11 · ʿAyn

ʿAyn is the letter that opens ʿarabī, the word for Arabic. In 1922 the Palestine Order in Council, article 82, made Arabic one of the three official languages of Mandate Palestine, with English and Hebrew [1]. On 19 July 2018 the Knesset passed, by 62 votes to 55, the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Its article 4 reads: the state's language is Hebrew; the Arabic language has a special status in the state [2]. About a fifth of Israel's citizens are Palestinian Arabs whose first language it is [3].

That is the whole of what the shirt says: one letter, written whole — not struck through — and two years joined by a bare line with a bent tip. A note on a statute, in the statute's own words, not on a people.

It is the emptiest shirt in the collection and the one strangers ask about. The letter is drawn in the everyday hand, nine centimetres tall, its bowl flicking out at the bottom the way a pen leaves the page.

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.