01 · Ṣabr

Ṣabr is the Arabic word for patience. It is also the everyday name of the prickly pear, Opuntia ficus-indica, whose hedges were planted for centuries around houses and fields as living fences [1]. After 1948 the hedges kept growing. Where villages had been demolished and forests planted over them, the cactus came up through the trees — so that, as one study of the landscape puts it, where cactus thrives in a forest or in uninhabited fields, a village once stood [1].

How many villages is a matter of definition and of who counts. Walid Khalidi's All That Remains lists 418 depopulated villages [2]; the Zochrot database records around 600 localities [3]. We print no figure.

The drawing is a herbarium sheet: one mother paddle, two younger ones, one fruit, the spines as pairs of ticks, two strips of paper tape holding the specimen down. The caption states one documented fact and a year. Nothing else is claimed.

For every T-shirt sold, FREE PALESTINE MEDIA S.R.L. gives €5 to a medical charity working in Gaza and the West Bank — named here once the written agreement is signed. The €5 is given by us from our own revenue; it is not a payment by you to the charity and is not tax-deductible for you. Transfers are made monthly and published on the ledger.