Abstract
Waste Siege and Electrical Palestine are two impressive texts that read together provide a historical and contemporary view into the politics of sanitation and energy in Palestine. These texts are unique in their insistence that scholars researching Palestine begin their work from the material relations that undergird everyday life. While the books emerge from distinct disciplinary traditions and examine two different time periods, they are united by their approach to infrastructure as always a product of power laden relationships. Both Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Meiton argue that ignoring this fact is not just about overlooking nuance; the stakes, in and beyond Palestine, are much higher. As Meiton suggests, “mistaking a political object for a natural one elides and thus perpetuates, even intensifies, the politics built into it” (p. 8). But as both scholars show, expressing the infrastructural relation between technics and politics is often difficult because infrastructures operate “in continual violation of the received domains of social theory,” namely economy, science, and culture (Meiton, p. 14). In Waste Siege, Stamatopoulou-Robbins therefore argues that analyzing infrastructural relations requires a new lexicon not only to sharpen academic analysis, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to better form international solidarity.
Discards and everyday life
Waste Siege offers a contextually-grounded, object-oriented ethnography of post-Oslo Palestine. Stamatopoulou-Robbins turns to everyday encounters with waste “to think about capitalism’s material excesses and where they converge with contemporary colonial processes and statecraft” (p. xiii). Spanning the rabish markets of Jenin and Jaffa, the Zahrat al-Finjan landfill in the Northern West Bank, toxic dumping grounds in Shuqba village, sewage pipelines in Baqa al-Sharqiyah, and Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah, this multi-sited project reveals larger social and political orders of colonial occupation and the constellation of forces producing what Stamatopoulou-Robbins argues amounts to a siege. In Palestine, waste has become a political and agentic infrastructure, facilitating networks, affects, and differentiated experiences of occupation. Stamatopoulou-Robbins suggests the book can be read in two sections: Chapters 1, 3, and 5 as an “ethnographic cluster” exploring conventional waste infrastructures, like sanitary landfills, toxic dumps, and wastewater, and Chapters 2 and 4 representing non-normative definitions of waste infrastructures, like markets of second-hand colonial goods and informal exchanges of used bread.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins expands upon the intellectual possibilities enabled by a new materialist study of infrastructure, effectively navigating the myriad agencies, ambivalences, improvizations, and discontents that characterize the exercise of sovereignty in Palestine. In the post-Oslo period, waste siege has come to obscure military siege by moderating everyday encounters with both the colonial Israeli and “phantom” Palestinian states. Many Palestinians have adapted to waste siege by forging alternative lives through steadfast, improvised, and compromised, but not nearly complacent, practices, such as the informal waste economies. These dialectics are carefully considered around the precarity of advancing statehood while ensuring the status quo of occupation is not simultaneously buttressed. This negotiation is exemplified by the expansion of landfills like Zahrat al-Finjan that do not plan for the absorption of waste for a population large enough to include a return of those exiled. By tracing the flows and forces of waste siege, this text enables a more refined understanding of the socio-political worlds forged with, under, and against occupation.
The politics of (non)electrification
In Electrical Palestine, Meiton follows the development and contestation of Palestine’s electrical grid from 1917 to 1948. To assemble an electrical and infrastructural history of Palestine, Meiton uses extensive archival research to flesh out the relationships between technology, capitalism, and expertise. Meiton’s book begins by denaturalizing the tenuous borders between technics and politics through a close reading of Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg’s life and work. Chapters 1 and 2 follow Rutenberg as he develops the plans for Palestine’s first electrical grid, presenting himself as a systems entrepreneur who emphasized his project as scientific and apolitical. This careful reading of Rutenberg reveals how Zionism, capitalism, and colonialism were not independent forces behind his vision, but entangled historical processes which coalesced in electrical technologies. Chapter 3 begins in the summer of 1923 when Rutenberg lights up a section of Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, marking the operation of the first electrical distribution system in Palestine. It is in this historic moment that Meiton documents the opposition to Rutenberg’s grid.
Palestinians rejected the alleged apolitical nature of the system by always relating the material and the ideological to argue that there was no electrical current that was not also a part of the broader Zionist current. Electrification, Meiton argues, became one of the first explicitly nationalist struggles for Palestinians as Rutenberg’s “countrywide scheme called out for resistance of the same geographic scale” (p. 115). The following chapters trace the thickening of the system as it rapidly developed across the territory. In Chapters 4 and 5, Meiton shows how electrification was the infrastructure driving uneven development with specific reference to the Naharayim hydroelectric system and the nonelectrification of Nablus. Uneven development was reified, as electrical consumption also became the statistical indexing tool of progress and ethno-national difference. Chapter 6 turns its attention to the more intimate electrical spaces of Jerusalem where power services became the material terrain upon which ethnonational difference materialized and intensified. The final chapter documents the nationalization of the electrical company.
Infrastructural occupations: liberation, methods, and theory
Waste Siege and Electrical Palestine, we argue, are best read together as studies of infrastructural occupations. We use the term infrastructural occupations in the plural to distinguish three specific ways the term can be used to read the texts together and in a broader context. Infrastructural occupations refer to a material political reality, a methodological challenge, and a theoretical turn.
First, both texts demonstrate how the contemporary reality and history of occupation are produced and contested in and through infrastructure. Closely examining occupation and its historical roots through waste and electricity reveal complicated and contradictory experiences of disposal and energy. For Stamatopoulou-Robbins, a landfill is both a “utopian infrastructure for an aspiring post colony” and, at the same time, a site that represents the right of return as “in a technical sense, unimaginable” (p. 45). The conditions of “waste siege” and “electrical Palestine” are materially inescapable, spatially bound, “ambient ecologies” (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, p. xi). Just as waste is positioned as material excess with “no place to go,” electricity is positioned in close spatial proximity to livelihoods (p. x). A focus on the spatial and temporal scales of infrastructural occupations illuminate the process of negotiating precarity under occupation. For Meiton, Palestine’s early system was not only a conduit of electrical power, but also of state power. Therefore, the unevenly developed electrical grid became one of the first explicitly national Palestinian struggles. The grid inaugurated a new cartographic imagination with distinct territorial consequences and became an integral part of the establishment of the State of Israel. The grid took on such prominence because as Meiton writes, the Jewish State of Israel was “infrastructural before it was anything else” (p. 6). Yet, what do these careful studies of infrastructural occupation mean for Palestinian liberation? Leaving this question open, both texts could be strengthened through a sustained focus on the relationship between infrastructure and liberation, in line with emerging scholarship that revisits questions of agency, resistance, and repression through infrastructure. 1
Second, both Waste Siege and Electrical Palestine are in deep conversation with engineers, waste managers, and others in infrastructural occupations. In their efforts to embed the technical within the socio-political, both scholars navigate a difficult epistemological divide between engineering and the critical social sciences and humanities. These historical and infrastructural relations are often overlooked because once infrastructures are built, “their contested nature disappears from view, as they are sublimated into an apolitical language of technics” (p. 4). Meiton closely reads archival sources to challenge Rutenberg’s claim that his grid was apolitical. Stamatopoulou-Robbins respectfully analyzes acts of disposal and waste management that her interlocutors do not always see as political while also being fluent in the language of leachates and sanitary landfills. Both scholars’ simultaneous familiarity with technoscientific knowledge and ability to read the development and contestation of such knowledge as always political renders these texts invaluable methodological guides to researchers working on technoscience, the environment, and infrastructure.
Finally, infrastructure has come to occupy an important place in the social sciences and humanities. The strengths of an infrastructural approach are in its ability to integrate diverse processes in a grounded material analysis. In Meiton’s case, colonialism, capitalism, and Zionism are not distinct, but rather deeply entangled forces driving (non)electrification. In Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s ethnography, environment, occupation, and everyday life are grasped in a single frame. These integrative analyses are possible because waste and electricity are always in flux, challenging neat divisions of the world such as rural/urban, social/ecological, and technical/political. Yet, as the infrastructural turn has worked to dissolve these dichotomies, scholars are often separated by the kinds of infrastructure they study. This separation must be challenged given the realities of infrastructures, which increasingly function and fail together. Glimpses of these overlaps appear in Palestine, for example, only when waste and electricity are read together. Future work should strive toward highlighting the unexpected ways infrastructural politics collide.
