Fragments of dry clay mixed with straw lie scattered on the ground. Some have a curvature, a perfectly round hole, or an intact ornament of a wheat ear. A few pieces have held the shape of the original object, while others have completely crumbled into dust.
Although geographically small, Palestine has a diverse range of soil types due to variations in origin (parent material), climatic, and topographic features.1 In the Central Highlands of Palestine, soil layers alternate between fertile, loamy terra rossa soil, permeable chalky marl, malleable clayey soils, and the underlying hard limestone on which these soils form. The depth of the soils, as well as their physical and chemical properties, vary from one place to another, even just a few meters apart.
North of Jerusalem, on the western side of the watershed that runs through the Central Highlands of the West Bank, villages like Kufr Aqab, Rafat, Qalandiya, Al-Jib, and Qatanna have a relatively thick layer of soil deposits overlaying the hard limestone beneath.2 This layer enabled these villages to historically serve as Jerusalem’s “food basket,” as well as centers for producing a variety of domestic earthen vessels according to the season and need.3 These vessels were predominantly crafted by women during the period between spring and autumn harvests. They served a variety of purposes, including food preparation, storage, and consumption, as well as the storage of water and oil.
Since the early 2000s, those villages have undergone rapid changes caused by their isolation from Jerusalem through the Israeli separation wall and the large-scale confiscation of farmland for settlement expansion. As a result, they now host new construction projects catering to the growing Palestinian population, confined between Israeli settlements and the separation wall, and disconnected from Jerusalem’s urban infrastructures. Accompanying these shifts has been the emergence of new terraforming practices, from open construction pits and stone quarrying “Jerusalem stone” tiles to piles of mixed earth waste that dominate village outskirts.4 Once an integral part of daily life—used in craft, construction, and domestic practices—earth materials today rarely escape the reductive labels of “resource” or “waste,” with soils often seen as construction by-products.
For geologists, these cuts in the ground serve as “geological windows,” allowing them to peek into the depths of layers otherwise invisible.5 Yet, they also serve as windows into layers of scientific classifications, economic and political exploitation, and lost practices. Reengaging with local knowledge around earth materials can contribute to practices of repair amidst accelerating land dispossession, fragmentation, and isolation. Earthen objects, in this sense, can serve as living pedagogical tools that inspire new ways of reconnecting with the land.
We gathered the pieces in large bags, took them down the hill, and transported them to our studio in Qalandiya, determined to rebuild them one day. The questions of how, when, and with whom this rebuilding would take place remained open, resurfacing each time someone saw the fragments and asked what they were.
The khabiyeh is a traditional clay storage unit that was integral to the daily life of Palestinian agrarian communities until the end of twentieth century. Unlike other fired objects like qudoor (cooking pots), or azyaar (water jars), khawabi (the plural form of khabiyeh) were left unfired. Their mixture of raw clay and straw was beneficial for preserving grains for years by naturally maintaining a cool interior. Clay’s ability to absorb, store, and slowly release heat is reinforced with straw fibers that create air pockets within the clay, which regulate humidity and airflow, as well as prevent spoilage and deter pests.
The word khabiyeh comes from the root khabba’a, meaning to hide something as a means of protection.6 Khawabi have been vital for long-term food security—they preserved surplus grains, sustained families during droughts and wars, and embodied preparation for the future. Grains such as wheat, barley, millet, and sorghum have long been central to Palestinian agriculture and daily life. Wheat, in particular, is processed into various staples—from bread and freekeh to burghul and sweets.7
By the late twentieth century, the use of storage tools like the khabiyeh had largely disappeared, not only due to broader shifts away from labor-intensive land practices but also as a direct consequence of the sharp decline in grain farming following the 1948 Nakba. The severity of this rupture is evident in a 2022 Oxfam report, which estimated that—in contrast to its history as a grain-producing region—95 percent of Palestine’s wheat is imported.8 Since October 2023, this reality has become even more devastating amidst the genocide in Gaza, with bakeries being continuous targets of Israeli bombardment and flour becoming the most expensive commodity under blockade and forced starvation. In the West Bank, the recent Israeli military attack on Palestine’s only national seed bank in Hebron, which preserved heirloom seeds that are resistant to disease and harsh weather, constitutes a direct assault on Palestinian farmers’ efforts towards food sovereignty.
The fragments remained in our studio for months, until a group of the previous workshop’s participants reached out again about wanting to build a new khabiyeh prototype for an exhibition.9 We immediately thought of the broken pieces that have been sitting in bags, and offered them as raw material for their new endeavor.
In June 2024, together with twenty workshop participants, we built three khawabi prototypes at Sakiya, an academy for art, agriculture and science located in Ein Qiniya, near Ramallah.10 The workshop aimed to contribute to Sakiya’s ongoing projects around food sovereignty and self-sufficiency practices. Located in Area C of the West Bank—under full Israeli control and where Palestinian development is heavily restricted—the academy is disconnected from the village’s water and electricity networks. Building a khabiyeh there meant it would serve not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a functioning food storage unit for the site. The workshop thus engaged practices of care and knowledge transmission in a context where cultural and agricultural continuity is under constant threat.
In the few weeks leading up to the workshop, we inquired about how to build a khabiyeh through conversations with the village’s older generations, research into written records and books, and gathering and testing clay samples. Farmer Yousef Yacoub remains the only villager in Ein Qiniya who is still cultivating wheat on his land. Yousef took us to his land and explained why he still insists on cultivating it despite the hardships:
Wheat is available in the market—why should I bother planting and struggling? That’s what people think. But when I plant and harvest it myself, I taste the difference. I feel connected to the land. I don’t want to abandon its produce. We must cultivate it. I don’t want to ever depend on others to feed me—on imports from other countries. No. I plant in my land, and from my own sweat, I harvest, eat, and live.11
Prior to the workshop, we also visited Carmen Badran at her home in Al-Jib, near Jerusalem, an area known for its rich clayey soils and long history of pottery making. Although she has never worked with clay herself, Carmen could still identify the different types of soil found around the village and the distinct qualities they lent to various domestic objects. Her knowledge comes from observing her mother and other women of previous generations as they processed and shaped clay for everyday use. She explained:
As for wheat… They built rooms out of clay for it—those are the khawabi—it meant they stayed cool and preserved the grain. No worms, no weevils. Today, we store wheat and go back to find it full of weevils. But they used to store it for three, four, even five years without it spoiling. Why? Because it was stored in clay. That means the clay had something special—or that its soil was naturally cool. Everything needs coolness to stay well, right? Even for houses, they used to plaster them with clay during summer. The clay they used wasn’t red—it was yellow, and hence reflected the sun. When it dried, it hardened from the rain and protected the house from water. Even now, we don’t know how to maintain a house without moisture problems. They used to mix the clay with boos (fine wheat chaff). And they kneaded it just like we knead bread today.12
Standing on four short legs, with a circular hole at the bottom of one of its walls, the khabiyeh allows for a container to be placed beneath it and filled with grains when needed. With little information on how to construct the base without it collapsing, we developed a method of building the vessel upside down. Four blocks of clay were compressed by hand, then joined together on top of the base, and left to dry before it could be flipped again the next day.
For the grains to slide out of the khabiyeh smoothly, its walls must be built with a slight inclination toward the opening. A handful of the clay mixture—about two fingers thick—was pressed on the outer edge of the base to start building the walls. This process continued until a layer, known as batteh, is formed, holding its shape without collapsing under its own weight. Each batteh was then left for a few hours to half-dry before the next layer could be added.
Historically, building khawabi was a time- and energy-intensive process that required the cooperation of a group of women—typically three to four, depending on the vessel’s size. However, we were able to build multiple khawabi simultaneously by staggering the process—beginning a new one while the first was in its initial drying stage, and so on. Before our workshop, we laid the foundations for two khawabi, enabling participants to rotate between them and begin a third. This approach allowed a process that usually takes weeks to be condensed into a single day, offering an immersive learning experience of the craft’s main stages.
The group who took over the mission of rebuilding the khawabi crushed the fragments further into dust, preparing for the rebuilding. The clay and straw dust of these khawabi held the memory of a mixture that cannot be replicated identically. It was created by the intuitive measuring and kneading of twenty hands: a mix of blue clay foraged from a dump site in Rafat, marl dusting the trees from nearby roadwork, and straw from the recently harvested wheat threshed by Yousef.
Four days after our workshop in Ein Qiniya, Israeli armed settlers attacked Sakiya and the village, destroying the khawabi prototypes along with other belongings on site. The life of the object was cut short by the very threats it was designed to protect against. This attack, following a previous one just a week before the start of the workshop, is part of a broader Israeli settler-colonial strategy aimed at intimidating Palestinians and asserting control over rural lands—spaces that are increasingly isolated and surveilled as Palestinian cities in the West Bank become further confined and subject to increased settler aggression.
Before the attack, we had come across many fragments of broken khawabi in the landscape. While those encounters usually evoked feelings of loss, we came to accept their destruction as part of the longer life cycle of the object. Many khawabi, once integral to interior walls, were destroyed as farming practices declined and traditional stone houses fell into disuse. While stone walls often remained intact, khawabi likely found new lives elsewhere—repurposed, repaired, or returned to dust in the land.
In Al-Jib, Wardeh Um-Hamdan, the last potter in the village, turned to khawabi from abandoned houses as a source of clay for her pots. In the last years of her life, she could no longer access the nearby Jabal Al-Matayin (Clay Mountain), following Israel’s annexation of more than half the village’s land for the Givat Zeev settlement. So she crushed unused khawabi, dissolved them in water, and repurposed the clay to create cooking pots that she fired and sold.
In this way, unfired clay objects like khawabi do not only store food, but also serve as clay sources in times of material scarcity. This is due to the composition of clay—silicate and aluminum ions arranged in thin, flat sheets, held together by water molecules that allow them to slide over one another.13 The chemical reactions induced by firing removes water and forms covalent bonds between the sheets, permanently locking them together and giving pottery its final hardness and strength. Until that point, however, clay remains workable—even when dry, it can be rehydrated and made pliable again.
In contrast to these encounters with abandoned khawabi traces, the destruction of our prototypes was an assault on something that we collectively created, provoking a direct experience of loss. If the khabiyeh is part of an earthen inheritance, created to preserve and sustain the livelihood of those who made it, what value does conserving the object hold when the communities and the spaces that give it life are under constant threat?
We ornamented the khabiyeh with wheat ears, which remained intact after the assault by settlers. The participants who took the initiative to rebuild the khabiyeh decided to set aside the ornamented fragments to be integrated into the new object later. As expected, cracks formed between the new clay mixture and the ornamented remnants of the destroyed khabiyeh—an inevitable result of joining dry clay with wet clay. Yet, the repairers created a new prototype, carrying forward the spirit of the original one we collectively built in the summer.
As much as these first prototypes meant to us, rooted in and lent from a long history of working with the land, their significance lies in the knowledge they carry forward. Like clay, knowledge is malleable: it moves, adapts, and finds new places and moments to take shape. To rebuild broken pieces of khawabi, to rework fragments of clay, to knead dust into shape is to face destruction—not as an end, but as part of an ongoing cycle. These are small gestures in the vast landscape of repair, ones that work with the memory held by materials, not to replicate what was lost, but to transform it into something bigger than itself. Being carried forward in the hands and minds of those who engage with it is an inheritance that outlasts the object itself.
For a detailed overview of soil types in Palestine, see Basim Dudeen, “The Soils of Palestine (The West Bank and Gaza Strip): Current Status and Future Perspectives” in Soil resources of Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries, Options Méditerranéennes: Série B. Etudes et Recherches; no. 34, ed. Pandi Zdruli et al. (Bari, Italy: CIHEAM, 2001), 203–25.
That is, relative to the soil layer found on the Eastern Slopes Zone between the Central Highlands and the Jordan Valley. In those areas, the lack of vegetation due to the high temperature and low rainfall accelerates soil erosion. Soils range from semi-desert soils to terra rossa and mountain marls, and the area is used mainly for grazing sheep and goats (Dudeen, “The Soils of Palestine”).
For discussions on the role of rural Palestinian villages in sustaining urban centers and producing local goods, see Khaldun Bshara and Suad Amiry, eds., Reclaiming Space: The 50 Village Project in Rural Palestine (Ramallah: Riwaq, 2015).
“Jerusalem stone” is a term that emerged during the British Mandate period to describe the pale limestone, dolomite, and dolomitic limestone quarried around Jerusalem and its surroundings. Traditionally, this stone served as the primary structural building material in Palestinian architecture, especially in the Central Mountain region. Since the Mandate era, however, its use has shifted mostly to cladding or facing, losing much of its earlier structural role due to changes in construction methods and materials. The name “Jerusalem stone” helped evoke biblical associations with the city, contributing to the symbolic framing of Jerusalem during that time. This change reflects broader colonial and modern influences on local building practices (See: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso Books, 2007).
The term “geological windows” was introduced to us by geologist Talib Alharithi, who uses it to describe exposed cuts in the ground—whether caused by construction activities or other forms of land disturbance—that reveal underlying geological layers.
The definition of “Khabba’a خبّأ.” according to the Lisan Al-Arab, see: Almaany, accessed April 3, 2025, ➝.
Nora Barrows-Friedman, host, The Electronic Intifada, podcast, episode 60, “The History of Wheat in Palestine,” June 24, 2022, ➝.
See the Oxfam International Report issued amid the war in Ukraine 2022, “Fears That Wheat Stocks Could Run out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory within Three Weeks,” Oxfam International, April 11, 2022, ➝.
The group comprised Amal Hajjaj, Basel Nasir, Batoul Harb, Dala Nobani, Dalya Yasin, Lana Judeh (curator), Layla Taher, Leyan Aruri, Tawba Alshaikh-Qasem (assistant curator), and Zena Nidal. This work was part of the exhibition “Of Mud and Iron: An Educational Exhibition on Palestinian Urbanism” (2025), supported by Sakiya and in partnership with the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center.
The workshop was part of Between Lime and Clay, a collaborative project by Areej Ashhab and Raghad Saqfalhait (2023–24), which also included seven other workshops, a symposium, an exhibition, and the production and screening of a film.
Yousef Yacoub, discussion with the authors on wheat cultivation in Ein Qiniya, 2024.
Carmen Badran, discussion with the authors on khabiyeh construction in Al-Jib, 2024.
Stephen Breuer, “The Chemistry of Pottery,” Education in Chemistry, July 1, 2012, ➝.