A symbol relegated to the fringe

Reporting from Hebron, West Bank — 

Yasser Arafat turned his trademark black-and-white head scarf into a symbol of Palestinian resistance and aspirations for statehood. But now, 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 head scarves made iconic by the late PLO chairman, who was rarely seen without his kaffiyeh.

During Palestinian uprisings, kaffiyeh sales soared. These days, though, the scarves look a little dated, like cufflinks or cassette tapes. With the streets relatively calm, Palestinian youths 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,” says 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, the only family member who still sports a kaffiyeh, scans the factory’s half-empty shelves and shrugs hunched shoulders.

“I couldn’t bear to see it close after 50 years,” the 80-year-old says, fingering a string of prayer beads. “But what else can we do?”

Now it’s in Jouda’s hands to see whether he and his two brothers can make a final push 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.

Jouda 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 the patterned fabric as it emerges from the machine.

“It takes 30 minutes to make one kaffiyeh,” he says.

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

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

When Chinese imports first 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 and Southwestern-looking designs.

Before long, the Chinese copied those too. Unable to compete, the family closed down 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 can’t hide his disappointment with the threadbare fabric that now rolls off his looms.

“You can see and feel the difference,” he says, 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 United States and Europe, where kaffiyehs sometimes enjoy popularity as a fashion novelty or political statement.

They’ve seen their product reduced from icon to kitsch, and say it will be a national tragedy if they close for good. The family is angry that the Palestinian Authority hasn’t offered to assist them, either by taxing Chinese imports or subsidizing the factory.

The Palestinian Authority’s economic minister, Hassan Abu Libdeh, acknowledged that some Palestinian companies are struggling to compete with foreign imports, but said the authority wants to create a competitive free market for consumers and is not able to assist individual companies.

What the Hirbawis might need most is a little sound business advice. They still lack a website. They do no marketing and are not members of the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce. They allow outside merchants and middlemen to reap 300% profits.

And they show surprising indifference toward Arafat, who was a walking advertisement for their product. They’ve hung a picture in the factory of the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, who died in 2004, but no one in the family seems to have cared much for him. One brother says they never met Arafat and never made him a kaffiyeh.

“Why should we have given him one?” says Abdul Azim Hirbawi, another brother. “He should have come to visit us, but he never did.”

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

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

“This just isn’t enough to support the family anymore,” he says. Renting the factory as a reception facility for one month would bring in more money than making kaffiyehs for five years, he says.

“We’d make more selling falafels,” he says. “And people don’t really care. We could close tomorrow and no one would care.”

edmund.sanders@latimes.com