Palestinian company struggles as iconic garment slips into irrelevance

HEBRON, West Bank — Yasser Arafat turned his trademark black-and-white headscarf into a symbol of Palestinian resistance and aspirations for statehood. But with relative peace and improving prosperity, the West Bank's only kaffiyeh factory is struggling to survive.

Since 1961, the Hirbawi family's looms have churned out hundreds of thousands of the patterned headscarves made iconic by the late Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, who was rarely seen without his kaffiyeh.

During past Palestinian uprisings, kaffiyeh sales soared. These days, the scarves look a little dated, like cufflinks or cassette tapes. With the streets relatively calm, Palestinian young people are more apt to reach for hair gel, and political leaders prefer Western-style suits.

Sales are plummeting.

The heaviest blow came from the West Bank's economic rebound, which opened the region to foreign investment and, for the first time, a flood of cheap, Chinese-made imports. The new global competition has all but shut the Hirbawis out of a market they once monopolized.

"Palestinians just don't buy from us anymore," said Jouda Hirbawi, 50, who began threading the factory looms as a boy and never dreamed of anything other than taking over the family business.

Now he won't allow his children to work there. The patriarch, Yasser Hirbawi, 80 — the only family member who still wears a kaffiyeh — scans the factory's half-empty shelves and shrugs.

"I couldn't bear to see it close after 50 years," he says, fingering a string of prayer beads. "But what else can we do?"

It's up to Jouda Hirbawi to see if he and his two brothers can make a final push in the coming months to keep the business afloat.

The factory is more of a museum, really. Approaching the building on a Hebron hillside, visitors hear the deafening rhythm of the motorized looms long before entering: BUM bum bum, BUM bum bum, BUM bum bum.

Inside, rows of greasy, rattling machines, with their spinning metal gears, rubber belts and wooden sticks, give the dimly lighted factory the air of a 19th-century steamboat-engine room.

Hirbawi stands over the spools of red and black thread as they slip into the loom like streams of paint down long needles, while a threaded shuttle — shaped like a little canoe — is whacked back and forth by wooden mallets to create the base cloth. He trims the loose threads quickly with a tiny knife, smoothing out the patterned fabric as it emerges from the machine.

"It takes 30 minutes to make one kaffiyeh," he said.

Twenty years ago, 15 looms, sometimes operating around the clock, made as many as 700 scarves a day. "The entire market was ours," Hirbawi said. "We were barely able to supply the locals."

Today, they're lucky to make one-tenth of that. All the employees except one have been laid off. Most looms sit idle, coated in dust and rust.

When Chinese imports arrived in the late-1990s, selling for a quarter of the price, the Hirbawis tried to expand by introducing new colors and patterns. Rather than the traditional black-and-white or red-and-white, they experimented with the scarves in orange, purple and green, or with hippie-style psychedelic designs.

Before long, the Chinese copied those, too. Unable to compete, the family closed the business in 1997.

Five years later, the Hirbawis reopened, this time trying to beat the Chinese at their own game. Rather than producing the high-quality product they'd built their reputation on, they slashed the thread count, used blends higher in polyester and cut back on the hand-finishing.

As a kaffiyeh purist, Jouda Hirbawi can't hide the disappointment in the threadbare fabric that now rolls off his looms.

"You can see and feel the difference," he said, pulling an older, thicker kaffiyeh from his desk drawer and holding it next to a new, nearly transparent version. "It was hard to lower our standards. The stuff we make today is only good for tourists."

But even after halving the wholesale price to about $4, the Hirbawis haven't won back any market share. Their scarves retail for about $14, while the Chinese knockoffs sell for about $5.

Now most of their business comes from Western tourists and the occasional order from the U.S. and Europe, where kaffiyehs sometimes enjoy popularity as a fashion novelty or political statement.

In a last-ditch effort, the family is planning to relaunch the higher-quality product in hopes it will find a niche. If the Hirbawis can win back just 30 percent of the local market, they say, they'll stay open.

Otherwise, Abdul Azim Hirbawi is already pushing the family to clear out the factory floor and reopen it as a wedding hall and conference center.