“Next time you come, it will be better, God willing,” says Yasser Herbawi, the 76-year-old owner of the first and only Palestinian keffiyeh factory. It’s hard to see how. Last year, the distinctive black-and-white checked scarves became a surprise global trend, knotted around the necks of the most fashion-savvy. At the same time, the family-run company that produces this symbol of the Palestinian national struggle has been slowly grinding to a halt.
“It’s the Chinese imports,” explains Yasser, sitting amid piles of keffiyehs at the Herbawi factory storeroom, just outside Hebron in the West Bank. “In the 70s we could barely keep up with demand, but by the mid-90s cheap Chinese scarves started coming in, because of globalization and GATT.” Yasser’s sons Abdel Atheem, 50, and Judeh, 43, nod in agreement and curse the trade tariff-busting deal. “We were forced to lower our prices and today we are working to a fraction of our capacity because we cannot compete.” The factory used to produce more than 1,000 scarves a day, but now makes less than 100 — and struggles to sell those. A shutdown seems almost inevitable.
Needless to say, the Herbawi family isn’t much enamored with the cheap imports that first swamped and then stole their market. “They are not the same quality,” says Yasser as he picks up a keffiyeh and spreads it across his knees, reverently feeling the light, dimpled cotton between his fingers. “Our product is better, much better. We take care of it and use only natural products, and it is beautiful.” This textiles factory, which Yasser started 40 years ago, supplied the entire West Bank and Gaza — orders for scarves, robes and jackets, all fashioned from the same check, would also arrive from neighboring Arab countries. Of course, the company creates much more than a specific cotton weave. “We are making the symbol of Palestine,” says Yasser. “This scarf is the history and the heritage of our country.”
The black-and-white square keffiyeh is Syrian in origin and is the head garment of choice for traditional, rural Arab males of a certain age. It was the 1930s Arab revolt against the British Mandate and Zionist organizations in Palestine that first established the scarf as a resistance symbol: it was worn in solidarity, and to make it difficult for the authorities to weed out orchestrators of the rural-led uprising. By the 1960s, the scarf became emblematic of the nascent Palestinian national movement — it was the favored headwear of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and habitually worn by other symbols of the Palestinian resistance such as Leila Khaled. Then a red-and-white Jordanian version surfaced, taken up by Palestinian Marxists to differentiate themselves within the wider nationalist movement. More recently, its meaning changed again: “The Marxists in Palestine have all but disappeared and the ones who replaced them are the Islamists,” explains Samir Awad, political scientist at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit university. “Now it’s the Hamas guys who put on the red-and-white, just because they don’t want to be associated with Fatah.”
Around the Middle East, traditional, rural Arab men do still wear the keffiyeh, in the traditional way — as a headpiece, with the aqal ring holding it in place. But Awad says that these days, it is less widely used as a neckwear nationalist emblem by the younger generation of Palestinians. He provides one possible explanation: “The image of the keffiyeh as a symbol of resistance was tarnished by events in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it is used by terrorists, by anyone who wants to hide their face,” he says. “It is very annoying, but there is no monopoly on the keffiyeh.” The common appearance of the keffiyeh in suicide bomber videos has doubtless caused the two concepts to fuse in the minds of some observers.
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