Threads of Resistance: How Palestinian Women Stitch Their Stories into Survival

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at RCSI chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

When my mom picked up her embroidery needle for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t just stitching thread, but rather memory. The room fell into a soft kind of silence, the kind that feels like remembering. Her fingers moved with practiced grace, pulling red thread through white cloth, each stitch was deliberately mad, intention clear with each one. It’s called tatreez, the centuries old embroidery she grew up around, the kind her family used to sew in Palestine before displacement stretched our threads across continents. I didn’t realize it then, but what she was making was much more than art, it was resistance, history, and love all at once. 

One Palestinian women’s art that really struck me was Reham Shaheen’s. Reham Shaheen is a Palestinian artist that grew up in Gaza, and is now based in Dubai where she shares and exhibits her art. Her work speaks the same language my mothers hands do, the language of resilience. When I first saw her work, I felt that same quiet strength, that same grief turned into beauty. Each detail feels like a heartbeat from the land itself. In her art, as in my mothers stitches, I saw a shared truth: that for Palestinian women, creation is resistance.

When I reached out to Reham Shaheen, she said something that stuck with me. “As a Palestinian artist and woman, my art is the voice I use to tell the stories that words cannot hold,” she wrote. “Every piece I create is rooted in the emotions of resistance, loss, and unbreakable hope — a reflection of my people’s struggle and our endless capacity to endure.” Her words felt like a testimony. In her pieces she captures what it means to exist in the space between grief and growth, between being uprooted and refusing to disappear. Her works often mirror the land itself: textured, layered, scarred, and alive. What struck me most was when she wrote, “My art is not only about resistance – it is about love, resilience, and the unshakable spirit of Palestine that continues to live within me and through everything I create.” 

There’s something profoundly feminine in that kind of creation, not just in subject but in essence. Reham draws the same way my mother stitches, transforming pain into presence. Both women create beauty which is not meant to distract from struggle, but to honor it. Through Reham’s brush, I began to see art not as escape, but as endurance. It’s a visual act of survival that leaves our mark on this land. 

When I watched my mom embroider, I couldn’t help but notice how much of her memory lives in her hands. The way she threads the needle, the way she leans in close to make each stitch just right. This type of muscle memory is passed through generations. Sometimes she hums softly, almost absentmindedly, as if her body remembers a rhythm her mind doesn’t have to think about. The patterns she chooses are always the same ones she grew up seeing: deep reds, geometric shapes, and olive motifs that once marked the borders of villages. Each thread feels like a small act of leaving a mark, a promise that our story won’t fade. I see memory, endurance, and love woven into fabric. There’s a power in that kind of creation, the kind that isn’t loud or performative but quietly unyielding. Watching her I realize tatreez isn’t just something beautiful, it’s a way of holding on when so much has already been taken. 

For so many Palestinian women, creation is more than expression, its survival. Whether through embroidery, painting, photography, or poetry, art becomes a way to speak when words fall short. Each piece, stitch, or verse carries the weight of a history that the world often tries to erase. I’ve come to see that art, for us, is about existence. It’s how we process grief, hold onto memory, and how we insist on being seen. In Palestine, beauty itself is an act of defiance: to create, to decorate, to remember, even when everything around you may feel like its built to make you forget. And in that act of creation — in my mother’s stitches and in Reham Shaheen’s brushstrokes — I see the same quiet revolution. Every color, every thread, every mark becomes a way of saying we are still here.