Words by Katherine Oung
Artwork by Vartika Sharma
Every day, Amira* wears a keffiyeh; on the street, in the grocery store, at the New England high school where she works as a history and religious studies teacher. Back in 2002, the Palestinian-American had traveled to Hebron to teach English, and as part of her trip, toured and bought three keffiyehs from a shop called Hirbawi. Although the keffiyeh is one of the most globally recognizable symbols of Palestinian history and resistance, the family-owned business endures as the only operational keffiyeh factory left in the country.
During her visit, Amira watched as Hirbawi brothers Izzat, Abdullah, and Jouda oversaw an assembly of rattling mechanical looms in the small room that makes up the factory. Tiny Palestinian flag banners hung from the ceiling. Posters of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization who popularized the keffiyeh as an emblem of the Palestinian struggle in the 1990s, adorned the walls. Rolls of vibrant cotton thread, which the company largely sources locally, spooled into each machine. On the opposite end, the headscarf’s signature checkered pattern emerged.
A collection of swatches on the back wall of the room displayed the hundreds of keffiyeh color combinations that the Hirbawi family has devised. These novel colorways riff off the traditional black and white keffiyeh design, and celebrate various aspects of Arabic culture, from a deep brown pattern that represents the hilly Palestinian city of Jenin to a red and black motif named “Um Suleiman (ام سلايمان)” after the ladybug.
For those who make and wear the keffiyeh, the headscarf is a symbol of Palestinian resilience—and the peoples’ connection to the land. Keffiyehs incorporate three distinctive patterns: a cross-hatched fishnet, striped lines that represent trade routes, and a depiction of olive trees, which were first domesticated hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Fertile Crescent where Palestine is today. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist and professor of biology at Bethlehem University, explained that one reason the keffiyeh was originally worn was to protect people against the elements while they worked in the fields.
“Everything we [Palestinians] do here is connected to agriculture; to our history,” Qumsiyeh, who also founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability and the Palestine Museum of Natural History, said.
The Hirbawi brothers’ father, Yasser Hirbawi, started the shop in 1961. He invented and eventually taught his sons a technique that utilized mechanical looms in keffiyeh-making while preserving traditional Palestinian weaving techniques. But a single Hirbawi keffiyeh still takes up to an hour to make, since the process requires extensive hand-craftsmanship, too: the threads between the different designs must be cut while the looms are running, and after the machines produce long rolls of patterned fabric, each scarf is individually sewn.
“While we continue to live and fulfill our duties, there’s a profound sense of just going through the motions, struggling to feel alive amidst the ongoing crisis.”
Decades after Amira’s visit, the looms at Hirbawi continue to churn. But the ever-tightening restrictions imposed by the Israeli government have constricted the company’s operations since its founding. Banks heavily limit cross-border money transfers into Palestine. Power outages and lockdowns are common. The occupied West Bank is also rife with physical roadblocks, from military checkpoints to swaths of roads that are only accessible to Israeli citizens. Hirbawi’s brand manager Nael AlQassis said that such barriers hinder Hirbawi’s importing and exporting capabilities as well as workers’ abilities to even get to the factory from their homes. These challenges have only been amplified since October 2023, and a massive emotional toll weighs over the company as Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports the killing of over 32,000 Palestianians since the start of Israel’s current siege.
“The daily reports of violence and massacres in Gaza…[contribute] to a pervasive sense of shock and grief,” AlQassis said. “While we continue to live and fulfill our duties, there’s a profound sense of just going through the motions, struggling to feel alive amidst the ongoing crisis.”
Israel’s occupation has also caused immense health and environmental wreckage within Palestine in the past 76 years, culminating in what Qumsiyeh called an “acceleration of genocide and ecocide” in the past six months.
Since the start of the current conflict, the UN has reported that Israeli forces have destroyed over 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet and 22% of its agricultural land, while demolition to Gaza’s water systems has led to more than 130,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage to enter the sea daily. Military operations have resulted in heightened carbon emissions and land contamination, including in the West Bank where Hirbawi is situated.
Qumsiyeh likened the situation to the destruction of Indigenous food sources by American colonists and the use of Agent Blue during the Vietnam War, while other academics, like legal scholar Nora Jaber and sociologist Mohammed Nijim, have also labeled the environmental catastrophe unfolding in Palestine as an ecocide. To Qumsiyeh, Hirbawi’s continued existence is an example of how, in Palestine, “everybody struggles in their own way” as “Gaza is made unlivable.”
Many other keffiyeh factories and small home producers used to exist across Palestine, but all except Hirbawi have since been forced to shutter.
Armin Langer, a University of Florida professor of European Studies, explained that the adoption of free-trade policies under the Oslo Accords harmed local artisans by allowing low-cost keffiyehs—which are mass produced outside of Palestine and often made with synthetic materials—to flood the market. Even Hirbawi closed operations for five years in the early 2000s, but rebounded by expanding sales to the international market of the Palestinian diaspora and allies of the country’s cause around the world.
“It reminds me of something your grandma would knit for you. You can tell that it’s made with love.”
These days, keffiyehs available on Hirbawi’s website are almost always completely sold out. One customer, Serita Braxton, said that, as a Black person, it was a priority for her to buy an authentic keffiyeh from a Palestinian maker. “For as long as I can remember, Black symbols and culture have been replicated without credit being given to the original source or even any monetary giveback,” Braxton said. “So for me, it’s always been important to go to the source.”
Braxton, who owns two other keffiyehs from other companies, praised the quality of her Hirbawi keffiyeh. “It reminds me of something your grandma would knit for you,” Braxton said. “You can tell that it’s made with love.”
Braxton received her Hirbawi keffiyeh in March of this year and has since worn it to pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Málaga, Spain, where she lives. Talking to me from the United States, Amira explained that at marches and protests, she too finds that “everyone’s wearing a keffiyeh, and we all stand side by side.”
Other times, wearing a keffiyeh feels more contentious to Amira—like at the local city council meeting she recently attended where the city struck down a resolution that would have supported a ceasefire in Gaza. Amira’s husband swears his wife “gets looks” while wearing her keffiyeh around their majority-White town, not all of them friendly. But she doesn’t care.
“I wear it as a sign to remind everyone that there is someone on staff at my school that’s Palestinian,” Amira said of her Hirbawi keffiyehs, which are threaded with the red, green, white, and black national colors of Palestine. “That those colors are ours and we’re proud of them, that our heritage is deep and you can’t erase it.”
According to Qumsiyeh, preserving Palestinian cultural traditions and connections to the land—both of which are vital to Hirbawi’s traditional keffiyeh-making process—is crucial to the global fight against the dehumanization of Palestinian people.
“Palestinians try to keep their businesses, try to harvest their olive trees…When we educate our children, plant a seed, grow a vegetable, all of this we call in Arabic ‘sumad (صمود),’” Qumsiyeh said. “Sumad is persistence, resilience, and resistance combined.”
Editor’s Note: Some names in this story have been changed to protect the safety and privacy of those involved.
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Inside Palestine’s Last Keffiyeh Factory
