Like several other key episodes in the history of the modern Middle East, the inter-communal violence that erupted in Jaffa and other Palestinian urban centers in the summer of 1929 – conflagrations which are now said to mark Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict – was informed by a an ecology that was at once social and environmental. Sectarian hotheadedness had much to do with actual heat, and in particular with global temperature variations that couched Palestine’s sweltering climate against that of colder settings like Russia. This paper – part of a larger project historicizing the effects of temperature balancing acts in the region – begins writing climate and seasonality back into the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It attends to female Muscovite Jewish immigrants arriving at the port city in shorts, and to the effects of their attire, bodily comportment, and ideas about sweat, tanning, labor, beauty and propriety on local young men, who would begin identifying as ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’ partly as a result of these summertime encounters. It also explores citrus cultivation and trade via this global junction (steamers arriving from Europe with passengers often returned from Jaffa loaded with oranges to metropolitan winter markets), exploring how agricultural seasonality informed communal strife, and more broadly, why most violence in the Middle East happens during the summer. Encounters in places like Jaffa, Arab port cities dubbed ‘bride of the sea’ and ‘mother of stranger’ and long accustomed to inflows of newcomers, were part of an unprecedented nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fossil-fueled migration waves from Europe. These population movements were not our present-day environmental migrations in the other direction, and usually responded to other push and pull factors than sudden or progressive climate changes. Rather, they are related to climate change as anthropogenic causes. How exactly does the process of acclimatizing to a new setting change its climate? Through exploring such questions, the paper looks into changes in the global economy, and concretizes a global division of labor between hot agricultural zones were cash-cropping depended on abundant solar energy and high temperatures, and colder settings whose coal and low temperatures were conducive to industrial processing of raw materials. These are the underpinnings of the emergence of a fossil-fueled planetary climate wherein hot zones, both geopolitically and environmentally, are connected to colder ones.