Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine

Abstract

Raw sewage and burning trash; mountains of debris from demolished homes and construction sites; piles of broken phones, flip-flops, and defective household goods; toxic chemicals, industrial runoff, informal dumping, and settlement refuse; bags of moldy bread hanging from walls. These and other forms of waste accumulate in and around Palestinian cities, villages, and bodies, forming what cultural anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins calls a “waste siege.” While most studies of contemporary Palestine center repressive violence, forced displacement, military occupation, and political negotiations, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine focuses on everyday life in zones of abandonment where Palestinians attempt to navigate and manage the accumulated detritus of colonial capitalism. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research based primarily in Jenin and Ramallah/al-Bireh, Stamatopoulou-Robbins provides a visceral and theoretically sophisticated guide to the disposability, toxicity, and ethical dilemmas that Palestinians confront in the West Bank today. At the same time, Waste Siege offers a “metaphor for a dying planet” (p. xi) by highlighting the destructive accumulation and uneven distribution of waste as well as the creative ways that people live among ruin. In doing so, she emphasizes tensions, uncertainty, and gray zones over simple assertions of responsibility. The first two chapters focus on dilemmas associated with the influx of low-cost, lowquality consumer goods to the West Bank. Mass consumption generates tons of garbage that must be disposed of. With donor funding and Israeli permission, the Palestinian Authority (PA) built two landfills in the West Bank. But this obsolete, low-tech solution has short temporal horizons and opens the PA to challenges related to land ownership and property values. Moreover, Israeli authorities force the PA landfills to accept trash from Israeli settlements, legitimizing colonization while shortening the life of the landfills. At the same time, Palestinian consumers navigate between a formal market awash in quickly deteriorating, low-cost imports and an informal rabish (rubbish) market specializing in secondhand goods discarded by Israelis. The former has an air of newness undermined by suspect quality, while the latter generates a sense of dirtiness and shame negated by an emphasis on the quality of the craftsmanship and an assertion of national pride because, as one respondent explains, “Arabs don’t throw perfectly good things away” (p. 90). Chapter 3 examines the indeterminacy of responsibility for addressing the “wastescape” (p. 107). Palestinian residents of a village overwhelmed with accumulated waste address their complaints to the PA rather than Israel. By holding the PA accountable,