‘Your daily reality is rubbish’: Waste as a means of urban exclusion in the suspended spaces of East Jerusalem

Abstract

Chinese

Drawing on ethnographic and visual research, this article examines the role of waste in two areas of occupied East Jerusalem cut off from the city by the Separation Wall and military checkpoints, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp as well as their immediate surroundings. In asking how urban exclusion operates on the margins of the city, we argue that rubbish can disclose broader socio-spatial relations at work in Jerusalem from the ground up. We find that waste serves to reduce the ambiguity at work in these interstitial zones by furthering exclusion – it operates through the urban everyday where the legal and political situations are in suspension. Conceptually, we contribute to the discussion on spatial stigma associated with infrastructural violence by arguing for a multi-layered understanding of the way waste ‘works’ in urban exclusion. Three registers mutually constitute each other in this process: the materiality of waste with its embodied and affective interactions, the symbolic and discursive violence associated with waste, as well as spatialised stigma and bordering processes.

Keywords

exclusion infrastructure Jerusalem stigma waste

Introduction

There is more rubbish here than human beings. Deep inside [the camp], it is even worse. The piles of rubbish are scary there – between the buildings and everywhere. It’s a repulsive scene […] there is no [municipal] inspection and not enough rubbish bins. People burn the rubbish, all that smell and smoke … (Amani¹ from Ras Khamis, Shuafat Refugee Camp; interview, 27 February 2018)

Waste is often seen as emblematic of the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem cut off from the rest of the city by the Separation Wall² which Israel began to construct in 2002. Over the past 15 years, the neighbourhoods of Shuafat Refugee Camp and Kufr Aqab and their sub-neighbourhoods experienced unprecedented, rapid growth and their cityscape underwent a radical transformation: from a mere few thousand residents living in low-rise, detached buildings in the early 2000s to an estimated 100,000 to 150,000³ residents – about one-third of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population – living in densely built high-rise blocks today. These areas are de jure inside the municipal borders, as determined by the Israeli authorities, but have been de facto severed from the city by the Wall and Israeli military checkpoints which regulate their residents’ access to the city; they are now territorially contiguous with the West Bank but do not fall under the mandate of the Palestinian Authority. Suspended in this interstitial spatial and political position, urban services in these areas are not sufficiently provided by the Israeli-controlled municipality of Jerusalem. Observers frequently note the omnipresence of waste as particularly striking – yet the role of waste in these areas has not been examined in its own right. Drawing on ethnographic and visual research, this article therefore approaches the question of urban exclusion in these neighbourhoods using the lens of waste. In doing so, we argue that rubbish and its material, embodied, affective and semiotic entanglements can disclose broader socio-spatial dynamics at work in these spaces, but also reveal how urban spaces and materialities and the everyday experiences they shape, influence urban geopolitics.

In investigating how waste participates in the creation of urban exclusion – and in line with the concern of this Special Issue – we grapple with the broader question of how urban stigma is linked to infrastructural exclusion. In doing so, we build on and engage with three bodies of literature: (1) urban scholarship on infrastructure, and especially the metabolic circulations of water, sewage and waste, shows how infrastructures’ capacity to connect or disconnect areas of the city can be a means of urban inclusion and exclusion (Graham and Marvin, 2001, Swyngedouw, 2006). Yet, much of the literature on the way restricted access to vital urban resources perpetuates inequality, termed ‘infrastructural violence’ by Rodgers and O’Neill (2012), fails to examine in detail how this violence operates on the level of affect, or where its symbolic violence might lie. Thus, we follow the call of Lawhon et al. (2018: 730) to examine ‘what it means for infrastructure to work’– or in this case, not to work. (2) Conversely, despite a recent interest in the ‘stigma of place’ (Tyler and Slater, 2018), in sociological discussions stigma is generally understood as a ‘label’ affixed by others. It may have tangible material effects – for instance when resulting in decreased health outcomes (i.e. Link and Phelan, 2001) – yet often, the materiality of the city is viewed as a projection surface, rather than as an actor from which stigma can also emanate. Neither the manner in which the materiality of the city exacerbates discursive stigma through embodied and psychological effects, nor the agency of the material (Bennet, 2010) are fully accounted for in this perspective. (3) A range of recent ethnographies of infrastructure have examined how citizenship is shaped through, and in relation to, sanitation infrastructures – be they water (Anand, 2017; Von Schnitzler, 2016), sewage (Chalfin, 2014; McFarlane and Silver, 2017) or household waste (Fredericks, 2018). While attentive to the agency of matter in their deployment of vitalist or more-than-human approaches, these studies are not primarily concerned with the urban and territorial effects of infrastructural exclusion which we examine here.

In bringing these interrelated literatures into conversation to examine the range of spatial, material and symbolic effects of infrastructural exclusion at the margins of East Jerusalem, we also build on a growing body of urban literature concerned with waste (see Moore, 2012 for an overview) and especially its metaphorical power (i.e. Arefin, 2019; Cheshire and Zappia, 2016; Rosa, 2016). Urban scholars have shown how dominant discourses have historically conflated filth or disease in marginalised urban areas with the moral defects of their inhabitants (Campkin and Cox, 2007) and continue to do so today (Gray and Mooney, 2011; Roy, 2004). Indeed, the spatial division of cities along ethnic lines has been justified through sanitation projects and the racialised projection of different standards of hygiene (Nightingale, 2012). Recently, the study of urban geopolitics has seen a move away from the top-down politics and divisions (Yacobi, 2015: 581); a number of recent studies have examined Jerusalem’s urban geopolitics through the lens of the everyday (Greenberg et al., 2020; McGahern, 2019; Shtern, 2016) and quotidian experiences of mobility infrastructure in particular (Baumann, 2019; Rokem and Vaughan, 2018; Shlomo, 2017). In line with this development, we focus here on the urban geopolitics of infrastructure and examine the unique force of waste in a liminal urban situation.

The article is based on 29 interviews with residents, local representatives and municipal officials, as well as multiple site visits carried out in 2014/2015 (Baumann) and 2017/2018 (Massalha). To gain more insight into the conditions of the research sites, Massalha further carried out visual and online ethnography, taking pictures of the interiors of residential buildings and their immediate surroundings, as well as studying news reports and broadcasts by media outlets concerned with their situation. This allowed us not only to examine the materiality of waste more closely but also served as the basis for analysing media discourses surrounding it.

The next section of the paper establishes the contemporary situation of Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp and their sub-neighbourhoods within the context of Israel’s ethnocratic planning regime in Jerusalem. While much of the existing literature highlights their interstitial nature from a biopolitical point of view, we argue that examining this state of suspension through the materiality of urban everyday experience can add valuable insights on how urban geopolitics are enacted from the ground up. Thus, the Discussion section is concerned with the role waste plays in this situation of suspension. We propose that waste operates as a means of exclusion on several interrelated levels. The proliferation of waste has somatic effects in terms of residents’ health, as well as affective ones, with Palestinians alienated from their surroundings. The stigma attached to waste is exacerbated through embodied and sensorial abjection. As the material conditions are discursively linked to externality, territorial stigma is generated; thus, waste contributes to the incremental exclusion of these spaces. However, at the same time, waste removal as a public service also is a site of contestation and negotiation. We conclude that waste is not merely a by-product of political inaction or an indicator of abandonment but in fact an active participant in the process of urban exclusion and the urban geopolitics of re-bordering. Through its materiality, entangled with the embodied and affective impact it has on residents and the stigmatising discursive uses it serves, waste minimises ambiguity in these liminal areas, thus advancing the exclusion of these spaces and the symbolic expulsion of their residents from the city.

Background: Suspended spaces at the margins of the city

The influx of tens of thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites into the areas behind the Wall in recent years must be viewed in the context of the urban policies pursued by the Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality. This section shows the ‘ethnocratic’ nature of those policies, in which ethnicity rather than territorial citizenship defines rights and privileges (Yiftachel, 2006), resulting in Palestinians living under constant threat of expulsion from the city. It shows how the areas behind the Wall have attracted many new residents because they exist in a state of suspension, simultaneously within and outside that regime. The existing literature on these areas highlights that state of interstitiality, primarily from a legal and biopolitical viewpoint. This leads us to ask how the particular infrastructural and material conditions in these areas affect the state of suspension.

Ethnocratic planning and slow expulsion

Years of racialised planning and zoning policies aimed at maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem have generated a severe housing crisis in Palestinian neighbourhoods (Massalha, 2019). Following the 1967 War resulting in the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel annexed East Jerusalem by immediately applying Israeli law and expanded the municipal boundaries, in line with demographic considerations – a process repeated multiple times in the following decades (Benvenisti, 1996). The selective inclusion of Palestinian territory and exclusion of Palestinians in East Jerusalem reflected two main planning objectives: maintaining a Jewish majority in the city and ensuring the impossibility of its future division (Bollens, 2000, Cheshin et al., 1999; Chiodelli, 2017; Dumper, 2014; Margalit, 2006). Planning policies have been key to achieving this by preventing many Palestinians from building homes legally in their city (Braier, 2013; Braverman, 2007; Chiodelli, 2012; Kaminker, 1997; Wari, 2011). In 2004, this policy was anchored in the Jerusalem Master Plan 2000, the first comprehensive municipal document to lay out planning objectives for the whole city. The plan aims to achieve a demographic ratio of 70% Jewish residents to 30% Arabs (Jerusalem Municipality, 2005).

In planning terms, this means Israeli settlers living in East Jerusalem are allotted almost three times as much land per capita as Palestinians (Human Rights Watch, 2010) and housing for them is state-initiated, while only very limited space is zoned for Palestinian construction (OCHA, 2009). Combined with prohibitive and unaffordable building permit requirements, this makes formal housing construction close to impossible for Palestinians. In the resulting housing crisis, prices have increased close to ten times faster in Palestinian East Jerusalem compared with the Jewish parts of the city (IPCC, 2013: 10). At the same time, as much of Palestinian housing construction is deemed ‘illegal’ by the municipality, residents live with the constant threat of home demolition (Braier, 2013).

As part of this ethnocratic system at work in Jerusalem (Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2002), Palestinians living under Israeli occupation struggle to maintain not only space for housing but also their right to remain in the city. Palestinian Jerusalemites are merely considered ‘permanent residents’ by Israel and are generally stateless (Jefferis, 2012), yet their status affords them advantages with regard to freedom of movement, healthcare and social security when compared with Palestinians in the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory (see Abu-Zahra and Kay, 2012; Handel, 2010, Kelly, 2006, Tawil-Souri, 2011). However, permanent residency can be revoked. The so-called ‘centre of life’ policy put into place in 1995 decrees that Palestinians must prove that they live and pay taxes in Jerusalem; if they live in the West Bank or Gaza, or move abroad for extended periods of time, they risk losing their right to reside in the city (International Crisis Group, 2012). It is also not automatically passed to children or non-resident spouses; this is virtually impossible since the passing of the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law in 2003. Over 14,500 Palestinian Jerusalemites have seen their residency revoked as a result of these restrictions since 1967 (OCHA, 2011), a policy which has been referred to as ‘quiet deportation’ (B’Tselem and HaMoked, 1998) and ‘silent transfer’ (Ir Amim, 2012).

Neither able to afford to stay in Jerusalem because of the housing crisis, nor able to leave it because of the risk of losing their residency, Palestinians are confronted with what Amir (2011) calls a ‘double bind’. Because the areas behind the Wall appear to offer a way out of this bind, one-third of all Palestinian Jerusalemites have concentrated at these urban margins of the city in recent years. Palestinians who are priced out of the housing market often have no choice but to move to neighbourhoods behind the Wall where planning regulations are rarely enforced and buildings constructed without permits are more affordable (Hasson, 2017; Massalha, 2019). Importantly, by living here Jerusalemites can retain their permanent residency, as they still maintain their ‘centre of life’ in the Jerusalem municipality, even if cohabitating with spouses who are West Bank ID holders and would not be allowed to live in other parts of Jerusalem. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, a large proportion of Palestinian Jerusalemites have sought to maintain their legal connection to the city by moving to its spatial margins.

Research sites

However the relocation of many Palestinians into the areas formally under the control of the Jerusalem municipality but behind the Wall has created difficult living conditions. Kufr Aqab, along with its sub-areas of Semiramis, al-Matar and al-Zughyyar, is located at the northern tip of the arm extending in Jerusalem’s northeast (see Figure 1). Kufr Aqab had 17,000 residents in 2007, before the current influx began. Today, approximately 80,000 residents live in an area of less than 2 km². Its high-rises, often constructed in close proximity to one another and without adherence to building codes (see Figure 2), now appear packed in the small area between the Wall, the Qalandiya refugee camp, the municipal boundary and the neighbourhood of Um ash-Sharayyet on the outskirts of the Ramallah/al-Bireh double municipality. Access to the rest of Jerusalem is restricted through the Qalandiya checkpoint operated by the Israeli military.

Figure 1.

Map of the suspended spaces at the margins of East Jerusalem.

Figure 2.

Kufr Aqab, October 2017.

Shuafat Refugee Camp is located on the central eastern edge of the city (see Figure 1). Distinct from the Shuafat neighbourhood, which is a middle-class area on the western side of the Wall, the camp was originally established in 1965 in an area of 0.2 km² for some 3000 people displaced from the Mu’askar camp in Jerusalem’s Old City (which itself housed Palestinians displaced in 1948) but expanded after additional refugees moved here in 1967. While today the camp is home to 11,000 registered refugees (UNRWA, n.d.), according to local representatives, the actual population of the camp is as high as 23,000 (interview, 4 September 2014). The wider area of approximately 1 km² includes smaller adjacent neighbourhoods: New Anata, Ras Khamis (see Figure 3), Ras Shahada and Dahiyat a-Salam. The population of the entire area is estimated at 80,000 (Kushner, 2016), of whom approximately 70% are said to be Jerusalem ID holders (local committee member, interview, 4 September 2014). Shuafat Camp is the only refugee camp within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries (as determined by the Israeli authorities), meaning that its inhabitants hold permanent residency in Israel despite the fact that the camp is under the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and is governed by a Camp Services Committee appointed by the Palestinian Authority (ARIJ, 2012). Since the closure of the Wall, and of the Ras Khamis checkpoint in 2012, the Shuafat Camp checkpoint is the only entrance through which residents of the area can access the city.

Figure 3.

New development in Ras Khamis as seen from the western (Jerusalem) side of the Wall, October 2017.

In the limited literature concerned specifically with the areas of occupied East Jerusalem behind the Wall, these neighbourhoods are described in terms of their liminal and interstitial status – especially with regard to ambiguous jurisdiction, the absence of municipal services or enforcement and the lack of formal housing construction. Thus, Dajani et al. (2013: 7) refer to the areas as spaces of legal and civil exception. Alkhalili (2019: 219) describes them as ‘grey spaces’, following Yiftachel’s (2009a, 2009b) notion of grey space as ‘neither integrated nor eliminated’ and ‘partially outside the gaze of state authorities’. Alkhalili et al. view the geographical and judicial ‘spaces of ambiguity’ as creating a situation of ‘geopolitical complexity’ (Alkhalili et al., 2014: 3, 6). In this in-between state, residents remain suspended in ‘permanent temporariness’ (Dajani et al., 2013: 6).

We should note, however, that this situation of suspension is not unique to these spaces. Robinson (2013) has shown that the ‘paradoxical status’ of Palestinians under Israeli rule is ‘as old as the state itself’. Yet, it came more clearly into focus as the occupation of Palestinian land and Israeli rule over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians became a matter of decades (Azoulay and Ophir, 2013). Examining Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territory, Ophir et al. (2009) speak of a situation of ‘inclusive exclusion’. Within Israel’s 1948 borders, too, Palestinian cities exist ‘in suspension’ between inclusion and exclusion, as are their residents, who live in ‘a state of suspended dialectic of citizens and enemies’, as Massalha (2014: 31) has shown. Thus, the neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem that have been cut off from the city by the Separation Wall for close to 15 years encapsulate Israel’s unwillingness to give up territory while at the same time seeking to rid itself of responsibility for the Palestinians living on it. They also embody the impossibility of the Israeli municipality’s aims to maintain a Jerusalem that is both unified and majority Jewish, as territory would have to be ceded to ensure the demographic aims.

If these spaces are emblematic of a long-standing tension at the heart of the Israeli regime’s relationship with its Palestinian subjects, it is worth asking how those tensions are navigated. In line with wider literature on the Israeli occupation and the Separation Wall (i.e. Amir, 2011; Hanafi, 2009; Ghanim, 2008, Parsons and Salter, 2008, Zureik, 2016), much of the research concerned with Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp views their interstitiality through a biopolitical lens. According to this reading, the areas have been ‘deliberately ignored’ and their unresolved status ‘carefully planned’ (Dajani et al., 2013: 7) to serve Israeli objectives, in particular the aim of a Jewish majority in the city (Alkhalili et al., 2014, see also Graff, 2014). Several authors examine the ways residents navigate this constrained field of possibilities: Hammoudeh et al. (2016) and Hamayel et al. (2017) focus on the manner in which the Israeli regime forces Palestinians to make life and family decisions within the restrictive parameters of the occupation. Similarly highlighting the lack of choice many Palestinians moving to these areas feel, Harker et al. (2014: 8) describe the local residents as ‘almost forcibly warehoused’. Meanwhile, Rosen and Charney (2016: 171) portray the recent increase of high-rise construction in what they term the ‘off-the-Wall enclaves’ as a ‘symbolic message of blatant defiance against Israel’s control’, a spatial challenge to the municipality’s rule, rather than an expression of exhausted options. Alkhalili (2017) offers a more fine-grained picture of agency and resistance in these spaces: while Palestinian land developers in Shuafat Camp claim to be working for the national cause, she argues their informal development fractures rather than unites the community by creating class differentiation.

Since the underlying tensions expressed in the suspension of these areas have so far not been resolved in the sphere of capital-P politics, the role of everyday life and urban space in shaping them is of interest. Yet, this question has not been addressed directly in the existing literature. While there are different views on the degree of Palestinian agency expressed in these spaces, the overall situation is viewed as shaped by the Israeli occupation, with the spatiality and materiality of these areas invariably seen as a result of political processes. That is, while existing scholarship highlights the absence of public services (Dajani et al., 2013: 7) and notes in particular the omnipresence of waste in these areas (e.g. Alkhalili, 2017, 2019; Graff, 2014), these are seen as signs of ‘total abandonment’ by the municipality (Alkhalili et al., 2014). The agency of matter in shaping the contours of urban geopolitics at these urban margins is not considered, although the ongoing, politically unresolved state of suspension raises the question how the spatiality and materiality of the city participates in boundary-making. Thus, in the following, we take waste as the starting point for asking how urban exclusion operates materially and symbolically, how it intervenes in the urban geopolitics of suspension.

Discussion: Waste across registers of urban experience

Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp are not only distinguished by political and legal ambiguity but also by a very particular material landscape, caused by disconnection from the city’s infrastructural circuits. In this section, we examine how the omnipresence of waste operates in this suspended urban setting. We argue that waste participates in concurrent material-embodied and symbolic-discursive processes that affect the spatial regime. Not only does waste cause health problems and a sense of alienation among residents; the sensorial abjection creates a symbolic expulsion that effectively draws the urban borders. When this abject infrastructural situation is discursively linked to lawlessness, the areas are not only marked as undeserving of services but also as already external to the city. This feeds into political debates about plans for a de jure redrawing of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to exclude a large number of residents from the city. At the same time, however, residents claim rubbish services as urban rights and view maintaining or winning back services as evidence of their ongoing right to the city at large.

Our conceptualisation of the work of waste as taking place on several entangled levels simultaneously builds on Larkin’s (2013) observation that infrastructures operate not only through their technical function but also on symbolic levels. What he calls the ‘poetics of infrastructure’ are at work when there are shifts in signification between these registers (Larkin, 2013: 336). We argue that the various registers upon which waste operates co-constitute one another: The embodied and affective impact of infrastructures cannot be separated from its symbolism and the discourse that is built around it. In this, we follow Navaro-Yashin in understanding new materialist and social constructionist approaches not as antithetical to one another but as running along what she calls an ‘affect-subjectivity’ continuum (Navaro-Yashin, 2012: 27).

Somatic effects and symbolic violence

While residential buildings in most areas of East Jerusalem are no higher than four storeys, in Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp areas, high-rise buildings of up to 13 storeys are built in close proximity to one another. Homes are often sold before they are completed and building work continues after the first residents move in. Because there is no way to hold developers to account (cf. Alkhalili, 2017), safety regulations are often ignored (Ir Amim, 2015). Building interiors and infrastructural work are often left unfinished, with electric wires in stairwells exposed, lift holes left empty with iron bars sticking out of them, communal windows unfitted and stairs without banisters (cf. Massalha, 2019). The members of the local committee of Northern Jerusalem, formed by residents of the Kufr Aqab area to represent their interests, expressed concerns regarding the unsafe building conditions given that the area is prone to earthquakes (interview, 20 August 2014), a fear frequently echoed by residents.

The nonstop construction work caused Kufr Aqab resident Aya to complain about persistent building noise and dust: ‘It’s so bad, I need to clean every two hours when the windows are open!’ (interview, 19 August 2014). Salem from Kufr Aqab argued: ‘All the construction here is motivated by profit making. Residents’ wellbeing does not even cross developers’ minds, let alone allocating a communal bin room’ (interview, 27 February 2018). And indeed, because of the lack of planning, there are no open green spaces, public places or play areas. The vacant lots between haphazardly constructed buildings become dumping grounds for rubbish (see Figure 4). Because of the density of construction, middle-aged couple Nidal and Amneh said, ‘there is no air circulation, and the smells rise up to our window’ (interview, 18 August 2014).

Figure 4.

Dumping grounds in Kufr Aqab, November 2017.

Lack of planning, paired with the speed of densification, also affects networked public services. Water pipes are often not wide enough in diameter to supply the increased population, and the municipal water company does not send in engineers because of supposed security concerns (interview, contractor for HaGihon, 6 June 2014). Thus, even though most residents pay taxes for municipal services, the latter are increasingly inadequate (OCHA, 2013). In 2014, residents of Shuafat Refugee Camp were entirely without running water for weeks (Gerberg, 2014). Most Kufr Aqab residents also suffer from insufficient and irregular water supply. Thus, Nidal and Amneh, who had running water between three and five days per week, habitually rationed how much water they used for showers and laundry. Mariam coped with the uncertainty of water supply by maintaining a gym membership in Ramallah for the sole purposes of ensuring she would be able to shower on a daily basis (interview, 4 August 2015). The absence of a proper sewage network can have devastating effects. According to the local committee, 40 houses were permanently damaged in Kufr Aqab when they flooded because sewage water could not properly drain off (interview, 20 August 2014).

Raya from Kufr Aqab complained of sewage overflowing due to the absence of infrastructure: ‘There are even mosquitos in wintertime’. Worst of all, ‘the place is infested with rats, inside the buildings too’ (interview, 27 February 2018). It is estimated that the neighbourhood of Kufr Aqab alone produces 800 tonnes of solid waste every month and would require an annual budget of 5.5 million Shekels (approximately 1.2 million GBP) to deal with properly (Jerusalem Institute, 2018: 9). Instead, the budget is 800,000 Shekels annually for all infrastructural works – less than 0.1% of the city’s infrastructure budget and merely enough to pave a few metres of road, according to the lawyer representing local residents (interview, 23 December 2019). According to a petition to the District Court filed by residents to oblige the municipality to provide sanitation services, the number of rubbish bins in Shuafat Refugee Camp only meets the needs of 25,000 residents, one-third of the actual population (Jerusalem Institute, 2019). The sanitation situation thus leaves residents with little option but to litter: ‘I have nowhere but the street’, said a young man coming out of his building on the main Kufr Aqab road, accompanied by his wife and baby, carrying a black plastic bag full of rubbish. ‘Rubbish bins are either full, overflowing or too far away from the building. I can’t keep it at home. I’m left with no choice but to leave it in the street’, he said while depositing the bag by the concrete slabs dividing the road (interview, 29 November 2017).

The piles of uncollected rubbish and their associated health hazards are a troubling issue for the residents. In the Shuafat Camp area, residents and officials blame the presence of waste for respiratory diseases such as asthma, gastrointestinal infections and diarrhoea, as well as chronic disease (Jerusalem Institute, 2019; UNRWA, n.d.). In Kufr Aqab, too, the lack of waste collection has caused high levels of respiratory and skin diseases (interview, lawyer for residents, 22 August 2014). This is exacerbated by the main coping mechanism employed by residents to deal with overflowing rubbish containers: burning the trash, causing toxic fumes (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Burnt rubbish in Kufr Aqab, October 2017.

Beyond its physiological effects, the omnipresence of waste has psychological impacts. Not only did residents link the absence of infrastructure to their areas’ status in the eyes of city officials –‘it’s an Arab area, the municipality does not care’ Raya said, plainly (interview, 27 February 2018) – but most of our interviewees living in the neighbourhoods beyond the Wall reported a deep sense of alienation from their environment. After three years of living in Kufr Aqab, Raya still found the place intolerable and alienating, both physically and socially. She felt no sense of belonging whatsoever: ‘Life is difficult and disgusting in Kufr Aqab. It’s psychologically tiring’, she stated (interview, 27 February 2018).

Salem, who regularly crosses to the other side of the Wall to maintain his connection to Jerusalem’s historic centre, said: ‘We do not feel settled here’, although he had also been living in the area for three years (interview, 27 February 2018). This alienation is also reflected in social relations. Aya said she would never let her children play with those of her neighbours (interview, 19 August 2014). This lack of a sense of community is certainly in part due to the recent increase in population and absence of lasting ties. Thus, Alkhalili (2019) notes the declining sense of community in Shuafat Camp and Hammoudeh et al. (2016: 47) describe Kufr Aqab as a ‘functional’ space created through ‘necessity’. But the infrastructural conditions play an important role in creating this atmosphere. Jameel, Head of the Neighbourhoods Committee of the camp related how dealing with waste preoccupies him on a daily basis:

Your daily reality is rubbish and sewage, and all you think about is how to remove the rubbish from outside the house, or how to get the sewage system to work. This is our everyday life. I want my son or daughter to see a clean green street when they go out to play. This is what I’d like to see (interviewed in Kan 11, 2015).

In these alienating surroundings, waste makes residents question the meaning of life under conditions which they find demeaning and dehumanising. ‘Even animals do not live the kind of life people are living here’, Ahmad, a resident of Shuafat Refugee Camp, told an Israeli reporter in reflecting on the conditions of the camp (interviewed in Kan 11, 2017).

In Bourdieu’s sense of the term, symbolic violence is an indirect exertion of power which naturalises the existing order, concealing the power relations underpinning it (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 4). We can see how waste contributes to the process of slow expulsion in indirect ways: not only does it make life at the margins of Jerusalem difficult to endure; by instilling in residents a sense of alienation with their surroundings, it creates a symbolic displacement. We cannot, however, say waste naturalises the existing spatio-political order in the sense that it makes it appear normal or legitimises it – instead, we have seen how waste acts to raise awareness of, and becomes an occasion to point out, urban injustice. Yet, waste naturalises urban expulsion in the sense that it reifies it in urban space: Palestinian Jerusalemites come to perceive their unequal status in the city not as an abstract political fact but to feel it in an embodied manner. This leads them to perceive an urban order in which they are viewed as excess populations as an inescapable fact shaping their lives on the most intimate level.

‘Displacing matter’ and territorial stigma

The sensory force of waste as material matter plays an important role in shaping the boundaries of the city. Read through the work of Douglas (2002), the presence of waste serves as a means of marking Palestinians as ‘out of place’, as a challenge to the established order. According to Douglas, this challenge can only be rectified by putting the matter deemed as dirt in its rightful place – in the case of Palestinians, re-locating them outside the city or re-drawing the boundaries to the same effect, so they no longer challenge the demographic goals of the Israeli regime. Yet, we cannot consider the impact of waste on a semiotic level alone (cf. Fredericks, 2018: 19) – therefore we discuss how sensory aspects of waste underpin discourses of transgression.

Prior to Israel’s occupation in 1967, former Israeli mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek recalled ‘the unbearable stench’ of East Jerusalem (Wohlgelnerter, cited in Weizman, 2007). By highlighting the smell emanating from Palestinian neighbourhoods, he followed a long colonial tradition in which expropriation could be justified through the olfactory dehumanisation of the native population (Nightingale, 2012; Rotbard, 2015). Bad odours are associated with transgression (Cresswell, 1996; Stallybrass and White, 1989). Even more than the toxic fumes of burning rubbish, the organic smell of waste demarcates the boundary of impurity in processes of abjection – a rejection of that which is other within the self, and the ensuing demarcation of a border between self and other. Building on Douglas, Sibley (1988) argues that dominant groups use abjection to minimise ambiguity in liminal zones and thus achieve a ‘purification of space’, a clear delineation of inside and outside. This entails the re-definition of interstitial spaces. As only the permanent exclusion of their populations from the city can re-establish the demographic order upon which Israeli-dominated Jerusalem is built, marking the suspended spaces as external to the city through infrastructural exclusion paints them as the ‘constitutive outside’ of the city proper – not only through symbolic means but in a very sensory manner.⁴

In processes of abjection, according to Ahmed (2004: 91), a ‘transference of affect’ takes place when signs of disgust stick to other, unspoken notions. The smell of waste permeates the neighbourhoods inundated with it, functioning as a ‘sticky sign’ (Ahmed 2004) signalling expulsion. Affecting residents’ perception of themselves and their neighbourhoods, these olfactory demarcations serve as constant reminders of their externality to the Israeli-dominated city and the danger of being displaced from it. However, unlike Douglas’ notion of dirt, waste does not challenge the prevailing urban order here – in fact, it serves to reinforce it. In that it associates the indigenous population’s continuous claim to its land with boundary transgression, waste is used for symbolic displacement from the city. Thus, we might think of the household waste stacked up in the streets and empty lots of Shuafat Camp and Kufr Aqab not as ‘matter out of place’ (cf. Liboiron, 2019) but as ‘displacing matter’ that marks Palestinians as trespassers, seen to be ‘out of place’ in their own homes and framed as dangerous because they challenge the ‘purity’ of Israeli demographic goals for the city.

In a similar vein, Israeli media reports about the failure of infrastructural services in East Jerusalem regularly refer to neighbourhoods located behind the Wall as lawless and chaotic, highlighting the prevalence of illegal construction and crime. Thus, a right-wing news site (Yashar, 2014) reported on the lack of water in Shuafat by referring to it as a ‘lawless Arab neighbourhood’ and noting that ‘terrorists’ from the camp have been celebrated by the local population – suggesting that they are not deserving of municipal services. From the other side of the political spectrum, left-wing council member Margalit (2014) has argued for handing responsibility over to the Palestinian Authority after infrastructure ‘collapsed because of the chaos prevailing in Shuafat’. The link established between lawlessness and criminality on the one hand and insufficient infrastructure on the other suggests either that these unruly subjects are not worthy of municipal service provision, or that the areas have deviated too far from the norm and are no longer salvageable. Wacquant describes this process in which a location is labelled a ‘lawless zone’ as ‘territorial stigmatisation’: the label suggests the place is ‘outside the common norm’ and thus allows the ‘authorities to justify special measures, deviating from both law and custom’ (Wacquant, 2008: 240).

When certain urban spaces are designated as ‘wasteland’, Rosa (2016) argues, we must be attentive to the systems of ‘value’ which they call into question or undermine. When describing areas behind the Wall in terms of waste, chaos or excessiveness, media discourses feed into stigma – and importantly they do so within a system that seeks tore-establish order by excluding them. The municipality uses the lack of security from which residents suffer as justification for not providing services. The areas are deemed so dangerous that municipal service providers including waste removal contractors could only enter with military or police escorts (Rasgon, 2019; interview, David Koren, Advisor to the Mayor on Eastern Jerusalem Affairs, 25 August 2015). It should be noted that the contractors are often Palestinian themselves and do not fear attack (interview, Palestinian contractor for HaGihon, 6 June 2014). As the lack of security because of the absence of policing (see Dumper, 2013) is also the city’s responsibility, the municipal neglect here is circular and self-reinforcing: the areas have only become ‘lawless’ and thus supposedly not serviceable because the municipality refuses to enter them and police for the benefit of local residents.⁵ The absence of municipal services lays the groundwork for territorial stigma promoted in discourses on lacking infrastructure – which is then used as justification for further excluding these areas. Thus, the ubiquity of waste in spaces behind the Wall, and the discourses resulting from it, must be seen in the wider settler-colonial context in which Palestinians’ spaces have been designated as ‘wastelands’ to legitimise displacement(cf. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020: 10).

And indeed, the lawlessness and lack of service provision have been deployed to advocate formally redrawing the municipal boundaries, effectively displacing Palestinian Jerusalemites from the city. There have been increasing calls to give up the areas beyond the Wall, including from the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem and Prime Minister (ACRI, 2015, Ravid, 2015). Since 2017, two bills attempting to demote the status of the areas behind the Wall as no longer fully part of the Israeli-controlled municipality – while also not handing over control to the Palestinian Authority – have been debated in the Knesset. Creating separate local authorities would allow the state to reduce the percentage of Palestinian Jerusalemites without ceding any territory (see ACRI, 2017; Ir Amim, 2018). One of these proposals, the so-called Elkin Plan, has the explicit aim of increasing the Jewish majority in the city from the current 59% to 69% (Shragai, 2018). As part of this debate, counterintuitively, a right-wing municipal councillor who is one of the strongest promoters of the settlement project in occupied East Jerusalem has advocated for better waste removal for Palestinians. Arieh King opposes the Elkin Plan on the basis that Israel should not cede control over any part of Jerusalem:

We should absolutely give no legitimacy to any plan that would take away even a centimetre from Jerusalem […] they turned the areas behind the Wall into the rubbish bin of the municipality […] we should take the bin out of the rubbish – this means dismantling the Wall, investing in the other side (interviewed in Kan 11, 2017).

The statement reflects how waste has come to embody the state’s and municipality’s absence, but also how waste services have become the grounds on which the debate over permanent inclusion or exclusion of the areas beyond the Wall is fought.

Infrastructural exclusion and urban citizenship

In a situation of suspension, residents of Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp enact their rights to the city through claiming access to public services – above all, waste removal. In this sense, we argue, being tied into the city’s wider metabolic circulations serves as a proxy for urban citizenship. At the same time, the symbolic violence of waste also lies in the fact that it compels Palestinians to partake in the ethnocratic regime of the city in order to ensure their ability to stay in Jerusalem.

Faced with infrastructure that is wholly insufficient in light of the population boom, members of the local committee of Northern Jerusalem described their interstitial status as follows:

Abu Sameer:

They treat us with racism, like second class citizens.

Abu Hani:

When they deal with me, they deal with me as an enemy, but when they want to take my taxes, they see me as a citizen (interview, 20 August 2014).

This ambiguous sense of urban citizenship, alongside ongoing political debates about formally excluding these areas, causes constant anxiety over locals’ long-term ability to maintain their residency status. Reports that inhabitants of Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp are no longer required to pay arnona (municipal property taxes) to the city caused confusion and a sense of precariousness (Ha’aretz, 2011). Residents felt that it was only a matter of time before their remaining benefits as Jerusalem ID holders would be rescinded, as Nidal and Amneh (interview, 18 August 2014) worried. Rumours about which areas may or may not be included in the city’s future outline abound, and residents such as Yasser said that speculations about future borders even affected real estate prices, with properties expected to remain inside the municipality becoming more expensive (interview, 12 August 2015).

In this situation of suspended urban citizenship, waste services have become a key indicator of inclusion or abjection. Their importance for remaining part of the city has been clearly articulated by the local leadership of both Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp. In 2012, the local committee of Northern Jerusalem took the issue of their infrastructural neglect to the Israeli municipal courts. The Jerusalem District Court eventually ruled in favour of the residents (Hasson, 2015), a verdict they saw as an affirmation that Kufr Aqab remains part of the city, and an important symbolic victory, even if little tangible improvement was subsequently seen in the neighbourhood. After years of repeated complaints by residents as well as petitions to Israel’s High Court of Justice, the municipality subcontracted private businesses to collect rubbish and more bins were delivered (interviews, lawyers representing Kufr Aqab residents, 2014, 2015, 2019).

The District Court’s decision was explained in part by the fact that Kufr Aqab’s rubbish problem was ‘exporting disease’ to nearby Israeli areas, as birds moved freely from one side of the Wall to the other (interview, local committee, 20 August 2014). Here, the ecological entanglements of waste took on a life of their own and counteracted the function of waste as ‘displacing matter’. The materiality of waste moved to erase the boundaries reinforced through abjection, reflecting how the various registers on which infrastructure operates are not always aligned. The materiality of infrastructural neglect in this way resisted its enrolment in the process of redrawing the outlines of the city in line with the municipality’s demographic aims. Instead, in this case, the infrastructure–nature nexus became a means for Palestinian residents to refuse that boundary-drawing and affirm their ongoing links to the city despite the presence of a monumental barrier.

In Shuafat Refugee Camp, too, as the rubbish situation worsened (see Figure 6), the Emergency Committee and Committee Against the Wall wrote in a call to action directly referencing the responsibility of the Israeli mayor of the city:

we will make it clear to Mayor Nir Barkat and his colleagues at City Hall: […] Stop avoiding your responsibilities towards the residents of east Jerusalem! Act to regularise and resolve the efficient disposal of garbage from Shuafat Refugee Camp! […] The funds allocated to garbage disposal per resident of the camp is only a fifth of those appropriated per citizen in West Jerusalem. (Email, 12 July 2015)

Figure 6.

Wall, rubbish and new housing construction in Ras Khamis (Shuafat Refugee Camp area), October 2017.

Palestinian Jerusalemites clearly reject the overpowering presence of waste, as well as the displacement from the city it symbolises. Thus, the symbolic violence of waste as enacted here, in contrast to Bourdieu’s sense of the term, does not involve the concealment or misrecognition of the power relations at its basis (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 194–195). Yet, more in line with the Bourdieusian notion of symbolic violence, which entails the complicity of those subjected to it (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 167), Palestinians come to be imbricated in the Israeli-controlled city’s wider power structures as they fight waste and assert their rights and belonging to the city. While Palestinians continue to boycott municipal elections in an expression of their non-recognition of Israel’s rule over East Jerusalem (Dumper, 2014), the severe impact of infrastructural neglect and ubiquity of waste compels them to appeal to Israeli authorities, seeking to improve their circumstances with the help of the ethnocratic institutions they generally reject. If symbolic violence ‘defies the ordinary alternative between freedom and constraint’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 168 n122), it ties the oppressed into existing power relations in a more indirect and insidious way – adding nuance to existing discussions on agency and external determination in the areas behind the Wall. The symbolic violence of the ‘double bind’ in which Palestinian Jerusalemites find themselves under Israeli occupation, reified and enacted here through waste, then also lies in the fact that even an attempt to resist expulsion is subsumed into the governing ethnocratic regime.

By appealing to Israeli institutions and referring to the notion that all residents of the city should be treated equally, the local committees organising the protest claim their equal right to the city. Inclusion in infrastructural circulations, then, is read as a signal of urban rights by those who see themselves increasingly cut off from the city, espousing something akin to what Anand (2017) calls ‘hydraulic citizenship’ and Fredericks (2018) terms ‘garbage citizenship’– an enactment of residents’ rights through infrastructural claims made, where infrastructures often serve as a means of protest and negotiation. In Jerusalem, where Palestinian residents’ rights are always under threat, ‘garbage citizenship’ means that when residents are able to secure waste services, they obtain formal recognition for the links to the city from the very authorities that habitually undermine those links. However, since Palestinian Jerusalemites are precarious non-citizens in the city, infrastructures do not merely become sites where urban citizenship is moulded into particular forms but are read as ominous indicators of potentially more significant changes to Palestinian residents’ right to the city at large. Elsewhere, waste-infested neighbourhoods may signal neglect, lower status or political oppression of residents – here the danger embodied by waste is the potential loss of the status of permanent residency. Furthermore, in its enrolment in the urban geopolitics of the city, waste here shapes not only the contours of urban citizenship in terms of marginal groups’ participation but is involved in the contestation of the territorial outlines of the city. Thus, taking waste seriously as an actor in the suspended spaces of Jerusalem reveals the ways infrastructural neglect and stigma are enlisted in the pursuit of Israel’s racialised urban policies and fought in Palestinian struggles to maintain presence in, and rights to, the city.

Conclusion

We have highlighted the important role and layered operations of waste in the process of urban exclusion. In the areas of occupied East Jerusalem that have been cut off by the Wall, spatialised stigma operates in complex ways that intertwine materiality and affect, semiotics and discourse to redraw the boundaries of the city and urban citizenship. The official contours of the city and Palestinian urban citizenship are less than clearly defined in these areas. We took this spatially and legally suspended status as a starting point for asking whether infrastructural (dis)connections might help us understand how the boundaries are negotiated in urban practice.

Beginning with the omnipresence of waste, we traced its embodied impact on residents’ health and the visceral disgust with their urban surroundings that translates into a sense of alienation. The symbolic violence of infrastructural exclusion lies not only in the indubitable sense of dehumanisation but also in the affective displacement from the city this alienation causes. At the same time, the material conditions are used to portray Palestinians as ‘out of place’, legitimising symbolic re-bordering through infrastructural exclusion. The abjection advanced by waste serves to minimise ambiguity in a liminal zone: through allowing Palestinian areas to become polluted, the Israeli state demarcates a clear inside and outside of a city where there is no such clarity. This, in turn, shapes the discursive terrain for discussions about eventual legal exclusion, whether by redrawing territorial borders or the boundaries of urban citizenship. Through ‘territorial stigmatisation’, these discourses retroactively justify the spatial containment of Palestinians by the Wall and appear to prepare the ground for a more permanent expulsion from the city. The extraordinary measures legitimised by territorial stigma, which Wacquant suggests can create further exclusion, thus reflect the persistent stickiness and self-reinforcing nature of signs of marginality. While expulsion has not been formalised in the political-legal realm (although its threat always hovers in the background), territorial stigma and symbolic expulsion enacted through waste advance the process of ‘silent transfer’. In more ways than one, then, waste in this interstitial setting advances Israeli strategic goals for Jerusalem. At the same time, we have highlighted the way Palestinian Jerusalemites seek to reaffirm their right to the city, utilising the issue of waste as a means of engaging with state power.

We can thus see how in a setting of spatio-political suspension, the mundane materiality and quotidian experience of the city can serve to advance geopolitical goals. In foregrounding the links between material and embodied, as well as symbolic and discursive, registers upon which infrastructural stigma operates, we have sought to contribute to the wider debate on urban marginalisation by showing how waste is deployed within the frame of an ongoing process of ethnic expulsion and spatial reterritorialisation. More than merely an expression or side-effect of municipal policies, because it is involved in the re-bordering of Jerusalem, waste here becomes an actor in urban geopolitics. While the liminal spaces of East Jerusalem cut off by the Wall are frequently examined from the top down, a focus on the materiality of infrastructural neglect from the bottom up reveals how strategic aims are achieved in and through the urban everyday. Thus, we have sought to call attention to the ways the materiality of the city participates in bordering practices, beyond being a mere indicator of ‘abandonment’.

In relating the case of Shuafat Camp and Kufr Aqab to the wider literature on ‘infrastructural violence’, we have shown how affective and symbolic registers play an important role, beyond the mere technical function of waste removal. At the same time, if we understand stigma as a ‘resource’ (Link and Phelan, 2014) that circulates, and that there are specific forms of stigma attached to infrastructural exclusion, then material infrastructures play an important role in distributing stigma. Despite the powerful symbolism of waste, our understanding of its work gains analytical power when symbolic exclusion is understood in conjunction with sensorial and embodied experience. While in many ways, the work waste does here mirrors urban exclusion through infrastructural neglect elsewhere, the heightened geopolitical stakes in Jerusalem mean that ‘infrastructural violence’ also has wider implications here. Urban exclusion here means not just ill health, difficulty accessing urban resources, or unequal life chances – but the potential loss of access to one’s home city altogether, as well as the ability to move across Israel/Palestine and beyond. In this sense, the case discussed also exceeds the contestations of ‘infrastructural citizenship’ elsewhere: here, it is not merely the terms of urban citizenship that are negotiated, but the very possibility of remaining in the city, along with the geographic outlines of the city itself.

Although the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem behind the Wall are frequently discussed in terms of their exceptional status, a focus on waste has revealed continuities within the wider space of Israel/Palestine. Like the state of suspension, the stench of waste and sewage is not exclusive to these interstitial spaces. It can be perceived across East Jerusalem (Benedit, 2016; Hasson and Riba, 2019) and across the rest of the Palestinian territory – from the rivers of sewage and mountains of solid waste ‘besieging’ the West Bank (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020) to the destruction of water and sanitation facilities in Gaza (Graham, 2010: 124). We have argued that the neighbourhoods beyond the Wall are emblematic of the wider suspension experienced by Palestinians under Israeli settler-colonial rule. In the unresolved interstitiality in the neighbourhoods cut off by the Wall, the materiality of the city becomes an important actor in shaping and delineating boundaries. Here, waste – with its somatic effects, its symbolic baggage and its stigmatising power – emerges as a means of infrastructural violence perpetuating urban exclusion through the everyday. At the same time, infrastructure is a site where Palestinians contest that exclusion, and potential expulsion, from the city as they struggle for the removal of waste, and thus seek to redefine the boundaries it draws.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper, along with the rest of the special issue, emerged from a workshop titled Urban vulnerabilities: Infrastructure, health and stigma, which was hosted by the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies and the UCL Development Planning Unit in June 2018. As well as the participants in that workshop, we wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Images by Massalha were taken while working on a consultancy for the World Health Organization (WHO). We thank the Gates Foundation for covering open access and colour printing fees.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The article is based on research that was conducted independently (Massalha) and as part of doctoral research (Baumann). The latter was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust, Kettle’s Yard, and the Council for British Research in the Levant.

ORCID iD

Hanna Baumann

Notes

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