Culture and sumud

Sumud (صمود) means steadfastness, or perseverance: to stand firm. After 1967 it became a term in Palestinian politics for the decision to stay on the land, in a village or in a refugee camp despite occupation and dispossession. It describes actions as well as endurance: planting trees, rebuilding a demolished home, keeping children in school under curfew.

Food, craft and art have their own histories, not all of them political. Since 1948, they have also helped families keep ties to places they can no longer reach. A dress pattern can record a village of origin; a dish or a poem can travel with people into exile.

The olive tree

The olive tree is probably the most familiar image in Palestinian culture. Groves across the West Bank hold trees that are centuries, in some cases over a thousand years, old. They are living property, passed down through families for generations and tied to specific plots of land in a way that predates modern land registries entirely. The autumn olive harvest is a communal event: extended families, often including relatives who travel back from the diaspora specifically for it, spend weeks picking together.

That same tree has become a site of conflict. Human rights organisations have documented the uprooting of tens of thousands of olive trees over the decades, through settlement expansion, the route of the separation barrier, military land clearance and, increasingly, settler violence timed to coincide with the harvest itself. A tree that takes decades to mature and can bear fruit for centuries is destroyed in minutes. Palestinians and Israeli solidarity volunteers alike now organise seasonal efforts to protect harvests in vulnerable areas.

Tatreez: embroidery as memory

Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, tatreez (تطريز), is one of the most distinctive Palestinian art forms, traditionally worked into the thobe (ثوب), a long dress whose colours, motifs and stitch patterns once varied so precisely by village and region that an observer could tell where a woman was from by looking at her dress. Motifs carry names drawn from the natural and domestic world around them (cypress trees, moons, feathers) and were passed from mother to daughter as both craft and record.

After 1948, tatreez took on a new function. Refugee women, separated from their home villages, began combining motifs from different regions into single garments, sometimes deliberately, as a way of holding multiple lost places within one piece of cloth. Tatreez patterns have since become widely recognised symbols of Palestinian identity, appearing on everything from wedding dresses to protest banners, and UNESCO inscribed the craft on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.

Visual art and protest symbols

Naji al-Ali, born in 1938 in the Galilee village of al-Shajara (destroyed in 1948) and raised in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, created the cartoon figure Handala (حنظلة) in 1969: a barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy, always drawn from behind, hands clasped at his back, who appeared in nearly every one of al-Ali's newspaper cartoons for the rest of his life. Al-Ali said Handala would only turn to face the reader once Palestinians could return to their homes; the boy has stayed ten years old, and turned away, ever since. Al-Ali was shot outside a London newspaper's offices in 1987 and died of his injuries weeks later; no investigation has conclusively established who was responsible. Handala's silhouette is now reproduced worldwide, on keychains, tattoos and painted walls, as a shorthand for Palestinian dispossession.

The keffiyeh (كوفية), a black-and-white scarf in a herringbone or fishnet weave, has a similar arc: rural, working dress that became a national symbol during the 1936–39 Arab revolt against British rule, and an internationally recognised one once it was permanently associated with Yasser Arafat's image from the late 1960s onward. Nearly all keffiyehs sold today are imported cheaply from factories in China; the Hirbawi factory in Hebron, founded in 1961, is the last one still weaving them in Palestine, and buying from it has become its own small act of sumud. Worn at protests far beyond the region, the keffiyeh is a strong enough political symbol that some schools, workplaces and public institutions have moved to ban it outright.

Food and hospitality

Palestinian cuisine shares much with the wider Levant, but carries its own dishes and its own disputes: musakhan (مسخن), roasted chicken over taboon bread with caramelised onions, sumac and pine nuts, is widely regarded as Palestine's national dish. Maqluba (مقلوبة, "upside-down"), a layered rice, meat and vegetable dish flipped from its pot at the table, and knafeh (كنافة), the syrup-soaked cheese pastry associated above all with the city of Nablus, are both sources of considerable regional pride. Food, like embroidery, has become part of a wider argument about cultural attribution across the region. Palestinians see it as one more instance of a broader, lived experience: watching things that are self-evidently theirs be described, in the world's eyes, as belonging to someone else, or to no one in particular.

Guests are served first and served generously, coffee is poured and refused only after a ritual third cup, and a host or fellow guest will often say sahtein (صحتين, literally "two healths") as a plate is set down. The obligation to host well is taken seriously, especially in the refugee camps and under blockade, where doing so is hardest.

Language, poetry and Mahmoud Darwish

Palestinian Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, sharing grammar and much vocabulary with Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian speech, but it carries its own dialect features and, especially since 1948, its own vocabulary of loss and return: al-Nakba, al-awda (العودة, the return), al-shatat (الشتات, the diaspora), muhajir (مهاجر) and laji' (لاجئ) for the different legal statuses of the displaced. Literature has mattered so much here because so much else (land, archives, institutions) was taken or destroyed.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), born in the Galilee village of al-Birwa which was depopulated and destroyed in 1948, is the poet most closely associated with the Palestinian national experience, though he resisted being reduced to a political symbol and insisted, across a long career, on poetry that was also simply about love, exile, language and mortality. Ghassan Kanafani, killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972, wrote some of the defining fiction of the refugee experience, including the novella Men in the Sun. Fadwa Tuqan, Edward Said, Susan Abulhawa and many others have carried that literary tradition forward in different forms and different languages, for readers inside Palestine and across a diaspora spread over every continent.

Film

Palestinian cinema has no national film industry or state funding body behind it, so most of its best-known work has been made through international co-production, and often by directors working in exile or the diaspora. Elia Suleiman, born in Nazareth, built a distinctive body of work out of near-wordless, deadpan scenes of daily life under occupation, closer in spirit to silent comedy than to conventional political cinema: Divine Intervention (2002), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and It Must Be Heaven (2019). 5 Broken Cameras (2011), co-directed by the Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat and the Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi from years of footage Burnat shot of his village Bil'in's protests against the separation barrier, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2013. Farha (2021), a Jordanian production following a teenage girl through the Nakba, drew condemnation from Israeli government ministers when Netflix added it in 2022, who called for its removal.

Dabke and public celebration

Dabke (دبكة), a line dance performed at weddings and celebrations across the Levant, has a specifically Palestinian repertoire of steps. Like tatreez, it is now performed deliberately at diaspora gatherings and cultural festivals, in halls from Amman to Santiago to Detroit, as an assertion of continuity.

For a people told for most of a century, in various ways, that they do not exist as a people, these are the ordinary ways of going on living as one. That is what sumud means.