In Lebanon, these Palestinian refugees sew designs from a homeland they’ve by no means seen

Editor’s be aware: This story accommodates a graphic picture of violence and demise.

SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, Beirut — Girls hunch over stitching machines with one eye on multicolored thread they’re weaving by way of black linen, and one other on their cellphones, streaming scenes of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

The seamstresses on this workshop are second and third-generation Palestinian refugees. Most of them had been born within the surrounding refugee camp, known as Shatila, close to a sports activities stadium in a southern neighborhood of Beirut.

They’re amongst 5.9 million folks the United Nations has registered as refugees displaced or expelled at Israel’s 1948 creation and their descendants. Almost half one million of them reside in Lebanon, the place they’re nonetheless handled as outsiders — unable to purchase property and restricted from accessing public well being care, and from working in most industries. Israel doesn’t permit them to return.

For these ladies, their commerce — conventional Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez — supplies each a livelihood and a connection to their homeland.

World recognition for conventional Palestinian embroidery

The workshop is supported by a nongovernmental group known as Beit Atfal Assumoud, based within the aftermath of a 1976 bloodbath of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militias in one other refugee camp in northern Beirut. The workshop’s preliminary mission was to offer a commerce for widows and different impoverished Palestinian ladies. (There isn’t any ban on males stitching tatreez, however it’s sometimes been ladies who’ve taken up the commerce, and this workshop employs solely ladies.)

The workshop has expanded its enterprise lately, as tatreez beneficial properties renown as a logo of resistance and identification for Palestinian in all places. In 2021, UNESCO named tatreez to a world checklist of handicrafts, rituals and artwork types it considers “intangible” to the “cultural heritage of humanity.”

“Tourists visit from Germany, Sweden, Britain! The [Palestinian] diaspora come to buy gifts for family and friends,” says Hanan Zarura, the workshop’s chief designer. “We recently sewed a wedding dress for a young woman in America.”

The workshop additionally sells its wares on-line, together with bookmarks, wallets, wall hangings and scarves.

A life story that mirrors fashionable Palestinian historical past

Zarura, 70, has had a life crammed with displacement and loss.

In 1948, her mother and father had been displaced from the land close to Nazareth, in what’s now northern Israel, which their ancestors had farmed for hundreds of years. Her father had a job on the port of Haifa, on the Mediterranean coast. From there, they fled north with their toddler and child — Zarura’s older siblings.

They walked up the coast, crossed into Lebanon, and first stayed within the coastal metropolis of Tyre. Then, Zarura says, they had been herded into the Shatila refugee camp, which was established in 1949.

That is the place Zarura was born and grew up together with her mother and father’ trauma — after which skilled her personal.

Shatila’s bloody historical past

In 1982, amid Lebanon’s civil battle and an Israeli invasion, native militias allied with Israel killed as much as 3,500 Palestinian refugees in Shatila and one other Palestinian refugee camp known as Sabra. It was one of many bloodiest chapters in Palestinian historical past, and the camps’ names have develop into synonymous with it.

By then, Zarura had a toddler and child herself. She remembers militiamen going door to door, rounding up native males, and taking pictures them. They killed her father in legislation, then got here for her husband, who labored as a automobile mechanic.

“I thought they might have mercy on him if he had a baby, so I put our two-year-old in my husband’s arms,” she recollects.

It labored, she believes. The militiamen informed her husband to offer the boy again to Zarura, after which they captured her husband, however didn’t kill him — and he managed to flee three days later. They survived.

However years later, in 1988, her husband was killed in one other spherical of preventing within the camp. And Zarura discovered herself a widow with 4 kids by then.

Tatreez as work and remedy

On the lowest level in her life, she turned to the tatreez embroidery she’d realized as a toddler — each for a livelihood, and as remedy.

“The NGO took care of my children in exchange for my time,” Zarura recollects, referring to the Beit Atfal Assumoud nonprofit group. “So that’s how I began — just as a volunteer, a few days a week — teaching tatreez to other women in the camp.”

Each Palestinian area has its personal distinctive embroidery design, and Zarura — who has by no means been anyplace within the Palestinian Territories — however is aware of all of them. She’s since develop into a grasp craftswoman of this artwork.

In 2000, Zarura was lastly in a position to lay eyes on her homeland, with a visit to the Israel-Lebanon border, organized by NGOs working in Shatila.

For the primary time, Zarura was in a position to meet two of her aunts who nonetheless reside on the opposite aspect, as Palestinian residents of Israel. Till then, they’d solely talked on the telephone.

“There was a fence 2 meters [6 feet] high between us, so we couldn’t hug or kiss,” she recollects. “The Israelis were in the middle.”

Her aunts requested an Israeli border guard to move a bit of bijou throughout the border fence although, and he did. It is a gold ring Zarura now wears every single day. It appears to be like like a spoon from their previous home, to which Zarura nonetheless has keys. Her aunts informed her a Jewish Israeli household resides there now.

Generational trauma, and reminiscences of coexistence

Zarura grew up continuously conscious of her mother and father’ trauma from the 1948 battle and their displacement.

“My kids have in turn grown up with more trauma. There’s no escaping it,” she rues. “It’s not that we’re passing it down the generations. It’s that history keeps repeating itself.”

However Zarura says she additionally grew up with inspiring tales from her late mother and father, of what they described as coexistence between Jews and Arabs in what was then known as Palestine, earlier than 1948.

“My parents would tell us stories about the blissful life they had in Palestine — how they had Jewish and Christian neighbors, and how there was love and familiarity between them. They would all send good wishes to each other on their holy days,” she recollects. “Back then, the olives of Palestine were shared among everyone.”

Now, as a refugee in Lebanon, she’s forbidden from shopping for property.

Her 4 kids are all grown up. One lives in Eire, one other in Belgium, and two sons reside close by, in Beirut, with 9 kids between them. Zarura sees her grandchildren typically, and she or he’s comfortable.

However she says she’d nonetheless transfer to the Palestinian Territories “in a heartbeat.”

“Of course! Even in war, it’s my country,” she says. “Nobody wants to be a refugee.”

NPR producers Moustapha Itani contributed to this report from Beirut and Fatima Al-Kassab contributed from London.