This National Keffiyeh Day
By Maryah Converse
16 November 2025
As a history teacher in the before times, Aliyah had always made a big deal out of World Keffiyeh Day in mid-May, organizing a small festival at their girls’ elementary school near the end of each year. Students dressed in traditionally embroidered thobe gowns, their hair caught up in rolled black and white keffiyeh scarves, holding hands in curving lines and stomping the dubkeh dance into the faded asphalt of the schoolyard, the lead dancer whirling olivewood misbah prayer beads over her head. There was ma’moul, baclava, and other sweets to share, and they would give out awards for the best patriotic essay or poster, and certificates for service to the school community.
When the Ministry of Education had announced a National Keffiyeh Day for mid-November a few years ago, Aliyah had scoffed, insulted. They already had a day to celebrate this part of their heritage. She had arranged for some of the girls to drape the black and white scarves over their shoulders and read a few poems at Tabour, the morning assembly when all the students lined up by class to sing a patriotic song, recite the Fatihah, do a few simple stretches and jumping jacks, and hear the day’s announcements.
For Aliyah, organizing a second full festival day had been too much to ask. A decade and a half of blockade had driven prices for everyday staples so high that Aliyah had needed to take up tutoring girls for their all-important tawjihi school — leaving exams in the afternoons after school. With the birth of her fourth daughter in six years, Aliyah had less time and energy than ever before to organize one keffiyeh festival a year, let alone two.
This year, a full month into a sort of ceasefire – or at least a lessening of hostilities, a lull that few had expected to hold this long – Aliyah was ready for a celebration.
Her family’s apartment now lay behind the so-called yellow line where occupation forces were daily demolishing the few residential buildings left even partially upright, so Aliyah was still living with three brothers, their wives and children in a cramped pair of sun-bleached, fraying tents on the Al-Mawasi beach on the central Gaza coast. She had convinced her brothers, though, to move their tent a kilometer north, closer to an UNWRA building that had been a shelter for a constantly revolving population of the displaced over two years, and was slowly reclaiming its purpose as an elementary school.
Three days a week, families dragged their possessions out of the classrooms into the central courtyard, making room for children, many dragging in battered fershah floor mattresses from their own shelters to sit on. Chalkboards were finally being used for verb conjugations and multiplication tables again, teachers were putting their heads together to recall the important dates of Islamic history and laws of chemistry, and students who’d been two years out of school vibrated with the excitement and anxiety of resuming lessons that some could barely remember.
Aliyah had gotten permission from the loose committee of people – mostly UNWRA school administrators no longer receiving their salaries but pivoting to the work of sheltering their community anyway – who kept order in the shelter. They designated a day between lessons and Aliyah organized a small celebration in the school courtyard for National Keffiyeh Day.
Most residents of the UNWRA school and the surrounding tents had only a few faded outfits they’d been wearing since the bombardment began, but every so often Aliyah would see a girl in a long black thobe embroidered in red and green and orange, geometrically stylized cypress trees and olives and Jaffa oranges, Bethlehem stars and Greek meanders, symbols of their cultural heritage across diverse communities between the river and the sea. She would stop these girls and ask for their mothers, implore them to come to her little festival.
Many people did still wear their versatile black and white keffiyeh scarves, helpful in keeping the sun off in summer, the dust out on a windy day, and the warmth in through winter. Aliyah looked for those in particularly good condition, the black embroidery unfrayed, the white still more white than not. Would they lend her their keffiyeh to decorate the courtyard on that day? Most agreed to come, keffiyeh in hand, to the event.
Among some young men lounging on the beach, she found someone with a Bluetooth speaker who agreed to attend, and started building her playlist of patriotic songs and dubkeh music on her cracked, long outdated smartphone, snatching every unpredictable moment of available internet to download, and every opportunity to plug into someone’s solar cell to charge.
Sweets, she had thought, would be hardest to come by, but sugar and wheat were finally coming through the borders. Few vegetables and no proteins other than lentils, but chocolate and flour arrived by the truckload, as if to fatten up their wasting bodies before the stage of the ceasefire when international troops were supposed to arrive to maintain the fragile semi-peace. Aliyah easily found grandmothers willing to make cakes and cookies for the occasion.
Aliyah was approached after school one day by an art teacher, who had managed to source some red, green, white and black paint. Could she organize some students to paint murals in the school courtyard? Aliyah introduced her to the shelter organizers, who contributed some white and UN powder blue paint and their blessing on the project. By the end of the next day, clusters of students were working all around the UNWRA school, teams of girls inside, and teams of boys on the external walls.
And every night, Aliyah lay in her tent, wedged between her nieces on a piece of tarp and a threadbare blanket, and listened to the distant thrum, thrum, thrum of air strikes continuing across the yellow line to the east. Every night, she prayed that the so-called ceasefire would last long enough for just one day of celebration.
Pausing arms akimbo amidst the chaos of the school-become-shelter’s courtyard on the third day of mural painting, Aliyah noticed that her shoulders had unknotted, she was standing taller, her chin higher than she had felt for months. There was an expansiveness around her heart, a lightness in her breath that had eluded her for two interminable, painful years. The laughter of children painting, and of their mothers scrubbing years of cement dust and char from the next walls to be painted. A group of boys practicing dubkeh around a Bluetooth speaker, and another of young men practicing traditional rhythms on tablah drums that had somehow eluded destruction.
These were her people.
Despite all efforts to overwhelm and break them, their pride and joy in their culture bubbled up with the slightest nudge. Just to her left, first graders were using the edge of their gently cupped little hands to stamp olive leaves along branches painted by the art teacher. A few yards down to Aliyah’s right, third graders were pressing and slightly rotating their open splayed hands to stencil fig leaves to another pre-painted tree. On the adjacent wall, a group of tenth graders were painstakingly dotting with pencil erasers the traditional cross-stitch designs on the breasts of women dancing in black thobe. On the opposite wall, middle graders were tracing in the fishnet and olive leaf motifs on the keffiyeh of herders with their sheep and goats, waving Palestinian flags above their heads.
Aliyah turned to look behind her, and not for the first time, felt the burn of tears. Above a foreground of rolling olive groves and wheat fields, behind the massive granite blocks of the Roman city wall, a group of young men and boys were painting row upon row of colorful, flat-roofed buildings rising on the seven hills of the Holy City. Rising above them all, they were beginning to paint the blue and gold of the Dome of the Rock, and the grey domes topped with crosses of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
These were her people. Muslim and Christian, hand in hand, standing up to envision a better, beautiful world together. For all the passion she had poured into World Keffiyeh Day over her many years of teaching, this National Keffiyeh Day touched something deeper, lifted Aliyah higher. There were fewer reasons to hope than ever before in her lifetime, and yet, she believed anew in the power of the future this generation could build together.
Maryah Converse was a Peace Corps educator in Jordan, 2004–2006, was studying in Cairo during the 2011 Arab Spring, and was a Fulbright-Hays researcher in Jordan in 2025. Her publications include New Madrid Journal, Silk Road Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Shooter Literary Magazine. Maryah holds a Masters in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a PhD candidate in Arabic linguistics. MaryahConverse.com | maryahc.bsky.social