LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
HEBRON, West Bank — Like many Palestinians of his generation, 76-year-old Yasser Hirbawi felt a new-found pride when a young Yasser Arafat began to campaign for an independent homeland half a century ago. He also sensed a business opportunity.
As Mr. Arafat vaulted into the international spotlight as the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mr. Hirbawi realized there was money to be made by manufacturing the kaffiyeh, the checkered black and white scarf that became Mr. Arafat’s trademark headgear.
Today, though, in what many see as a metaphor for the failing state of the Palestinian economy, foreign competition threatens to ruin the factory he set up.
The kaffiyeh may remain a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and has become a fashion accessory from New York to Tokyo, but its sole surviving Palestinian manufacturer has cut production to a fraction of capacity and is in danger of closing.
“It’s the national symbol. It must keep going and it must be produced locally,” said Mr. Hirbawi, who wears the scarf over his traditional jalabiyeh robe. “It must be protected.”
Mr. Hirbawi opened the Hirbawi Textile Factory in 1961, just as Mr. Arafat, who died in 2004, was building his Fatah movement in exile in Kuwait. The kaffiyeh, without which Mr. Arafat was seldom seen, is a traditional desert garment, protecting wearers from hot sun and dust in summer and cold in winter.
Once used largely to denote different tribes, today its various colors and designs carry political connotations — black and white is associated with Mr. Arafat’s Fatah, while a red and white version is linked to the Islamist organization Hamas.
It is also now highly fashionable in the West, adorning the shoulders of both Palestinian-sympathizing students and celebrities including actors Colin Farrell and Kirsten Dunst, singer Sting and the soccer player David Beckham. The fashion chain Topshop sells it in high street stores, and the Spanish fashion house Balenciaga has created a $5,800 designer version for the catwalk.
Over the years, Mr. Hirbawi has taken mass orders destined for masked gunmen and political parties as well as souvenir shops, supplying them all from his inventory of checkered scarves. He thinks, although he cannot be sure, that Mr. Arafat himself wore his kaffiyehs.
Ironically, his factory has become a victim of the very cause its product is identified with. With the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 came the beginnings of an independent Palestinian economy and trade with the outside world, and before long, souvenir shops were selling scarves made not in the occupied territories, but from factories elsewhere — mainly China, where suppliers offer cut-rate prices.
What remains of the Hirbawi Textile Factory is a cavernous concrete warehouse, with box upon box of unused spools of cotton yarn and a 1970s Volkswagen van rusting in a corner. The automatic looms, brought from Japan with much fanfare in the 1960s and 1970s, sit heavy with dust and largely empty, two of them stopped mid-production with the threads of unfinished scarves still dangling.
Just four of the original 15 machines operate, switched on for just four hours a day to produce 10,000 scarves a year — a far cry from the 150,000 produced annually in the early 1990s. Even so, sales are even lower, and hundreds of kaffiyehs are piling up in a storeroom.
Not one is exported, beaten out by overseas suppliers. And the shrinking Palestinian economy, with its high labor and production costs plus heavy barriers on exports, has amplified the struggle.
Not far from the factory is the designated site of a Turkish-backed industrial zone championed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, now the Middle East peace envoy, who took on the task of kick-starting the moribund Palestinian economy when he began his new job last year.
But small family businesses such as that run by Mr. Hirbawi — he has five sons and two daughters, all married, and 30 grandchildren — has so far not seen any benefit.
“When I look at [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] wearing the kaffiyeh, I say, maybe he’s wearing a kaffiyeh from me,” said Mr. Hirbawi. “But I want to say to him ’Please … protect us.’ My machines are in good shape. They can start working tomorrow. I just need a market.”
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