The Language of Palestinian Embroidery
The Language of Palestinian Embroidery
Wafa Ghnaim
November 1, 2024 6pm
The First Unitarian Church of Portland
1211 Main Str.
Wafa Ghnaim is a Palestinian dress historian, researcher, author, archivist, curator, educator and embroideress who began learning embroidery from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, when she was two years old.
Her first book, “Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora” (2018), documents the traditional patterns and stories passed on to her by her mother. Wafa has since become a leading educator in SWANA dress history and embroidery techniques, as the first-ever Palestinian embroidery instructor at the Smithsonian Museum. Wafa continues her mother’s educational legacy through The Tatreez Institute (Tatreez & Tea), a global arts education initiative she began in 2016 teaching courses in Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian embroidery techniques and lecturing at leading institutions, museums and universities around the world. Wafa has since been featured in major media outlets, including Vogue Magazine, which named her and her mother “the world’s leading guardians of tatreez”. Her curatorial debut "TATREEZ INHERITANCE" (2023) at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC highlights traditional Palestinian dresses circulating North America and the importance of reclamation in the diaspora. Wafa released her second publication “THOBNA” (2023) to celebrate Palestinian embroidery as a powerful form of resistance over the past century.
Wafa is currently the Curator for the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C. and Senior Research Fellow for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art.
Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel
Leaked cables and emails show how the agency’s top officers dismissed internal evidence of Israelis misusing American-made bombs and worked around the clock to rush more out while the Gaza death toll mounted.
In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.
The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reportsthat Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
‘Game of demographics’: How Israel aims to wipe out Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem
‘All measures of forced displacement have seen a drastic escalation since Oct. 7,’ says Tamara Tamimi, a Palestinian policy fellow at think tank Al-Shabaka
In occupied East Jerusalem, however, experts say Israel has taken a different approach, using the Gaza war to accelerate the “silent displacement” of Palestinians to reshape its demographic landscape.
The strategy there has four main elements: demolitions, evictions, land confiscation, and expansion of illegal settlements.
It is designed specifically to isolate East Jerusalem from the West Bank, imposing further restrictions on Palestinian residents, and advancing Israel’s “settler colonial” ambitions.
“All measures of forced displacement have seen a drastic escalation since Oct. 7, and Israel is well known to exploit these kinds of situations in order to advance its settler colonial endeavors,” said Tamara Tamimi, a Palestinian policy fellow at think tank Al-Shabaka living in East Jerusalem.
“Israel has exploited its genocidal onslaught on Gaza in order to advance settler colonialism in other key strategic areas, particularly Jerusalem and Area C in the remainder of the West Bank.”
A crucial actor in this “large escalation” is the illegal settler movement and the organizations associated with it in key strategic areas in Jerusalem, she said.
Special Report: Emails show early US concerns over Gaza offensive, risk of Israeli war crimes
The emails, which haven’t been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world. The messages also show internal pressure in the Biden administration to shift its messaging from showing solidarity with Israel to including sympathy for Palestinians and the need to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
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The chaos Israel is sowing across the Middle East could come back to haunt it
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbours that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Netanyahu is currently set
A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.
It’s called the ceasefire ritual - a public display of hand-washing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.
Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: it is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.
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If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.
Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line - as the Pentagon has confirmed - is that the US supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and ceasefire plans can go hang.
Read more at: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/chaos-israel-sowing-across-middle-east-could-come-back-haunt-it