Scratch-and-sniff Palestine: How olfaction shapes nonsovereign infrastructural spaces

Prologue: The usefulness of unscented writing

I sometimes joke that ethnographic writing on waste management in the West Bank should be published on “scratch-and-sniff” paper, a discardian version of the high-end stickers treated with a fragrant coating. American children bought them in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of smelling the cloying strawberry and ice cream scents that wafted through American childhoods, readers would have been able to use their nails to scratch at the pages and release replicas of the foul odors there. For anyone without access to Palestine, a scratch-and-sniff publication might help convey the pungency of the human excrement that drifts into windows in places like Wadi Nar (valley of fire) in the southern West Bank, where raw wastewater from Jerusalem and Bethlehem gathers momentum to flow into the Dead Sea.

Scratch-and-sniff pages could coax readers into embodied experiences of revulsion at smelling foulness “out of place” (Douglas, 1966) in their offices and living rooms. Perhaps scratch-and-sniff pages would highlight similarities between some readers’ smellscapes (Henshaw, 1994) and Palestine’s. Maybe readers having the ability to smell Palestine would increase a text’s believability for those doubting it, as a form of artificial evidence. The bit of grime that would have ended up under readers’ fingernails could convey the invasiveness of Palestinians’ waste siege (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019).

But a scratch-and-sniff ethnography would still fall short of conveying what it is like to live in Palestine besieged by wastes. The fact that the fragrant treatment on a scratch-and-sniff surface eventually dissipates would mislead readers by failing to capture malodors’ constancy in Palestine. Scratching in the privacy of one’s home would be challenged to simulate the sharedness of Palestine’s pungencies. When a seven-person taxi barrels through Wadi Nar, passengers cover noses and exchange glances. They wave at neighbors as they close windows to try to keep the stench out of kitchens. Being Palestinian in Palestine means being collectively subject to such shared experiences, much like being Black in the United States is partly the condition of shared subjection to racialized suspicion in stores, underfunded schools, and police brutality.

Most importantly for this essay, scratch-and-sniff pages would give the mistaken impression that apprehension and evaluation of the odors that come with being besieged by wastes in general—and by excrement in particular—are straightforward in Palestine. They are not. Olfaction, as anthropologists of the senses (e.g. Stoller, 1989) have shown, has an inherent “interpretive flexibility” (Reno, 2011: 521). In the quote with which I opened this essay, Michael Taussig describes the olfactory politics at Navarro, a mountain made of garbage in Colombia’s Cauca Valley. The dump is home to 800 people digging for gold and other precious objects under the violent control of gangs and paramilitaries. Being disgusted by the dump’s malodors marks you as an outsider and can get you killed. In Palestine, olfaction is an object of interpretation, a sensory tool for interpretation, and a shifting marker of belonging to different types of collectivities. Holding one’s real or proverbial nose—or not—does not threaten one’s life in the immediate term. But, over time, multiple nose-holdings (or withholdings) contribute to the conditions that facilitate or preempt livability there (see also Rubaii, 2016).

How sense makes infrastructure

This essay argues for paying attention to how bodies are variously sensitized to smell and to how diverse forms of scientific measurements respond to embodied attunements. In particular, it examines how Palestinians experience a continuum of hazards in relation to waste infrastructures, where a hazard is the risk of harm. The hazards I describe include the unstable epistemic and political roles of olfaction alongside the other impingements of human excrement such as toxicity to human health and ecological damage. In Palestine, olfaction is a high-stakes sensorial process. It is a quiet yet important factor shaping possibilities not only for construction of the waste infrastructures designed to serve a future Palestinian state, but also for immediate relief from inundation by raw sewage.

The continuum of hazards to which Palestinians are exposed in relation to waste and waste infrastructures includes contradictory civilizational and scientific framings of olfaction’s usefulness in assessing infrastructural conditions. During my fieldwork, expressing disgust at excrement’s odors had a complex set of valences (for other contexts see also Bubandt, 1998; Durham, 2011). Intolerance of excrement’s malodors could serve both as a marker of civilization and of one’s backwardness. On the one hand, using olfaction to assess sewage management modes was un- or anti-scientific. My Palestinian interlocutors, many of whom were trying to improve Palestine’s ecological conditions, had to consider that, especially among Israeli and foreign donor representatives, sense-based disgust was viewed as a cultural trait holding Palestinians back from infrastructural, economic and, ultimately, civilizational development.

On the other hand, sensorial attunement to disorderly wastes held transformative potential. In this settler colonial context predicated upon the undeservingness of one collectivity to live equal to another, or on the land at all, the embodied capacity to be disgusted had political efficacy. It could carry overt critique: expressions of sensory revulsion were modes by which people communicated judgement of the material conditions in which they lived, governmental abandonment, and rights violations. Expressing disgust indicated an embodied refusal of environmental threats to wellbeing that functioned as a mechanism for “gathering around” the matter of excrement (Chalfin, 2017: 651, 660), albeit grounded in collective disappointment (see also Nucho, 2016; Wedeen, 2008). As a form of affective labor (Elyachar, 2010; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019: 172–206) marking a shared human sensitivity, it could also be more subtle: it could encourage positive perceptions of Palestinians among Israelis and international donors, thereby lubricating the path toward support for Palestinians to construct and rehabilitate waste infrastructures for their own communities. Such infrastructures could make living in Palestine more tolerable in the present. They could help materialize a future Palestinian state. This more subtle effect of sensorial attunement could enact an infrapolitical (Scott, 2005) critique of colonialism without appearing to directly condemn colonialism, thus opening up a space for politics to be enacted infrastructurally.

Excreting ingested materials is ostensibly a process that characterizes humankind and that is an ontological fact of animals and plants. Yet, like olfaction, practices and politics around excrement are neither transhistorical nor, ipso facto, are they identical across space. Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit (2000) retold the history of the French state through its shifting approaches to excrement. He showed how excrement’s history is bound up in infrastructural entanglements (see also Allen, 2008; Benidickson, 2007; Dobraszczyk, 2014; Melosi, 2008; Pike, 2005). Stories of excrement cannot be told without infrastructure. Telling the history of shit, according to Laporte, helps us understand other histories that flow from it, as well as how the flows of shit themselves have changed. For example, the histories of the family, intimacy, and the sense of smell in France, are connected to infrastructural changes in how, when, and where excrement was moved through household and urban spaces in the sixteenth century. For Laporte, excrement is a historiographical vehicle for telling these other histories. It is also material with causal effects inside history.

I build upon Laporte’s work and more recent scholarship on the history and anthropology of excrement highlighting humans’ place-specific, historically contingent engagements with excrement (Chalfin, 2014, 2017, 2020; Farmer, 2022; Jensen, 2017; Jewitt, 2011; Terreni Brown, 2014). Much of that work demonstrates how excrement materializes and perpetuates difference and hierarchy, for example where infrastructures expose some human groups to excrement’s health hazards and olfactory irritations, while protecting others from the same (e.g. al-Mohammad, 2007; Anand, 2012; Arefin, 2019; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019, 2020). Excrement has, alternatively, served as object and tool of imperial and postcolonial sanitation campaigns aimed at transforming people’s relationships with their bodies, space, and political authority (e.g. Anderson, 1995, 2010; Engel and Susilo, 2014; Prashad, 2001). In such contexts, state efforts to train or discipline people into specific embodied experiences of excrement appear as practices that reproduce power and unequal relations.

My argument is that the continuum of hazards that Palestinians face in relation to excrement and sewage infrastructures includes not only the contaminations and ecological damages to which the absence of safe infrastructures exposes their bodies, but also contradictions around the interpretation of olfaction as a sense for apprehending what is going on with excrement. That these interpretations are incoherent simultaneously makes them hazardous and yields room for maneuver.

Scholars have tended to portray those who discipline, for instance governors seeking to shape the governed through excrement, as actors with coherent desires for a singular outcome. For example, Laporte argues that the French King sought to discipline subjects into accepting the smell of excrement in their homes in buckets while waiting for designated times of day to dump them outside. This was part of the King’s push to control when excrement ended up on the streets and how it turned into gold, meaning fertilizer for profitable agriculture, on the outskirts of the city (Laporte, 2000: 43). In a similar vein, public health and sanitation campaigns are framed as coherent attempts, in Deborah Lupton’s words, “to elicit disgust to persuade members of their target audiences to change their behaviour in the interests of their health” (2015).

The takeaway: power wants people to have one kind of relationship to excrement— a kind of relationship they do not already have. People obey, one story goes, and are subjectivated into new sanitary subjects. This is what happened in France, where the smell of excrement grounded new intimacies, defining the nuclear family and private realm (Laporte, 2000: 44). Or, in another rendition, people resist discipline or remain stuck in their sense-based subjectivities, legitimizing hierarchy based on their continued erroneous relations to excrement. In both scenarios, infrastructure features most often as a tool for discipline rather than as its outcome.

What we find in Palestine, by contrast, is a fragmented and confusing world of meanings around sensory attunements to excrement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Palestinian environmentalists, Palestinian Authority (PA) bureaucrats, and municipal employees, and on oral histories and archival materials I gathered during research in the West Bank (2007–2017), I analyze the role that contradictions in the place of bodily-sensed odor of human excrement has played in processes of Palestine’s infrastructural development and in the possibilities for political subjectivity. The contradictory place of olfactory attunement to excrement helps construct particular subject positions and opens up possibilities for politics and self-fashioning through and alongside infrastructure. Olfaction's ability to serve as an embodied epistemological tool that produces evidence or, conversely, to be dismissed as a sign of a lack of capacity to understand evidence, has shaped the professional pathways and modes of political expression and infrastructures available to Palestinians. That embodied olfaction has been key to building or obstructing infrastructures suggests that human bodies—and their interpreted and interpretive attunements—must figure in our investigations of infrastructural spaces in the Middle East, and beyond.

Smelling (in) Palestine, smelling while Palestinian

In March 2011, I attended an event in Jerusalem called “Harvesting the Sun Twice: Cross-Border Initiatives for Environmental Peace Building.” ¹ It was hosted by an Israeli organization called the Van Leer Institute, which was established in 1959 to promote “humanistic, democratic, and liberal values in the social discourse in Israel” (Van Leer, 2015: 1). Most of the audience in the large auditorium was Israeli. One of the event’s purposes was to bring Israelis into contact with West Bank Palestinians and Jordanians, whom Israeli policy had separated from Israelis for over 15 years.

Ibrahim Absa was one of three Palestinian speakers. The other five were Jordanian and Israeli. He had returned to the West Bank in 1990 after growing up and studying in Kuwait, Germany, and Holland. He had become head of the PA’s consumer protection department and chief of control and inspection in the Ministry of National Economy. He was at the Van Leer as part of a student group working on the Environment and Regional Sustainability. His bio described him as “an environmentalist” who “was looking for opportunities to improve the environmental situation in Palestine.”

In English, the event's Israeli MC asked what had made Absa an environmentalist. When he had returned to his hometown of ‘Anabta near Tulkarem in the West Bank, Absa replied, it was “the bad smells … especially in the Alexander River” that had shocked him. He was referring to raw excrement flowing from Nablus and Tulkarem into what Palestinians call Wadi Zomar. Wadi Zomar was known as one of Israel/Palestine’s most polluted waterways. This event was occurring three years before a wastewater treatment plant would eventually be built in Nablus. Nearly two decades of delays had resulted from Israeli bureaucratic and military obstacles to PA construction of the plant.

Despite knowing well the Israeli obstacles to Palestinian infrastructure development, as any PA employee does, Absa did not lead with the full-frontal indictment of the Israeli government. I note Absa’s choice of response because of the alternatives I could have imagined. Had one been invited to the Van Leer, a representative from a grassroots Palestinian environmental or human rights NGO might have offered such an indictment. A representative from an organization like al-Haq, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Bisan Center for Research and Development, would have likely begun by framing Israeli obstructions to waste infrastructures in terms of Israeli aggression against what many refer to as “the Palestinian environment” and as human rights violations. As I learned from interviewing people at al-Haq and from collecting affidavits on damages to communities’ health from neglected Palestinian infrastructures or harmfully deployed settler sewage, for such NGOs, speaking the language of violations when speaking about the environment is part of documenting those violations. It is part of building cases for the courts. And it performs an invitation for solidarity from outside Palestine. It is also fundamental to participating in making a better future for Palestinian communities. This is likely why the Israeli government has targeted these organizations, most recently by designating them “terrorist organizations,” effectively outlawing their activities (al-Tahhan, 2021).

Instead, Absa claimed his experience of stench as the origin of his conversion to environmentalism. He was evoking what, drawing on the philosopher Adrian Cussins (2002), Casper Bruun Jensen calls the exposed “activity trails” of Tulkarem’s raw sewage. For this audience, doing so helped lend shape to his position as a good-willed representative of Palestine’s excrement. Absa was one of hundreds of Palestinians now working in the PA and as local coordinators and consultants for international aid organizations and in private companies. They branded themselves pioneers of Palestine’s environmental development. As “nascent technocrats” (Mukerji, 2015: 6) in the institutions of the would-be state, they worked to fashion themselves as a new “social type” (Mukerji, 2015: 6; see also Matthews, 2011) that aimed, among other things, to be perceived by Israeli society as people with whom Israelis could communicate and work comfortably.

They were also the social infrastructures (Elyachar, 2010) that had been put in place for the development of Palestine’s material infrastructures after Israel had transferred responsibility over those infrastructures to the PA during the Oslo negotiations. While they shouldered responsibility for Palestine’s wastes (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019: 172–206), PA bureaucrats lacked the authority vis-a-vis Israel to design the state’s environmental future . Their financial capacity to do so, granted to them by international donors, was also precarious and partial. Wastewater treatment plants for larger Palestinian cities cost between 20 and 100 million dollars per plant to build (PNA, 2010: 6). They are also expensive to operate and maintain. Support from donors depended, among other things, upon Palestinians appearing to care about the environment in a way that was legible to donor agencies. Caring entailed being correctly attuned in particular ways to the environment’s materialities. Because Israelis and donors tended to perceive ordinary Palestinians as people lacking adequate care for the environment—and as incorrectly or insufficiently attuned to it—support from donors could depend on PA bureaucrats performing a contrast between their revulsion at excrement and that of other Palestinians.

Bureaucrats like Absa could understand the work they did to make themselves into partners to their Israeli counterparts and into deserving aid recipients as having been successful from the fact that Israeli organizations and donors sometimes marked people of their social type out as special. Marking came in the form of invitations to speak and to travel, for instance, and by offers of access to spaces otherwise prohibited to Palestinians under Oslo’s apartheid system. Perceived environmental sensitivity, and the overlap between appearing to be environmentally friendly and appearing as nonthreatening to Israel (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014, 2019), was presumably also how Absa and two other West Bank Palestinians had been granted rare Israeli permits to enter Jerusalem for the event.

Absa’s reference to odor did not initially strike me. Nor did it seem to strike anyone in the audience. Sure, I thought, his time outside Palestine had made sewage smells that much more shocking. Displeasure at the smell of excrement seemed like an obvious way to express concern for the river’s condition. My first thought was that Absa was participating in a broader, popular practice within Palestinian society.

While I was living in the West Bank, speech marking revulsion at the olfactory offenses of sewage expressed an “embodied intimacy” (Weston, 2017: 10) with the air carrying particles from contaminated water, a visceral attunement to one’s chemosphere (Shapiro, 2015). Smelling was a form of “embodied empiricism” that treated “the human body as a technology” (Weston, 2017: 22).

Smell was also political. It articulated bodily refusal of hazardous conditions in which one had wrongly been placed. Smell helped one assess malfunction in the public domain (Robbins, 2007: 26). And it told people what they needed to know about their surroundings. For example, don’t drink the water. That was critical in a context of water scarcity imposed by Israel, and where water quality testing and information were often hard to come by (see Bishara et al., 2020). References to the smell of excrement often served a purpose similar to the purpose I understood Absa’s reference to be serving at Van Leer: they claimed disapproval, professed a problem, and established one’s dignity by disavowing acceptance of certain conditions. They were a claim that one deserved better; a claim to rights.

Smell was a way to assess the quality of something in the everyday as well, whether an object or a form of governance. It helped identify errors or the need for action. I spent time daily in Jenin’s used goods market (souq al-baleh) for two and a half years. Many shoppers came to that market to buy discarded shoes. Shoppers complained that new shoes, which the PA customs officers had vetted, left their feet smelling foul. Many expected that discarded Israeli shoes—assumed to be of higher quality—would not create this problem because they would have been vetted by Israeli customs officials. The smell of shoes connoted the relative success of governance. In speech, “smelling” sinister interests was a way of speaking about detecting hidden motives in others, whether in one’s governors or in neighbors, coworkers, or friends.

For the Palestinian leadership, in turn, residents’ olfactory sensitivity to some things could warrant dramatic action. The 1997 Palestinian Local Councils Law, one of the earliest laws that the PA passed in order to govern Palestinian communities at the local level, deems a foul smells among the causes for demolishing a building. That olfactory attunement would be used for Palestinians to destroy a Palestinian building stands out especially given the intensity and frequency with which the Israeli occupying authorities destroy Palestinian buildings and infrastructures or prevent their destruction.

Using the senses to evaluate environmental (and other) conditions extended a long history of doing so in Palestine. In the late Ottoman period, for example, “confirmation of water potability involved both observations made using the various sense (sic) (relevant to color, smell and taste)” (Marie et al., 2012: 2). Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, public health efforts aimed at disease prevention had focused on visible, horizontal distances between perceived sources of pollution and water sources such as springs, wells and ponds. For instance, some “doctors in Palestine believed that malaria was caused by filth and/or by eating raw fruit that was grown near the swamps” (Sufian, 2008: 65). Possessing a human sensorium, and in particular being able to smell and taste contamination, qualified a person to detect water quality.

My initial understanding while listening to Absa’s presentation, then, was that olfaction was an agreed-upon evaluative tool for identifying and objectifying hazards. Olfaction stood outside of what I thought of as the physical hazard of excrement contaminating drinking water and making people sick with digestive diseases, for example. It helped people to simultaneously mark themselves as objects of hazards and it positioned them as dissatisfied subjects of critique. Yet as I later reflected on my observations of the dynamics of sewage infrastructure development during my fieldwork, I realized that, under some conditions, olfaction’s epistemic instabilities could themselves be hazardous.

The calloused colonized

In referring to his senses rather than indicting Israeli state policy, Absa mobilized sensorial attunement to excrement’s smells to enact an infrastructural politics. He contributed to efforts toward Palestine’s betterment that did not work through overt critique. These efforts aimed instead to alter the material arrangements of infrastructures like underground sewage pipelines and treatment plants. The idea was that these could transform where sewage went, the chemical makeup of sewage, and how it related to humans and the ecologies in which they lived. Olfaction references could avoid confrontation, then, while still encouraging people within Israeli environmentalist circles like those that would gather at Van Leer to consider supporting projects initiated by people like Absa and his PA colleagues.

Absa could also be understood to be communicating to this audience, however subtly, that ordinary Palestinians as the subjects of colonial rule share sensorial sensitivities with their colonizers. Absa would have heard from his senior colleagues in the PA and from the older generation of municipal employees about assumptions held by many Israeli occupation administrators. Those assumptions included that Palestinians had a propensity for less sensorial irritation than Israelis. He would have seen how assumptions about a duller Palestinian sensorium cast Palestinians as less capable of managing their environment on their own. He would have lived and breathed the idea that managing the environment without Israeli involvement was central to most Palestinians’ visions of liberation.

My own research among Israeli officials and environmentalists confirmed that Palestinians had had to contend for decades with Israeli assumptions about Palestinians’ relative sensorial nonattunement. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Israeli authorities’ understanding of the West Bank’s foul odors informed public health campaigns. Micha Blum was the head sanitation officer and played other roles in sanitation in the West Bank’s military administration between 1969 and 2000. Blum and I spoke in his Jerusalem office in 2011, around the same time when I attended Absa’s presentation. We discussed Israel’s 1970s campaign to construct wastewater treatment plants for West Bank Palestinian cities. I had sought Blum out to understand the contrast between the 1970s, when Israeli state policy had supported construction of sewage infrastructures, and the post-Oslo period, a period of systematic Israeli obstructions. In the 1970s, odors had been one motivator for Israeli authorities’ involvement in Palestinian sanitation, he told me. “The push” for treatment plants came, he explained, from the fact “that wastewater was running in valleys, contaminating the groundwater, and it was a good breeding ground for mosquitos. And smell!”

Veteran Israeli bureaucrats, lawyers, and environmentalists, including Blum, recounted that in that same period, many in the Israeli administration believed that Palestinians would accept sensorial nuisances that Israelis would not. Officials expected Palestinians to accept loud trucks hauling malodorous trash to new landfills or odors from sewage treatment plants, for example. Hillel Shuval wrote the environmental impact assessment for an Israeli landfill project in Ramallah in 1980s. He had been Israel’s chief environmental health engineer and had taught environmental sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He recalled imagining that Palestinians’ perceptual experiences were similar to those of Israelis. When I met Shuval in his Jerusalem retirement facility in 2010, he emphasized that his had been a minority view. Others in the Israeli government had argued that Palestinians had a higher threshold for sensory nuisances than did Israelis, he told me.

Israeli assumptions about Palestinians’ olfactory callousness have shaped Israeli industrial policy. This policy has tended to expose Palestinians to toxic materials and health and safety hazards (e.g. Ross, 2019). One representative instance involved the Geshuri factory. The factory specialized in pesticides and other chemical products and was located near the Jewish majority seaside city of Netanya until 1985. When residents complained about the bad smell coming from the factory, the owners decided to move it to an area -- the West Bank -- where the laws are more flexible and neighbors were considered less vocal (Rapaport, 2004). The factory ended up in an Israeli industrial zone beside the Palestinian city of Tulkarem, in whose direction the factory's smoke continued to blow into the 2010s (on weaponization of wind, see also Molavi, 2019).

Palestinians’ awareness of the possibility that Israelis will perceive them as people whose senses are less attuned percolated into encounters like the one in which Absa found himself. In such encounters, Palestinians were under a spotlight to avow and explain their environmental “awareness,” as I have argued has become necessary in infrastructure management after Oslo (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019). Each bodily motion and word choice was assumed to be scrutinized for signs of friendliness toward Israelis as well as signs of capacity to work at particular levels of scientific expertise.

Still, out of this scrutiny came certain, albeit tricky, possibilities. Absa could expect that his narrative of disgust in ‘Anabta could serve “to fix a shared orientation to a perceptual referent” (Reno, 2011: 521) with his Israeli audience—an audience he could assume would identify with his sensorial sensitivity. Olfactory disgust was code for shared civilizational standards that coalesced around the proposed universality of hygienic-perceptual standards. It could help him affirm his occupiers’ choice to allow him to be an unusually mobile, and welcome, Palestinian in an Israeli-dominant space (see Bishara, 2015).

The tricky part: Absa could expect that his expression of olfactory disgust would differentiate him from his compatriots in the eyes of those audience members who assumed that most Palestinians lacked the capacity for such an intense experience of disgust. Affirming this hierarchy and his own place at the top at once made it possible for someone like Absa to have a seat at an Israeli table and supported the idea that Palestinians could not protect the environment on their own. It ran the risk of keeping that table in charge of Palestinians’ lives into the foreseeable future.

Sensory fallout

The tricky place of olfaction in the making (or unmaking) of waste infrastructures in the West Bank did not only stem from the need for Palestinians to anticipate Israeli perceptions of Palestinian sensorial insensitivity. It also stemmed from the fact that scientific measurements relating to excremental infrastructures have changed engineering’s relationship to olfaction. The change to this relationship has complicated olfaction’s significance to the assessment of infrastructural conditions. Olfaction as a tool for responding to excrement or to the infrastructures that manage it has become additionally hazardous because its relationship to scientific measurement has become dubious.

The twentieth century saw contestations over the nature and causes of dangers posed by excrement (e.g. Spackman and Burlingame, 2018). In the mid-twentieth century, the scientific communities that studied and promoted wastewater recycling developed a belief that nitrates, feacal coliforms and parasite ova found in excrement and other wastewater forms damaged human health when raw wastewater flowed into the ground untreated, and when wastewater was used in irrigation or mixed with drinking water. In Palestine, as elsewhere, wastewater came to be viewed as a threat to public health.

The focus on nitrates disarticulated odor from pollution. Nitrate water contamination is odorless, tasteless and colorless (see e.g. Avisar et al., 2009: 515). In much of the West Bank the aquifers around which water contamination concerns concentrated are up to 300 meters (roughly 328 yards) below the surface of the earth. Water pollution was thus also understood as odorless and invisible because it was physically inaccessible. Ordinary people’s senses dropped out of scientific processes of detection and prediction of pollution. Assessment of environmental threats now required new forms of training and equipment. This was the kind that Hillel Shuval had brought to assess a Ramallah-area landfill. And it was the kind that the PA was working to harness as tools of Palestinian self-governance after Oslo.

The PA’s efforts to do so were that much more important because fear of excrement’s sensorially undetectable hazards had become paramount to visions of a viable state in Israel. Israel’s earliest Water Commission had promoted wastewater reuse as a matter of survival. The state had centralized and regulated the standards according to which wastewater was reused. When the PA was established in 1995, the need to regulate wastewater treatment and reuse extended to the Israeli bureaucracy that evaluated the centralized wastewater treatment plants that the PA set out to construct. Building centralized plants under PA control at the scale of cities, meanwhile, could offer the PA control over water resources in the absence of fair water access from Israel (e.g. PWA, 2012). It became commonsense among PA officials that wastewater could compensate for a significant percentage of irrigated agriculture (e.g. Shaheen, 2003: 201).

For anyone seeking clout in the circles of people with the authority to help build Palestine’s infrastructural future, performing environmental awareness and framing Israel/Palestine (McKee, 2018) as an environment vulnerable to excrement encouraged a disavowal of one’s senses. Not being bothered by the smell of excrement was a sign for many of my interlocutors in the PA and municipalities that one understood the science. It was a sign that one’s commitment to, and knowledge of, science overrode one’s “base” instincts to be disgusted by the malodors of excrement. Not following one’s olfactory response to excrement was to understand, as one study published in 2021 explained, that even high standard treatment

generally reduces organic material in sewage, and improves the appearance and odor intensity of wastewater, but it does not significantly reduce health hazards caused by microorganisms, such as cholera bacteria, hepatitis, polio virus, and other kinds of bacteria and viruses. (Salem et al., 2021: 142, my emphasis)

That PA officials were on this trip as part of a campaign to secure support and funding from Israel, the UN and the Japanese government, for PA sewage infrastructure projects inside the West Bank was a structuring condition for their behaviors. So too was the fact that they saw themselves as the pioneers of a science-based approach to state-building for Palestine.

For PA officials, assuming that ordinary Palestinians were sensorially fixed meant treading a fine line in performances of disgust at their compatriots’ living conditions in high-stakes fora that involved Israelis or donors. It meant avoidance of what Bourdieu calls “disgust at the ‘facile’” (Bourdieu, 1984: 486). Bourdieu uses “facile” to describe tastes understood to be vulgar, childish, uncultured, or primitive that are “reduced” to the senses.“Governing waste while Palestinian,” to paraphrase Amahl Bishara’s phrase “driving while Palestinian,” entailed disavowing the same sensory experiences that proved one’s civilizational worth—and one’s deservingness to exit subjugating dynamics.

Smell, sovereignty, and the senses of the governed

In internal conversations, my interlocutors in the PA and municipal offices who were trying to build the infrastructures of the would-be state cited sensorial attunement to excrement in their efforts to shape the trajectories of Palestinian infrastructures. They cited olfactory attunement as a factor around which they had to work as they planned for specific types of treatment plants in specific locations. Sensory attunement mattered to them in part because Palestinian wastewater treatment plants might be built but there was always the risk that Palestinian communities might not end up using them.

PA officials tended to frame their worry as a worry about a cultural problem (mushkilah thaqafiah) in Palestine. Many understood Palestinians’olfactory sensitivity as a “hexis.” Pierre Bourdieu (1977) defined hexis as “principles embodied…beyond the grasp of consciousness” (Bourdieu, 1977: 93) and beyond intentional outside intervention, especially not through discourse. PA officials took the cultural attachment they understood ordinary Palestinians to have to olfaction as seriously as they did the physical properties of the land on which they built sanitary infrastructures. ²

One reason that residents’ potential refusal to use treated wastewater raised concerns was that a prematurely defunct plant threatened negative reputational and financial consequences. Although donors expected local communities and municipalities to cover the cost of operating and maintaining plants, donors felt that the success of plants post-construction reflected upon them even after their departure. Aid representatives spoke and wrote often of past failures, where they had funded a plant somewhere in the Global South, for instance, and it had fallen into disuse a few years later. Such failures became evidence of the Global South’s inability to use Global North technologies. And they justified donor agencies’ hesitation to fund infrastructures elsewhere. PA officials also worried that residents would be too disgusted to use the treated water and would therefore refuse to pay a new wastewater tax. Since wastewater treatment plants were cast as PA projects, for PA officials, a nonworking plant would represent (yet another) PA failure.

Concerns about olfaction impacted the types of infrastructures that PA planners considered possible for Palestine. They impacted the rate at which infrastructures were designed, permitted, and constructed. And they impacted the ways and extent to which Palestinian communities and their animals and lands continued to be exposed to the biophysical hazards of raw sewage. In other words, olfaction's epistemic instabilities shaped the materialities both of Palestinians’ wastescape and of the infrastructures that were—or were not—inserted into it.

Least surprisingly, the PA’s large-scale projects for wastewater treatment tended to have components for mitigating odors from accumulations of organic materials in plant lagoons, for example. Concerns about olfaction also shaped the size and location of potential infrastructures. PA officials and municipal sanitation engineers with whom I spent time felt certain that only centralized plants at a distance from residents would work for these particular communities. They viewed their fellow Palestinians’ reliance on smell as too big an obstacle to reuse schemes that would bring wastewater into residents’ proximity. In favoring large-scale plants, they favored more expensive plants. More expensive plants required heavier lifting to convince foreign donors of the need for their support.

During my fieldwork, I also spent time in smaller communities like the villages of Shuqba in the central West Bank and Faqu’a in northern Jenin. From al-Haq, a human rights organization in Ramallah, I collected affidavits from other mid-sized communities like Salfit. I interviewed researchers and leaders in environmental organizations like the Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem (ARIJ) in Bethlehem. From my interlocutors in these sites outside of the PA’s centralized policy-making I saw and learned how getting donors with finite resources to invest in larger, urban plants meant channeling funds away from smaller communities that also sorely lacked sewage conveyance and treatment facilities.

PA projects involve what are called “stakeholder” meetings with community representatives. Stakeholder engagements are usually fleeting and structured by and for the people running the projects (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014, 2018; see also Li, 2007). Positing pollution as odorless further meant excluding residents from these communities, as well as larger ones, from critical consultative aspects of the processes of infrastructural development. If communities could not be trusted to know how much to rely on their senses when evaluating whether a certain kind of wastewater infrastructure was appropriate for them, they could not be trusted with the process of building, designing or operating it. Most of the Palestinians with whom I spoke who were not employed in the PA, in municipalities or NGOs, knew little to nothing about the wastewater infrastructures that made or could mitigate their inundation by sewage.

Seeds of an otherwise

Palestinian university-based and NGO researchers I met were concerned that the PA’s approach to wastewater recycling obstructed other, more immediate solutions to sewage pollution. Many with whom I spoke did not wish to wait for the necessarily slow and unpredictable process (see Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020) through which the PA applied for permits from Israel for any large-scale infrastructures connected to water and wastewater. They understood that these infrastructures were tied up in aspirations for a particular version of Palestinian statehood that many of these non-PA interlocutors supported in principle, but also questioned for its immediate consequences.

Workers I interviewed in environmental NGOs had been proposing the alternative of constructing smaller, on-site wastewater treatment plants at the scale of homes, schools, and individual institutions. One key: small plants do not require Israeli permissions. Another: they are much cheaper to build and to operate than are the PA’s large-scale plants. They cost as little as three thousand dollars each. They do not require international donor funds. And they can be constructed on a rolling basis, as funds and desire for them become available. Treatment of wastewater can begin in some places, even if elsewhere new infrastructures are delayed. During my fieldwork, ARIJ, an NGO that had preceded the PA’s establishment by over a decade, had already secured what it was calling “green loans” through the Bank of Palestine to fund a pilot program of small-scale plants in the Bethlehem area.

Among other things, NGOs’ optimism about smaller scale plants was based on a different stance vis-a-vis culture and olfaction than circulated in PA circles. They approached disgust as a hexis in Gregory Starrett’s terms. Critiquing Bourdieu, Starrett argues that rather than reproducing “a vague discourse of mute embodiment” we must “perceive in detail the ways in which the body is made symbolic, interpreted, and experienced as ideologically significant” (Starrett, 1995: 965). Researchers assumed that Palestinians’ olfactory experiences were available to the experience-havers for analysis and revision. They assumed that Palestinians could and did reflect on their own cultural processes.

Following the opening up of promises for new infrastructure projects across the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s, research on the feasibility of wastewater reuse had surged (e.g. Adilah, 2010; al-Khatib, 2017; Gearheart et al., 1994; Ghanem, 2004; Haddad, 1993; Isaac and Abuzahra, 2005; Mizyed, 2013; Nashashibi, 1995; Nashashibi and Van Duijl, 1995; Salem et al., 2021; Shaheen, 2003). Some of this research had centered around the question of whether ordinary Palestinians would be open to reusing treated wastewater.

Researchers’ and NGOs’ assumptions that Palestinians’ olfaction was open-ended led them to engage in debates both with outsiders and with ordinary Palestinians about the future role olfaction’s role in wastewater management.They sought to go beyond a focus on practice (non-use of wastewater), by focusing instead on “indigenous discourse about practice” (Starrett, 1995: 964). By assuming that discourse existed as an open field of engagement, they opened up the possibility of persuading people in doubt about the smell of sewage of alternative lifeways through discourse.

One way that Palestinian researchers argued for wastewater reuse’s feasibility was by entering the debate about its relation to Islam. Their willingness to enter this debate is significant for its contrast with the way that PA officials often spoke of people's attachment to Islamic interpretations of wastewater reuse. In the view of many PA officials, attachment to Islam for understanding wastewater took some approaches to managing wastewater off the table completely. In doing so, it framed the PA’s insistence on large-scale infrastructures as the one and only option for Palestine.

An example of a contrasting approach comes from a paper that was published by researchers al-Khatib et al. in 2017. The paper, titled “Governing the Reuse of Treated Wastewater in Irrigation: the Case Study of Jericho, Palestine” appeared in the International Journal of Global and Environmental Issues. Seeking to argue that reuse hesitancy is sometimes based on a misinterpretation of Islam, they interviewed what they called “an Islamic scholar at a leading Palestinian university.” The scholar cited a decision (fatwa) from the Council of Senior Scholars in Saudi Arabia from 1978. He argued that wastewater reuse is acceptable in Islam as long as “the purification was in a correct way and (sic) not have smell, taste, and colour” (2017: 144). Permission to reuse wastewater here requires the water be sensorially inoffensive. Their citation of this scholar permits people’s reliance on their own embodied experiences. But if sensory sensitivities could be appeased, the authors argued, reuse could proceed without violation of religious restrictions. This was a small step toward disarticulating commitment to piety from consideration of reusing treated excrement.

Other researchers outside the PA’s planning circles had gone further, arguing that culture is inherently changing. Nader al-Khateeb, for example, a veteran researcher at the Water and Environmental Development Organization based in Bethlehem, published a chapter in a UN University Press book titled Water Management in Islam (2001). Sounding like an anthropologist, al-Khateeb wrote at that time that “cultures are not fixed entities: values, beliefs, and customs change and can be made to change” (2001: 79).

Palestinian researchers I encountered believed that it was possible to train hesitant farmers and other residents to attribute less decision-making power to their senses. Some even proposed that training and educating people could be so successful that it could “substitute putting stringent reuse standards”—standards imposed and controlled by central government (e.g. Mizyed, 2013). Researchers saw exposing residents to small-scale plants as an educative process. Environmental NGOs I visited in Bethlehem, for example, had on-site wastewater treatment plants ready to show visitors.

The approach of NGOs and researchers to the changeability of communities’ sensorial sensitivities had implications for distributions of power. It carried with it seeds of an otherwise. But that otherwise, too, was open-ended. Changing residents’ sensory relationship to excrement, as NGO and academic researchers suggested was possible, ran the risk of rendering residents more dependent on those classes of people whose knowledge came from sources other than sensorial ones. Though al-Khateeb et al. (2017) did not quote the entire Saudi fatwa on wastewater reuse, even that 1978 decision had included an important clause after “smell”: “as witnessed by honest, specialized, and knowledgable experts” (Abderrahman, 2001: 65–66; italics mine). One’s senses were (now) deceiving. Those with the proper training were (re)authorized to be aware on the population’s behalf. That experts believed that they were more reliably able to detect when a sensory experience was significant afforded people classed as experts, including NGOs critical of PA forms of governance, claims to have some authority to govern as well (see also Reno, 2011; Weston, 2017).

This is perhaps one reason why, when I discussed the small-scale plants with the PA’s head of wastewater management, he dismissed the idea out of hand. He called it impractical. He listed odors among the reasons for it being out of the question. “It has problems of smell,” he told me. “It is not a solution.” His response framed the PA’s commitment to large-scale, urban wastewater treatment as the only way forward in wastewater management for liberation through a state.

Conclusion

Olfaction tends to be a feature of waste infrastructure planning and design in much of the world. My point in this essay has been that, as a result, it can be understood as part of a continuum of hazards relating to excrement to which communities, including Palestinians in the West Bank, are exposed. But as I have shown with Ibrahim Absa’s story at the Van Leer, this continuum of hazards also opens up possibilities for infrastructural politics. PA officials’ responses to olfaction’s epistemic instabilities have set in motion the possibilities for changing the material conditions of livability in Palestine. They have also opened up the potential both for a politics through infrastructure and for PA bureaucrats’ own self-fashioning as reliable partners to Israelis. This has had implications for Palestinians’ health, for political organization, for the ecologies in which Palestinians live, and for the possibilities for sovereignty.

Both the PA-led trajectory (opting not to try to change people’s sensorial attunements) and the alternatives to it proposed by NGOs (proposing sensorial training) arguably end with communities ceding some of their autonomy to the people with the instruments, institutional connections, and capital to detect excrement’s dangers. In the latter case, however, cession comes with the ability to learn new ways of managing one’s own water (with on-site plants) and with swift amelioration of exposures and contaminations from excrement. In the former case (with large-scale PA infrastructures), cession of autonomy comes with the promise of an infrastructure in the long term that, for many residents, would be expensive and would not necessarily provide much-needed water supply increases. At the same time, building infrastructures that, in the long term, could provide the sanitary conditions for a thriving, liberated Palestinian society—and for the return of the millions living in exile—can also be understood as the enactment of a progressive politics through infrastructure.

Debates about embodied knowledge have animated recent scientific and social scientific discussions of climate change. Some communities apprehend change through visual cues like oceans “eating” entire islands and embodied memories of cooler weather. But scientists and activists worry that the scale and rate of change to our planet may not be physically perceptible to many of its human inhabitants. Some of these humans say that their bodies are not sensing global warming (Weston, 2017: 106). “Climate skeptics” are being asked to stop “consulting their bodies in order to decode shifts in both weather and climate” (105). For mainstream climate science, the body has dropped out as a diagnostic tool. Something similar happened to the science of sewage.

While excrement’s odors have been reframed as nuisances, olfactory disgust is also arguably part of a contemporary habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) through which the dispossessed can register critiques of the political conditions in which they live. We can speculate, following Weston (2017), that a just future may depend on discovering, or recovering, a form of sensory syncretism. Those committed to sensory detection (or non-detection) in assessing environmental conditions can be enlisted in schemes based in scientific expertise for which the senses have lost their use. In Palestine, the closest to Weston’s suggested sensory-scientific syncretism is taking place among the NGO and academic researchers whose work I have depicted briefly in this essay. The question that remains is whether, and how, processes of PA statebuilding will allow for such syncretic propositions to shape Palestine’s future infrastructural landscape.