Paper short abstract:

In Jerusalem rain galvanises multiple forms of care, none of which are neutral. When water falls from the sky it inspires urban designs entwining with political violence, radical politics in plans for floods, and dances for liberation. If rain ushers in new arrangements, what potential do they hold?

Paper long abstract:

For centuries in Jerusalem its residents have looked up to the sky for rain. A signal for good harvests and health in the year ahead, falls from the heavens augured hope or precarity with the swelling of pools, wells, and karstic springs. Now, rain entwines with the extremes and small intimacies of life under political violence, just as its patterns become more unpredictable every year. In the moments of the everyday, while floods bypass blockades and devastate displacement in Gaza, the political systems which govern rains here are at work across the city of Jerusalem. Regulations from the state control the capture of rain with claims of care, urban designs for municipal ecosystem services obscure effects of Palestinian dispossession, and plans for floods beyond city borders elicit radical politics articulated through care. Before it touches the land, though, rain remains free. Palestinian Jerusalemites tend to rainfed garden plots, embrace the showers of a new season, and look up to the sky for signs of sacred hope. Amongst these rains, forms of care displace, refuse, and subvert one another. Never taking care and its politics for granted, Jerusalem rain unsettles and regenerates infrastructural, state, and daily practices in the Palestine Anthropocene. In this work I draw on my doctoral research in Jerusalem and collaborative projects which have emerged since. Where rain ushers in new political and ecological arrangements, what power do these wield? If atmospheric matter inspires an ecology of care, what are its limits and what potential does it hold?