disappear.
How it all began
Palestinian Traditional Dress Day is a celebration of identity, a form of protest, and, for many, a quiet act of survival. The day was first marked in 2015. At the time, two young Palestinian women, Lana Hijazi and Mai Elli, launched the first mass celebration of traditional dress, using social media to mobilize hundreds to wear the garments across multiple cities on the same day.
Hijazi and Elli had seen a photo of a Zionist model wearing the Palestinian thobe, labeled as part of "Israeli heritage” — an act they saw as cultural theft. Zionist media outlets have repeatedly published photos of models and El Al flight attendants wearing the thobe as "Israeli heritage”.
"An overwhelming and familiar sense of bitterness took over me, and I wanted to be part of change to protect my country from being stolen,” Hijazi wrote in 2017 for the Palestinian literary publication Magazine 28. What began as a grassroots campaign became an internationally recognized occasion. In 2018, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas formally marked the day in the national calendar.
Behind the dress
At the heart of this celebration is the thobe — a traditional Palestinian dress embroidered with tatreez, intricate cross-stitched patterns unique to each region. "People might look at a thobe and just see a dress, but when you look closely, you realize that each one tells a story,” said Amna Salameh, owner of Kashtban, a project aimed at teaching Palestinian embroidery in Kuwait.
The patterns on a thobe are all inspired by the natural landscape of Palestine. "If the area is full of greenery and flowers, the woman’s thobe will be covered in plants and floral designs,” she said. A thobe made in Yaffa (Jaffa) might feature orange blossoms, a nod to the region’s groves. One from Al-Khalil (Hebron) might show grapevines. The patterns also reflect a woman’s social status, marital history and family lineage.
Elements of men’s traditional dress — such as the keffiyeh or hatta (headscarf), sirwal (trousers), qumbaz (long tunic) and shamleh (belt) — are shared across the Levant. But the keffiyeh, in particular, has become a symbol of Palestinian defiance. Palestinians wore it during the 1930s rebellion, the resistance of the 1950s and both intifadas, and it continues to be a marker of national identity today.
Mourning Gaza
In previous years, Palestinian Traditional Dress Day was marked with public celebrations, sometimes including wedding processions and street festivals that spanned multiple communities. In 2019, a couple in the West Bank even held their henna night during the festivities, dressed in traditional attire and surrounded by dabke dancers.
But in 2024, as the Zionist entity bombarded Gaza and settlers escalated their attacks on West Bank communities, many celebrations were canceled. Al-Bireh Cultural Center — known for organizing one of the largest events — instead held an exhibit featuring century-old thobes, including one partially buried in rubble to represent Gaza’s cultural loss. "The rituals of joy were absent from this year’s celebration amid the genocidal war targeting Gaza’s heritage,” said Julie Hajjaj, director of the center, in an interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
"Last summer, museums and heritage institutions in Gaza — like the Pasha Palace, the Qarara Museum and the Rafah Museum of Palestinian Heritage — marked the day,” she said. "All of them have since been destroyed, along with their archaeological and cultural treasures.” Hajjaj said the garments on display — both men’s and women’s — represent a Palestinian identity that "has been under a war of erasure for decades — a war that has escalated in recent months.”
A living resistance
The Nakba didn’t just scatter people — it buried traditions. Embroidery, once woven into the fabric of daily life in Palestinian villages, began to fade in exile, largely due to material shortages and changing lifestyles.
"A lot of the stitches and the embroidery are no longer made, because the villages and places in Palestine where they originated were wiped off the map during the Nakba,” said Adelha Ayed, Director General of the Palestinian Museum, in a 2021 interview with Reuters. "The social life that once required these thobes also vanished, replaced by modern life and new dress codes.”
For decades, the thobe faded from daily use — until a new generation began to reclaim it. Some now wear modernized versions of the dress; others preserve heirlooms passed down through generations. In recent years, dozens of grassroots collectives around the world have begun teaching embroidery, restoring thobes, and exhibiting traditional garments.
"Women used to embroider while sitting under trees, surrounded by flowers, sipping coffee and chatting. That disappeared,” said Faten Abu-Ghazaleh, a longtime volunteer with the Palestinian Culture Center in Kuwait. "We wanted to make sure this tradition was not lost.”
UNESCO heritage
In 2021, tatreez was officially recognized by UNESCO as part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage — a milestone many Palestinians saw as long overdue. That same year, Miss Universe contestants visiting occupied Palestine posed in Palestinian dresses presented as "Israeli”, sparking outrage. Activists viewed the photo-op as part of a broader pattern of cultural appropriation.
The keffiyeh faced a similar ordeal. "Over the past 10 years, the keffiyeh has become appropriated by the fashion world without cultural attribution to its Palestinian origins,” Wafa Ghnaim, a researcher and curator specializing in the history of Palestinian clothing, told CNN. "Cultural appropriation leads to cultural erasure, and it is of utmost importance for those wearing this scarf to educate themselves on its meaning and history. It is not a garment that anyone can wear,” she explained. "It symbolizes Palestinian solidarity, liberation and freedom.”
But Palestinians remain steadfast. One woman in the West Bank, Mayofa Abdel Fattah Jaradat, explained why she still wears the thobe in her 60s. "This dress represents my dignity and my honor,” she told Reuters. "My mother, my grandmother and my ancestors stuck to it. That’s why we won’t abandon it.”