Stitched amid conflict, this Palestinian luxury sneaker is now available in the U.S.
If you visit a Palestinian home, you might come across a colorful geometric pattern adorning the throw pillows or tea towels.
For 3000 years, women across the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank have learned the art of tatreez, a form of cross-stitch embroidery that is passed down from generation to generation. The motifs, which often feature stars and cypress trees—and the color palette of browns, blues, and reds—are meant to conjure the beauty of the Mediterranean landscape.
“We do embroidery on bags, dresses, bedsheets, book covers,” says Kifah Adra, the head of the Women’s Weaving Cooperative in Masafer Yatta, a chain of hamlets in the area. “All of our homes are filled with embroidery.”
The Palestinian people are struggling in the midst of conflict and military occupation, and the most immediate imperative is to protect human lives. But for Adra, and other Palestinians whose communities are facing existential threats, it is also important to save cultural traditions to ensure that their legacy and history are not erased.
That’s the philosophy that drives Resolute RGL, a Palestinian fashion house that wants to share tatreez with a global audience. It was cofounded in March 2025 by Basel Adra, a Palestinian journalist and documentary filmmaker, along with his mother, Kifah, a master artisan who has been the longtime leader of the women’s cooperative. They’re joined by a group of of Palestinian and global activists—Maria Chacour, Nicholas Jacob, and Joseph Levin—who bring their expertise in design and operations to the business.
They’ve launched a collection of luxury sneakers—priced between $250 and $350—that are embellished with tatreez patterns, hand stitched by 250 women in the cooperative. They’re adding other footwear designs, including sandals and Mary Janes. The overarching vision is for these products to humanize the Palestinian people and preserve their artistic lineage. Today, in a brand milestone, Resolute is expanding its presence to the United States, bringing its products to a broader audience with pop-up experiences across New York, including at the United Nations during Climate Week.
The Vision for the Cooperative
The groundwork for Resolute began in 2003, when Kifah launched a cooperative with three other women in her ancestral home of Masafer Yatta. In this remote, rural region, Israel’s military occupation restricts people’s movements and hinders building infrastructure like schools and universities. Kifah realized that women, in particular, have few options when it comes to formal education or traditional employment. Girls start learning tatreez from the age of around 10, as a rite of passage, and Kifah had the idea of transforming this craft into a business that would allow women to earn a living and achieve some independence.
For years, the cooperative generated revenue by selling embroidered dresses, wall hangings, and home decor to visiting activists, foreign volunteers, and human rights researchers who visited the South Hebron Hills. However, as military blockades tightened and travel across the West Bank became increasingly dangerous, physical visitors dwindled.
That’s when Kifah’s son, Basel, and his community of activist partners came up with the idea of evolving the business. Rather than waiting for international supporters to visit Masafer Yatta, they could use the modern e-commerce infrastructure to get the products out into the world.
Together, they decided on a product that would blend centuries-old craft with a modern lifestyle: a high-end everyday sneaker that features subtle tatreez panels. To fund this vision, they launched a Kickstarter campaign that was timed to coincide with the night of the Academy Awards in March 2025, when Basel was up for an award for his documentary, No Other Land. The film was named Best Documentary Feature, and Basel accepted the Oscar wearing a pair of “Haifa” sneakers from Resolute. That night, the project went viral on social media. In their launch, they sold more than 6,000 pairs of sneakers, generating enough revenue and momentum to scale into a sustainable fashion house.
Help Women Work Safely
With its U.S. expansion, Resolute offers an economic lifeline to thousands of women across Masafer Yatta and the greater Hebron region. And thanks to Kifah’s intimate understanding of life in the region, she has built a supply chain around the daily realities, movement restrictions, and safety of the artisans.
Resolute taps Kifah’s organization, the Women’s Weaving Cooperative, which has an entirely decentralized production model. Raw materials and threads are delivered straight to the artisans, so they can work safely in their homes without risking the possibility of violent encounters on rural roads. Women can work on their own schedules, which often include family obligations and farm chores. They often work in the evenings, or while their children are studying.
Each pair of shoes requires 14 to 24 hours of hand stitching, as women work through each panel. Once they complete their embroidered panels, Resolute collects them from the West Bank and ships them to partner factories in Portugal, where master shoemakers assemble the tatreez onto high-quality leather and suede sneakers.
But running a global fashion brand from Masafer Yatta means being confronted by danger every day. On the day I spoke with Basel, he described the recent events in the village. “Just in the last two weeks, two entire communities in Masafer Yatta have been erased with Israeli bulldozers,” he says. “They didn’t leave any home, or bathroom, or water tank for the families. Everything was wiped out.”
Despite this structural destruction, the community refuses to abandon their home. Basel says that staying means finding any means to build a life and survive. And for the 250 women stitching this tatreez, each completed piece of embroidery is an act of defiance—proof of life when everything surrounding them is being torn down. These women of the cooperative are the majority shareholders of Resolute, and the income they receive from purchases directly benefits their communities.
Resolute is now stepping onto the global stage in New York and across the United States. Back home in Masafer Yatta, Kifah hopes that the sneakers represent more than luxury fashion. “Our hope is that our community and our village will be rebuilt and improved,” says Kifah. “And that the women’s voices reach places it didn’t before.”