Palestine's culture: village crafts that became national signs

What the embroidered dress used to say

The garment is the thob, a long loose dress. UNESCO's listing of 2021 describes the village outfit as a dress, trousers, a jacket, a headdress and a veil, each embroidered in silk thread with symbols such as birds and trees. On the thob the embroidery covers the chest and the sleeves down to the cuffs, and embroidered panels run down from the waist. The choice of colours and motifs showed a woman's regional identity and her marital and economic status, and the Culture of Palestine article records that until the 1940s most women could read from the cloth, colour, cut and motifs which town or area another woman came from.

The war of 1948 disrupted that. Displaced women could no longer spend the time or money on complex garments, and new styles appeared in the 1960s, many of them from the refugee camps after 1967. One, the "six-branched dress", is named for six wide bands of embroidery running down from the waist; another, the shawal, cut shorter and narrower, probably grew out of welfare embroidery projects in the camps and was popular in the West Bank and Jordan before the first intifada. Village styles gave way to an identifiable Palestinian one.

Embroidery is still made at home and in groups. UNESCO describes women gathering in each other's houses to sew, often with their daughters, some embroidering as a hobby and some selling pieces to add to the family income, with the skill passed from mother to daughter and through formal courses. The keffiyeh or hattah, a black and white headdress, began as a farmer's cloth and has been a symbol of Palestinian resistance since the Arab revolt of the 1930s.

Which languages and faiths are practised

Arabic is the official language, in its Palestinian dialect, which divides further into rural fallahi and urban madani speech. Hebrew and English are also widely spoken, and many Palestinians use Hebrew as a second or third language. The record lists Arabic alone as the official language.

Most Palestinians are Muslim, nearly all Sunni. Christians are a small minority, about 1% in the Palestine article's figures; in the Gaza Strip, where Sunni Muslims make up 99.8% of the population, the Gaza Strip article counts an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Arab Christians. The Samaritans, numbering in the hundreds, live in and around Nablus.

The land is sacred to three faiths, and Palestinian towns hold sites for each. UNESCO describes the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as standing on the place identified since at least the 2nd century as the birthplace of Jesus, with a first church completed in 339 and the present building essentially of the mid 6th century, shared by the Greek Orthodox Church, the Custody of the Holy Land and the Armenian Church. In Hebron, the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, stands in an enclosure built in the 1st century over the cave believed to hold the tombs of Abraham and his family, a site of pilgrimage for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Folk tales told by both Muslims and Christians feature Saint George, the patron saint of Palestine.

How stories and songs are passed on

The Palestinian hikaye is a women's art. UNESCO, which proclaimed it in 2005 and inscribed it in 2008, describes fictitious tales told at home on winter evenings to small groups of women and children, in fallahi or madani dialect, dealing with family matters and with women torn between duty and desire. Men rarely attend. At the time of the inscription UNESCO reported that almost every Palestinian woman over 70 was a teller, and that the form was in decline. Folk tales more widely open with a blessing and the formula "There was, in the oldness of time", and are peopled with jinn and ghouls.

Traditional song has a set rhythm and no set words, leaving room for improvised verse. In the ataaba, four verses follow a fixed form and metre, the first three ending on the same word with three different meanings, and the fourth concluding; it is still sung at weddings and festivals. Zajal, al-Rozana and the ululation of the zaghareed are other forms. For three decades the troupe El Funoun has rearranged wedding songs for the stage, among them Mish'al in 1986 and Zaghareed in 1997.

Dabkeh is the dance to those songs, made of synchronised jumping and stamping, shared across the Levant and performed by Palestinian troupes around the world. UNESCO inscribed dabkeh in Palestine on its Representative List in 2023.

Who wrote after the Nakba

Poetry in classical forms draws audiences in the thousands, and after 1948 it became a vehicle for politics. A school of resistance poetry grew among the Palestinians who became citizens of Israel, with Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Zayyad. Their work was little known in the Arab world until Ghassan Kanafani, writing in exile in Lebanon, published an anthology of it in 1966. Since 1967 critics have divided Palestinian writing into three branches: from inside Israel, from the occupied territories and from the diaspora.

Theatre followed the same lines. Marie Elias describes three stages: a beginning in the 1920s with Arab and translated European plays, a rebirth after 1967 aiming at a Palestinian identity, with groups such as the Balalin troupe founded in 1970, and a professional theatre in the West Bank after the Oslo agreement of 1993. Palestinian cinema began in 1935, when Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan filmed a Saudi prince's visit to Jerusalem and Jaffa; historians divide what followed into four periods, from the near silence of 1948 to 1967 through the films of the PLO in Beirut to independent work from the 1980s on.

How the old towns were built

The towns were built of the local limestone. UNESCO's description of Hebron's old town, inscribed in 2017, dates its form to the Mamluk period between 1250 and 1517: quarters grouped by community around the Ibrahimi Mosque, and houses whose groups of rooms branch from one another in a tree-shaped plan. Ottoman rule from 1517 to 1917 raised the roofs to add upper storeys without changing the plan. The listing counts the markets, khans, religious lodges, shrines, bathhouses and clustered courtyard houses of the old town as part of what it protects.

The Culture of Palestine article quotes the view that urban architecture in Palestine before 1850 formed a distinct tradition, "significantly different from the traditions of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt", while the townhouse shared the arrangement of living space common across the eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule. In Bethlehem the Pilgrimage Route that UNESCO inscribed in 2012 runs along Star Street through the old gate to Manger Square, and is walked each year by the patriarchs of the three churches at their separate Christmases.

Where painting and writing are made

Palestinian art has more than one centre. The Culture of Palestine article places it in the West Bank and Gaza, among Palestinians in the Arab world and in Europe and the United States; the Palestine article adds Palestinians inside Israel. Contemporary painting grew out of folk art and Christian and Islamic religious painting, and after 1948 nationalist themes dominated, with artists such as Salam Dyab and Hisham Zreiq taking up modern styles in the 1990s.

Intellectual life ran through the wider Arab world early on, through writers such as May Ziadeh and Khalil Beidas at the turn of the 20th century, and later through the diaspora: Edward Said and Ghada Karmi abroad, Emile Habibi among the Arab citizens of Israel. In the 1960s, by the Culture of Palestine article's figures, 44.6% of West Bank adolescents aged 15 to 17 were enrolled in high school. The news agencies Wafa and Ma'an and broadcasters such as Al-Quds TV serve the territories, and UNESCO's country page counted 105 journalists killed in the State of Palestine since 1993 when it was read in October 2026.

What Palestinian cooking is built on

Until the 1950s and 1960s the rural diet rested on olive oil, za'atar and bread baked in the taboon, a simple clay oven. Cooking divides by region. In the Galilee, bulgur and meat are combined in kibbeh; in the West Bank the staples are taboon bread, rice and meat; Gaza's cooking, close to Egypt's and to the sea, uses fish, chilli, garlic and chard. Certain dishes mark the olive harvest, among them musakhan, roast chicken on taboon bread under onions fried with sumac and allspice, which comes from the Jenin and Tulkarm area. Maqluba, an upside-down dish of rice, aubergine and meat, and musakhan are described in the Palestinian cuisine article as symbols of Palestinian identity, and dishes shared with Israeli cooking, such as hummus and falafel, have been argued over as cultural appropriation.

The calendar has its own food. Qatayef, folded pancakes filled with goat cheese or walnuts and served in syrup, are made only during Ramadan, when juices of carob, tamarind and apricot are drunk at sunset. Ka'ak filled with dates is baked by Christians for Easter and by Muslims for the two Eids, and Christians keeping Lent make siyami, fasting versions of dishes such as maqluba without meat or dairy.

Knafeh comes from Nablus and takes its cheese from the city's name. Nablus also gives its name to a soap: the tradition of Nabulsi soap making was inscribed by UNESCO in 2024.

Which practices UNESCO has inscribed

The State of Palestine ratified UNESCO's 2003 convention on intangible heritage on 8 December 2011 and sat on its committee from 2016 to 2020. Four of its nine inscriptions, calligraphy, the date palm, metal engraving and henna, were joint nominations with other Arab states, by the Culture of Palestine article's account.

Nominations of the oud and of ka'ak al-Quds, Jerusalem sesame bread, were pending in 2026. The handicrafts the Culture of Palestine article lists beside these, weaving, pottery, glass-making and carving in olive wood and mother of pearl, are also made for sale; their economic weight is covered under the economy.

How sport and modern music took shape

Organised sport began in social clubs in the 1920s. By 1948 there were some 65 athletic clubs, about 55 of them in the Arab Palestine Sports Federation founded in 1931. Football became the most popular sport, with a West Bank Premier League, a Gaza Strip League and a national team governed under FIFA, and Palestinian athletes have competed at every Summer Olympics since 1996.

Music moved between stage, concert hall and protest. Art music has its own line of composers, beginning with a first generation that included Augustin Lama, Yousef Khasho and Salvador Arnita, and later institutions. The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music supports the Palestinian Youth Orchestra, and the Culture of Palestine article records a hip hop scene since the 1990s that sets folk melody against hip hop beats. The singer Mohammed Assaf won the second season of Arab Idol in 2013.