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By Jenan (She/Her/Any)
"جانا عونة يا إبراهيم ريح اليوم يا ابراهيم فيها النصر يا إبراهيم"
-Palestinian Folk Song
Ma’dud is a bamboo-like stick used for gauging the level of water in a reservoir. The stick is measured with tape and equally divided into sections according to the number of cultivating families in a clan. The sections are marked with thorns stuck into the stick. The stick is placed inside the reservoir, and the collection of water starts from sunrise until sunset. The division of water supply is repeated among different clans who own mashakeb (nearby cultivated plots of land). The water moves from the reservoir to the respective lands through qanawat (canals). Irrigators respect each other’s rounds, determined by the time allocated that corresponds to the Ma’dud that they own. Each cultivator is responsible for being present to collect their water amount. If a cultivator forgets to show up, someone from their family will collect the water for them. When one cultivator finishes watering their land, the next cultivator at the pool shuts the water flow for them. The system repeats every four to eight days, depending on the type of crops. If less water is needed than the allocated Ma’dud, a family can decide to give the excess water to a clan in need. Ma’dud is an ancient Palestinian management system. Ma’dud is a bamboo stick. Ma’dud is a water share, and more broadly, a resourceful share. Ma’dud is a livelihood.
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Art by Jenan
Care is a bamboo stick; care is resurgence. When we practice care in a Free Palestine, we are reclaiming socio-cultural modes and traditions connected to the land, to nature, and to each other, that were lost or suppressed. A Free Palestine involves openness–openness to reimagining Palestinian sovereignty as an embodied claim to the land. Care in a Free Palestine shies away from the idea that neoliberal markets can deliver mechanisms of care.
Concepts of interdependence are crucial to how Palestinians operate in the world. This sense of interdependence is present in management systems such as Ma’dud, that aim to bring the various pieces of our lives together. The cartography of Ma’dud can be mapped onto other intimate social processes; specifically, we use it as a guideline that shows how care is organized and displayed. Ma’dud allows us to think of limitless pathways for care. We practice care that makes safe spaces for everyone, and harnesses realism to support each individual’s needs.
If a community member is in need of more resources, other community members share their resources for the sake of maintaining harmony.
Care is a communal system that is not monopolized by a single person or institution. Care takes into consideration that if something in the system breaks down, everybody is informed.
Care is based on solidarity and accountability, and is constantly re-configured as a cultural space according to the complex relationships between people.
Care is a mode of being; Ma’dud is a mode of care. Care is collective, and collective care becomes collective action.
Care embodies answers of how we live, and how we live together. Care invokes practices and values that are foundational to Palestinian knowledge.
The core Palestinian values that inform how we practice care are Ouneh (collaborative support), Faz’a (impromptu help), Sharaka (cooperation), Tabadul (reciprocity), O’sareyyeh (familiality), Karam (generosity), and Hikaye (story-telling). These values require us to respond to social, cultural, ancestral, terrestrial, spiritual, and temporal species activities that make up inter-related life processes.
Ouneh is a concept deeper than volunteering. Ouneh is an informal social institution that emerged with the goal of filling shortages in community work. It is present in the way Palestinians help each other build houses, and join to assist each other in the olive harvest season. The host families provide food and ensure the participants’ needs are met.
Another value related to Ouneh is Faz’a. Faz’a takes on a spontaneous and emergency-like collective action in order to help a person or people in need. Faz’a requires vigilance towards others’ crises, and takes on the form of a human chain; where every member of our community strengthens others, and nourishes our ties together.
This is where O’sareyyeh would come in, where the concept of familiality between Palestinians is not limited to clans or blood ties; O’sareyyeh is based on a consensual logic of shared identity, politics, histories and experiences grounded in mutual respect that allows Palestinians to move along with each other with ease and familiarity. Palestinian O’sareyyeh becomes an extension of Palestinian land, where a return to the land is also a return to each other.
Care for us hinges on Tabadul. Tabadul is a form of reciprocity that involves a mutual giving and receiving based on good relations. Tabadul is not constructed around a linear time frame; in an agricultural system, a cultivator may give another cultivator seeds for one year, and the other cultivator may share seeds in the next year. Tabadul ensures the wellbeing of its participants: there is no accounting in Tabadul, and if a participant fails to give back, they are not cut off- instead, they are encouraged to give back in other ways. This principle leads to a praxis of care that is not merely charitable or altruistic. Rather, it is mutually beneficial and harmonious, and it centers internal consistency.
Another associated value is Sharaka, which is co-operation. Sharaka as a system emerged from sharecropping, where a piece of land can have various permutations that belong to different people. Sharaka informs our way of care by forming relationships that connect us cooperatively, allowing us to share resources, and express our limitations.
Karam is interwoven with all other values, and as a concept, it signifies generosity and hospitality, and rids of an expectation of compensation. Karam comes from a belief in Palestinian culture that all natural resources are a ne’mah (gift) from God, and cannot be individually owned. In fact, it is very common in Palestine for people to pick fruit from a neighbor’s tree, without fear of reprimand. Karam is incorporated into our matrix of care by treating other community members with nobility and honor. Karam increases affection and symbiosis in a caring network and trains our souls to be abundant.
Care, for us, has a practical responsibility of bridging a clear understanding in the relationship between the past, present, and the future. One way of creating this bridge is by disseminating knowledge and wisdom through Hikaye. Hikaye is an oral method of storytelling that focuses on real or imagined tales most commonly practiced by Palestinian women to provide localized perspective and societal critique. Through Hikaye, we create a space for a cross-generational sharing of stories, narratives, and experiences that inspire a pedagogical wonder. Hikaye comes to take on the role of an interactive participation in care. The information and stories shared mediate dialogue between community members and enrich encounters by adding meaning, value, and resonance to the care work being undertaken.
Art by Jenan
Care is an act of world-making and belonging. Even though our matrix of care is transformative, we recognize that native voices are not homogenous, and what works for some may not work for others. Our politics of care is oriented towards relations rather than identities, because in Palestinian spaces, there are multiple identities that do not sing in unison.
Care networks are built out through time, and take into account different lived experience, and how differently people encounter such spaces; care spaces are constantly evolving. Care for us is also about the advent of something new, and the opening of cosmophonies- in other words, care makes new worlds manifest or appear.
Our praxis of care invokes the value of abundance, or opening up to the rest of the world, which demonstrates the need to translate the potential of care into proximal communities. This is the final principle of Tarsheed: rationing care resources and sharing. This principle consolidates the notion that the Palestinian body is inherent in the land of Palestine, and the land of Palestine is inherent in the world; accordingly, the Palestinian body is inherent in the world. From here arises collective interdependence and a responsibility to sustain the world.
Care is a way of belonging that ruptures space and time. If our current of care instigates belonging, then belonging is a movement that involves reciprocity and participation, where it is constituted by those who belong to it in such a way that also belongs to them. Palestinian belonging unfolds a type of space that corresponds to us, or opens up a space within our place in the world.
Care permeates belonging and allows Palestinians to inhabit the world in our own way, thus bringing it together. By opening up to the world each in their own way, Palestinians are in a collective relationship with more of the world, we are present in the world and also the world is present in us to the same reciprocal extent. Belonging grounds participation in the world, and the world gives unity to our being. Through this work, the unveiling of our mechanisms of care ground us as harmonious beings with all of our surroundings.
Shukr:
My essay is inspired by intellectual rumination on several authors’ previous scholarship. I am much indebted to the work of Janan Mousa in her 2020 paper, “Collective Action in an Exceptional Governance Context: A Critical Analysis of Co-operative Water Management in the West Bank of Palestine”, Renaud Barbaras’s (2019) “Belonging: towards a phenomenology of the flesh”, Olivier Vallerand’s (2013) “Home is the Place We All Share”, Hamdan Taha and Iman Saca’s (2022) “Invoking Awneh: Community Heritage in Palestine”, Marian Barnes et. al (2015) Ethics of Care: Critical Advances in International Perspective, and Jamal Nabulsi’s (2014) “’to stop the earthquake’: Palestine and the Settler Colonial Logic of Fragmentation”, as well as his 2023 article, “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty”, and Stephanie Butler’s 2020 review, “Indigenous Resurgence”. I am also indebted to the land- our Palestinian land- with all its stones, its skies, its plants, animals, elders and children, from which several ecological experiences have emerged to endow me with practical and theoretical knowledge. Finally, I am indebted to our Palestinian peers on the ground, the purveyors of carework, who spend time caring for our country, in order to embrace us all in a Free Palestine.