Palestinian Culture: Language, Traditions, Flag and Everyday Life

Palestinian culture is the shared way of life of about 15.5 million Palestinians, in Palestine and around the world. It is an Arab culture rooted in the towns and villages of the eastern Mediterranean, expressed in the Palestinian dialect of Arabic, close family ties, a strong tradition of hospitality, and arts such as embroidery (tatreez), the dabke dance, storytelling and food.

This overview covers the main parts of the culture of Palestine with sources, and answers some common questions along the way, including what the flag's colors mean and whether it has a star.

Palestinian Arabic: the language of daily life

Palestinians speak Arabic. As across the Arab world, there are two layers: Modern Standard Arabic, used in writing, news and formal speech, and a spoken dialect used at home and in the street. The spoken variety is Palestinian Arabic, which linguists at Birzeit University describe as part of the South Levantine group, alongside Jordanian Arabic, and close to the dialects of Lebanon and Syria.

Palestinian Arabic is not one accent. The same researchers identify urban dialects (which vary between cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Nazareth, Nablus and Hebron), rural dialects and Bedouin dialects. The best-known marker is the letter qaf: in most city speech it becomes a glottal stop, in many villages a "k", and in Bedouin speech a "g". So qalb, "heart", can be heard as 'alb, kalb or galb.

The archived CIA World Factbook notes that Hebrew is also spoken by many Palestinians and that English is widely understood.

Palestine beliefs: religion and community

Most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. The CIA World Factbook's last estimates put Muslims at 98 to 99 percent of the population of Gaza and 80 to 85 percent of the West Bank's population, where the remainder is mostly Israeli settlers together with a Christian minority of 1 to 2.5 percent, mainly Greek Orthodox.

Christianity has deep roots here. Bethlehem has been identified as the birthplace of Jesus since the 2nd century, and its Church of the Nativity, first completed in 339 CE, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. A small Samaritan community also lives beside Nablus.

Religious festivals shape the year: Ramadan and the two Eids for Muslims, and Christmas and Easter for Christians. Our guides to Eid al-Fitr and Ramadan explain those in detail.

Embroidery, dabke and other living traditions

Several Palestinian traditions are inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Hospitality runs through all of these. Embroidery circles, wedding dances and winter storytelling are social events held in homes, and guests are offered coffee, tea and food as a matter of course. Food is a subject of its own: see our guide to Palestinian food.

• Tatreez (embroidery), inscribed in 2021. UNESCO describes village dresses, called thobes, covered on the chest, sleeves and cuffs with embroidered birds, trees and flowers, where the colors and designs show a woman's region and her marital and economic status. The skill is passed from mother to daughter.
• Dabke (dabkeh), inscribed in 2023. A group dance performed in a line or semicircle, with dancers holding hands or shoulders, jumping and stamping the ground, at weddings, graduations and festivals. UNESCO notes that most Palestinians know it.
• Hikaye, inscribed in 2008. Folk tales told by women to other women and children, usually at home on winter evenings.
• Nabulsi soap making, inscribed in 2024. The olive oil soap tradition of the city of Nablus.

Women from Palestine: keepers of tradition and much else

Women carry much of the culture described above. Tatreez and the hikaye are women's arts, and UNESCO notes that many women also sell embroidery to add to their family's income, working alone or in groups.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) reported for International Women's Day 2026 that women make up about 49 percent of the population of Palestine, some 2.74 million people. Their participation in the paid labor force is low, about 19 percent in the West Bank and 17 percent in Gaza in 2025. The same release records the toll of the war in Gaza on women, including more than 22,000 who have been widowed since October 2023 and a sharp rise in households headed by women.

The Palestinian flag: colors, meaning, and whether it has a star

The Palestinian flag has three equal horizontal stripes of black, white and green, from top to bottom, with a red triangle at the hoist. It has no star.

If you remember a flag like this with a star, you are probably thinking of Jordan's. The Jordanian flag uses the same colors with a white seven-pointed star on the red triangle, and the stripes are the same black, white and green. Both descend from the Arab Revolt flag of 1917.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the four colors recall the major dynasties of Arab history, the Abbasids, Umayyads, Fatimids and Hashemites. They are also linked to a 13th-century Arabic poem that Britannica quotes: "white are our deeds, black are our battles, green are our fields, red are our swords." Britannica records that the Palestine Liberation Organization formally endorsed the flag on 1 December 1964, and that Israel lifted long-standing restrictions on flying it in 1993.

Palestine Day and other key dates

There is no single "Palestine Day". Three dates are most widely marked.

• 29 November: the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The UN General Assembly established it in 1977. The date is the anniversary of the 1947 UN resolution on the partition of Palestine.
• 15 May: Nakba Day. "Nakba" means "catastrophe" in Arabic and refers, in the UN's words, to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war, when more than half of the Palestinian population was permanently displaced. The UN first commemorated it officially in 2023.
• 30 March: Land Day (Yom al-Ard). It recalls 30 March 1976, when six unarmed Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during protests against the confiscation of land in the Galilee. Many people mark it by planting olive trees.

Fun facts about Palestine

A few facts that surprise people, each from UNESCO, Britannica or PCBS.

• Jericho is one of the oldest settlements on Earth. UNESCO records that Tell es-Sultan, the mound of ancient Jericho, was already a sizeable permanent settlement, with a wall and a tower, by the 9th to 8th millennium BCE.
• The Dead Sea, on the eastern edge of the West Bank, is the lowest body of water on the surface of the Earth, about 430 meters below sea level.
• Palestine has six UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the old town of Hebron, the terraces of Battir, and Saint Hilarion Monastery in Gaza. The most recent, Sebastia, was added in 2026.
• More Palestinians live outside Palestine than inside it: about 5.6 million in the West Bank and Gaza out of roughly 15.5 million worldwide, according to PCBS.
• Nablus was founded by the Romans as Flavia Neapolis in 72 CE, and its name is the Arabic form of Neapolis, "new city".

Movies about Israel and Palestine

Film is one of the most accessible ways into Palestinian life. A short starting list:

These films take a point of view, and viewers will find others that take a different one. They are listed here because they were made by or with Palestinians and have been widely recognized.

• No Other Land. A documentary about the demolition of homes in Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank, made by a Palestinian-Israeli team including Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham. It won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March 2025.
• 5 Broken Cameras (2011). A Palestinian farmer's footage of his village over several years. It was nominated for the best documentary Oscar.
• Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013). Two dramas by the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, each nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film.
• From Ground Zero. A collection of short films by 22 artists in Gaza, screened by the UN for its Nakba commemoration in 2025.
• The Voice of Hind Rajab. A docudrama by the Oscar-nominated director Kaouther Ben Hania, screened at UN Headquarters in December 2025.

What do Palestinians want?

It is not for a charity to answer this on anyone's behalf, and Palestinians do not all want the same thing. The best evidence is independent polling. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah surveyed 1,270 adults face to face in the West Bank and Gaza between 5 and 8 August 2026, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent.

Asked what the Palestinian people's highest priority should be, 43 percent chose an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. 28 percent chose the right of refugees to return to the towns and villages they left in 1948. 15 percent chose building a religious society, and 11 percent a democratic system that respects freedoms and human rights.

In the same poll, 44 percent supported a two-state solution in general terms and 50 percent opposed it, while 56 percent supported a two-state arrangement specifically based on the 1967 borders. 58 percent said the two-state solution is no longer practical because of settlement expansion. Support for negotiations rose to just under half, its highest level in four years, and 79 percent wanted President Mahmoud Abbas to resign. A separate Arab Barometer survey in Gaza in October 2025, reported by PSR, found that a majority would choose to stay in Gaza rather than leave if given the chance.

Keeping a culture alive under pressure

Culture depends on people being able to live ordinary lives: to cook, to marry, to send children to school. In Gaza, where most families have been displaced and many have lost their homes, those ordinary things are what has been taken away.

Fight for Palestine funds food, clean water, medical aid, shelter and support for children's education in Gaza through local partner teams. You can read about humanitarian aid in Gaza, see how to help without money, or donate.