Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins - Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (2021)

Speaker 1: I'm really, really excited that we have Sophia Stamathopoulou Robbins joining us today from Bard College. We were commenting before everybody showed up about how, like, you know, it's too bad that we can't welcome her in person, but, you know, it's in certain ways, like, more, like, practical, right? She doesn't have to hop on an airplane, right? And, like, all these different things. So, you know—

Susie: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Neither here nor there. Anyway, we're just really excited to have her with us, virtually speaking, to talk about her book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. I should say a quick word about, you know, Dr. Sema Topalooglu-Robins. She's an assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College. And, you know, this book, which was awarded the 2020 Albert Harani Book Award from MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, is probably one of the most exciting books about Israel and Palestine that I've read in a really long time. It takes a really fascinating and novel approach to thinking about it, and also raises a lot of important issues as we kind of reorient ourselves in terms of thinking about the situation in the region, its history and what the future might hold as well. And so I'm just really excited. Thank you, Sofia, so much for joining us. So I'm really excited to hear what you have to say in your presentation and then to have a chance for us to talk about it. So thank you.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Well, thank you all so much for having me. And just if you can just bear with me as I share my screen and get myself Tech ready for you. I want to thank you all for being here, and and the Schusterman Center for you know organizing and supporting the event. I really look forward to our conversation. So please also wave at me or yell at me if you suddenly stop being able to hear me. It would be very embarrassing if I continue to tell you my story and you. Couldn't hear me. Okay. So I'll be speaking for about 15 minutes, and then I really want to get into that conversation with you. My book argues that Palestinians in the West Bank are surrounded by what for them are unprecedented types and volumes of waste that they are unable to escape. I call this a waste siege. My premise is that this emergent yet overlooked siege shapes politics and ethics in the West Bank in unexpected ways. Even in a place dominated by settler colonial militarism and neoliberal statecraft, that domination and experiences of it are both mediated by historically specific forms of and ways of managing refuse. I conducted fieldwork for this book in Palestine between 2007 and 2016 or '17. And I can talk more about the actual research afterwards. But today I want to discuss first 2 features of waste siege to give you a sense of what I mean by it. The first is circularity. The other is the way that infrastructures become generative because they proliferate problems rather than making them go away. Meanwhile, waste, which we think of as that which is managed by infrastructures, Oh, I think I'm unable to click as you're admitting people. Do I admit them? Interesting.

Speaker 4: I've just admitted someone, so do you want to try again, Sophia?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah.

Speaker 4: It's not working?

Jason: No.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Oh, that's good. Okay, here we are. Palestine's waste siege resulted from a historical conjuncture in the past 2 decades. It is the story less told about the post-Oslo period, during which the Palestinian Authority has not been able to create adequate distance between Palestinians and wastes, be that Palestinians' own wastes or Israeli-produced wastes. So part 1, and this is the longer part, is about circularity. The phrase waste siege conveys a sense of surroundedness, a sense that life without waste is inconceivable. My formulation complicates the definition of waste as matter out of place, as some have defined it following anthropologist Mary Douglas's famous definition of dirt, which renewed the argument of philosopher and psychologist William James that dirt was a matter of classification. Here, waste is not so much out of place as matter with no place to go. It remains present even when it changes form or location. Picture a piece of used toilet paper in a windowless prison cell. You can crumple it, step on it, rip it apart, move, or even eat it, but you cannot in a meaningful sense get rid of it. This makes waste siege generative. Any attempt to address the ethical, environmental, or other dilemmas that waste creates, or equally to capitalize on the opportunities it opens up, results in the redistribution and reformulation of waste dilemmas rather than in their eradication. The Palestinian Authority's first West Bank sanitary landfill demonstrates how waste in Palestine besieges even in what we might think of as the ideal scenario, when an infrastructure is successfully erected to dispose of it en masse. Under strong encouragement from its international donors, upon whom the PA depends almost entirely, the PA opened the landfill in 2007. In many ways, Zahra al-Finjan looks like a typical landfill. It is a crater cut into agricultural land south of Jenin in the northern West Bank, occupying roughly 44.5 acres. Landfills are the most common method of waste disposal worldwide, popular, if often invisible, because they make waste absent from certain spaces, allowing large agglomerations of people to live together. But unlike many other contexts where landfills are uncharismatic, unspectacular infrastructures, even for those who manage them, in Palestine they carry a surprising, if dirty and contested, sheen. Oslo had implied that the PA would eventually turn into a Palestinian state only if it could demonstrate its readiness for statehood to the international community, which included Israel. Readiness includes evidence that the PA will protect the environment, which the Accords framed as an environment shared between Israel and the PA. This sharedness became justification for continued Israeli involvement in Palestinian waste management and produced an imperative for Palestinians to construct sanitary infrastructures. Since its establishment, the PA has sought to use landfills to replace longstanding garbage management systems comprised of hundreds of smaller dump sites that were unlined and frequently burned. Zahra'a al-Funjain centralized waste disposal by forcing over 85 municipalities to close local dump sites and to haul wastes to the landfill instead. In doing this, the PA made municipal waste its de facto property, rendering waste public at a national scale and the PA itself all the more state-like for serving as custodian of the nation's wastes. What Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Apple call the promise of infrastructure that Zahed al-Finjan offered was evident in the everyday affects and activities of its managers, Promoting landfills, which they did, among other things, through YouTube videos like the one in this image and Facebook posts, was what they referred to as national, wathani, work. Zahra al-Finjan was a historic opportunity to transform Palestine's physical environment, to create modern signs of statehood, and to work on Palestine at the albeit much-reduced national scale. Doing national work also meant impressing donors and Israeli officials who were always understood to be watching. Zahra al-Funjain was in these senses a way for PA employees to perform what historian Dominique Laporte calls the transformation of shit into gold. Yet the landfill was also toxic. When that much waste is compressed in one place, Waste burial becomes an environmental risk. It risks human health and water sources, for example, if leachates leak into water supplies. Landfills also devour land. They're one of the few infrastructures that grow in size over time. They constantly consume more waste, which in turn alters land use. Given that Israel adds new Jewish-only housing daily in the West Bank, Giving up agricultural land to store garbage was anathema to the ethical positions of many engineers like Hamdiye Muttasim, who nevertheless made the decision to do so. Waste burial is also toxic because it is not quite as modern as everybody— everyone said it was. Its chief proponents, Hamdiye Muttasim included, knew that well. Other, newer technologies, such as heat-coupling incinerators, Like the one depicted here, were likely more appropriate for Palestine. Incinerators need less land because they transform waste into usable materials, and they can generate energy. This is particularly significant given that Palestinians are forced to purchase electricity from Israel. Hamdi and Mawtassim knew that landfills are being banned elsewhere, including in countries like Germany that were funding new Palestinian landfills. Finally, landfills are financially toxic. The landfill had been built on a $9 million World Bank loan that was now due. The only way to pay it back was from the tipping fees. For communities that had previously been dumping on free or cheaply rented land, being charged at the entrance and hauling wastes across greater distances required higher fuel and maintenance costs for larger trucks. Making waste disposal much more expensive. Many municipalities simply could not pay or refused to do so. But Zahed al-Finjan's operators could not reject municipal trucks that could not pay. Trash would pile up, and residents already critical of the PA would be watching, as would donors and Israel. This left the managers needing more trash to turn into gold. Here comes the circularity of waste siege. One way that Zahed Delfinjan's operators improvised to pay back the loan was by increasing the number of people whose waste was disposed of there from 200,000, for which the landfill had been designed, to 600,000 and then 1 million, hoping that other communities would pay and help cover the non-paying communities' costs. But inviting unplanned-for waste disposal meant that the landfill's lifespan was abruptly reduced from 30 years down to 15. Israeli prohibition on incineration and donor concerns that Palestinians lack the know-how to manage incinerators meant that landfills were Palestinians' only large-scale waste disposal option. A prematurely full landfill would force operators to expand the landfill sooner than expected, devouring more land, creating more environmental risks, and more political compromises. This case shows how in compressing waste to mitigate one set of dilemmas, Zahra'at al-Finjan proliferated new waste-related dilemmas, enlisting new sets of actors to engage them. Importantly too, all choices in relation to Zahra'at al-Finjan were ambivalently made. So one way to read my book is also as an ethnography of ambivalence. Part 2, Infrastructures: The Infrastructural and Socialities of Siege. Infrastructures are among Palestinians' improvisations for mitigating waste siege. In addition to using the popular sense of the term infrastructure, which evokes large-scale technological systems, I mean that other things, including waste itself, can become infrastructural. Valuable research on roads, oil, dams, and electric grids frames infrastructures as materials that make exchange over space possible and that connect faraway spaces to one another. I propose that waste is infrastructural in that it too can facilitate flows, circulations, and distributions of people, goods, and ideas. Waste is an enabler. So in the last few minutes, I will discuss one example of how waste became infrastructural and what it helped to generate. One byproduct of Zahra'at al-Finjan's managers' attempts to deal with the landfill's besieging qualities was what I call landfill time. Inhabiting landfill time meant thinking in terms of a single landfill's lifespan. It extracted a temporal orientation from landfill's technical properties, for example, that landfills have expiration dates because they fill up. Landfill time anticipates change, but it also creates a suspended for-now sensibility similar to what James Fobian calls a for-the-time-being temporality and what Vincent Ialenti calls the long now. Thinking of landfill's period of governance as a temporary but for Palestine long 30-year duration allowed people like Hamdi and Mottasim, who in fundamental ways were actually opposed to landfills, to square that opposition with the impossibility of managing waste otherwise. It was what allowed them to suspend judgment enough to see establishing landfills as national work, thereby allowing further waste to be compressed and for circularity to continue. Landfill time also shaped governing practices. In much of the world, landfills and other waste disposal infrastructures come with efforts to shape populations' behaviors, such as recycling and environmental awareness campaigns, of which we're all subjects or objects. Because they treated waste burial as practice— as a practice with an expiration date, Hamdi and Mutasim saw themselves as waiting to deal with the trickier behavior-altering issues like awareness and and recycling until a future date when landfills would be closer to closing. This could placate communities already aggravated by landfills and gave my PA interlocutors a sense of their own governing style as patient, beneficent, and even non-interventionist. Landfill time served as the suspended temporality of state building while everyone waited for the state My interlocutors did not view landfill time as political. It was not an improvisation consciously aimed at challenging colonial subjecthood. It was a way for what Fobian calls troubled optimists to live with waste siege that also sometimes rendered responsibility for both waste and military siege indeterminate. Yet such imperfect improvisations should not be taken mistaken for signs of complacency. Improvisation implies making do, but with an emphasis on making. Social formations organized around specific cultural brokers coalesce when people improvise to adapt to this emergent form of siege. As existing forms of community are diminished or rearranged, as is arguably the case with the Palestinian national movement having collapsed, other forms of collectivity may be emergent as what Jacques Derrida calls supplements to existing forms. So in closing, I want to scale up and out from Palestine. If waste siege describes the state of stateless Palestine, it's also a metaphor for our besieged planet. It's a matter of proportions in finite space. The proportion of waste to habitable Earth is growing. Waste siege offers a way to think about that, And the fact, for example, that radioactive materials are leaking out of nuclear power plants in Japan, France, and New York, and that such leakages, like other waste types that humans produce, like plastic bags, are outpacing technologies for minimizing their effects. My hope is that this book makes a case for thinking of refuse and excreta, toxic and troublesome as they may sometimes be, as animating, culturing environments, for socialities, ethics, and politics. Thank you so much. Let's see what I can do here. Oh, I can't—

Speaker 1: I can, okay. Thank you, Safiya, so much, you know, for kind of giving us this overview of what you're thinking about in the book specifically, but kind of also the broader context and sort of ways in which this idea is really useful. I want to have a chance over the next 40 minutes or so for everybody to ask questions and to discuss this issue. And I thought that maybe I might get us started, which I just want to say, first of all, that I think especially after the events of the past few weeks, Here, right? It gives us all a clear sense of like how important infrastructure is, right? And what wait siege really looks like. Like, I don't know what your experiences were like, but we missed our trash day here, you know, on my street because of the storm that disrupted the trash collection. And literally, there just wasn't enough space in our trash bin. To put all the garbage, right? You know, just because we went for 2 weeks without, you know, having the trash being collected by the city. You know, the same thing with the electricity. It's like, what does a failed state look like, right? We lived through the failure of infrastructure here in a lot of ways, you know, just recently. And so, I mean, obviously we invited you here, you know, to speak long before we thought this was even a possibility. But I think it's interesting to think about What does infrastructure really mean? But what I wanted to ask about here is actually about the last thing that you were talking about, because you spent a lot of time thinking about a very specific example of a landfill, right, and what that represents in terms of the Palestinians. But I was hoping maybe you could say a bit more about what we take away from this when we expand the view, right? Like the idea of waste siege, this is obviously I mean, that you're talking about that affects the Palestinians in particular, but on a larger planetary scale, like, there's no place for us to really put the waste that is being produced, whether it's carbon, whether it's, you know, like you said, plastic bags or other things. So the question is, like, what do we learn from the experience of the Palestinians, of Israel and Palestine broadly speaking, as we think about kind of the ecological challenges, you know, and infrastructure challenges of humanity on planet Earth?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: No big deal. Let me try to get the answer for planet Earth. I think that, you know, there are 2 ways that I am thinking about the answer to that question that may seem like they go in opposite directions. One is, of course, like I said here, that I'm making a planetary leap from Palestine, which is kind of an unusual move when we think about Palestine, just because it tends to be thought of as such an exceptional place and context. And I do that deliberately, partly to get a little bit of attention back to this place via waste in some ways. But I feel strongly that I learned from looking at the Palestinian experience That we can think about waste or kind of pollution and the divide that we tend to keep between that in our minds and infrastructure, on the other hand, which is that which is supposed to manage it. We can think about the divide as kind of more of a troubled divide, or maybe, you know, basically think about the materials overall and the technologies that we're producing as humans. as output that then needs to be managed by more output. And I think changing the frame to kind of question basically how good infrastructures are really for solving the problems that we're trying to solve, which is another way of questioning the kind of technical fix approach to the problems we generate as societies all over the place. I guess that's one takeaway for me, which is to say, to be more direct about it, that the technical fixes or the infrastructural fixes are often fixes that allow us to not think about cultural fixes or economic fixes. And so I think that connects us really quickly to the climate debates and this idea that we should be sort of reorganizing ourselves from the ground up. To really consider— if we consider that we're producing a wastage at a planetary level. And in a way, that would be the case whether or not we were also responsible for climate change. So maybe it's a slightly less— it doesn't— it's an argument that doesn't rely on your belief in climate change, if that makes sense. I've never thought of it that way, but it's like an argument that basically states that the material output and the ways in which we're contaminating the planet are themselves worthy of serious analysis. And, you know, when we stop— especially when we stop imagining that when waste gets moved, it's actually going away. I think that was really the most striking thing. And Josh Reno has written an amazing book that's just all based on his experience in a Michigan landfill, where he makes a kind of A similar point, or it's not really away if you track the workers. But I think you can make that claim at a planetary level. But the second point I want to make, which seems sort of different or in a different direction, is that, of course, I learned a lot about environmental racism, to put it one way, you know, just about the unevenness, obviously, of the burden of this proximity that people are facing in Palestine, you know, that that is really repeated across the planet. Right. Everywhere, whether it's inside a country or across borders. And, you know, that's like, in a way, that's an old argument to be making, but I certainly saw it very, very powerfully. And I saw what it was like to basically to try to live ethically. I think that's maybe the difference between my book and a lot of the work that comes out about environmental racism, which focuses mainly on the source of the racism or on the source of the pollution, I was really thinking about how living in that kind of condition also mediates your ability to be an ethical person or to, you know, and how you are ethical or how you imagine different temporal horizons for your collective life or for your own life, and how you imagine what a solution looks like, how, you know, whether you live in in hope for total solutions, or if you live in this, what I guess I'm seeing as a kind of condition of ambivalence. So I guess I'm interested in the worlding effects of the siege, which normally could easily be glossed as an environmental racism story, and you could sort of end there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Susie, you've had your virtual hand raised for a while. You know, you probably want to Great.

Susie: Thank you, Sofia. Thank you so much for this talk. It was beautiful, and I'm dying to read your book from this. I'm also an anthropologist and a museum curator, and I did a traveling exhibit that— about folk art made from industrial discards.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Susie: That was a global look called Folk Art Made from the Global Scrapheap. And I wondered if you, in your work, looked at the everyday expressive arts of people transforming trash into either objects of renewed utility, like baskets made from old tires, or—

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Susie: Rugs made from plastic or things like that, or literally art, or other kinds of expressive behaviors like the language of waste and trash and throwaway as it applies to Palestinians' conceptions of of themselves as being sort of thrown away or something like that. But anyway, mainly I was interested in the Improvisational, expressive culture around waste?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. And I do, I do take an interest in that side of things. In the book, there are 2 chapters. One is about bread being reused, dried bread. And actually, I'm in— I'm just beginning a film about that. And I was speaking to a Palestinian chef who said, that women used to be complimented for their innovativeness in using stale bread in different dishes in a way that has receded for various reasons. But people do place bread outside. And, you know, this is less— I don't know that you would call it an artistic practice. It's certainly expressive in the anthropological sense. But I think there's 2 thoughts. One is I remember as I was doing the research, you know, there were some hipsters in Ramallah who were repurposing like industrial-style small-scale waste and selling like used barrels that they had made into beautiful chairs, you know. And I somehow like pushed that away from the project. I don't know why, but it was there. I just didn't sort of thematize it. I think that I was affected by the fact that I was noticing the international donor community being really excited by signs that Palestinians were reusing for artistic purposes. Like, there would be little news pieces about Gazans who, you know, Gazan kids or something who would reuse tires, and there would be this suggestion that this was like a glimmer of civilization or a glimmer of, you know, environmental awareness, and I was so cynical about that. Kind of implicitly racist read that I just decided to not pursue it, but it was really there so much, to be honest. And I do have a chapter in the book that looks at the way that people repurpose Israeli household discards. So it's a very specific trade that is— has taken hold in the last 20 years where people bring, smuggle in objects from Tel Aviv and other— Haifa and other cities in Israel and resell them. And, you know, there are these beautiful shops in Jenin with menorahs and other decorative objects, and those will become the basis for a decorative life, like aesthetic life inside Jenin households, which I, you know, found very striking given Jenin's specific history. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Jason?

Susie: Yeah.

Jason: Hi, Safiyyah. Thanks for that really fascinating talk. I was excited to see that you were giving this talk. Your book was just recommended to me in a workshop that I was participating in, so it was well-timed. Listening to the way that you're talking about waste as infrastructure, It struck me to a certain extent that much of what you're saying about waste is also just generally what we could say about infrastructure at large, especially when you look at it through the sort of the Mary Douglas frame of waste is culturally situated and so on and so forth. So I was wondering if there is anything distinctive from a material or cultural standpoint about waste, or whether we just should think of all infrastructure as potentially a circulatory regime of waste?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Well, I guess I have 2 opposite answers for that, too. I think that from the perspective of infrastructure and anyone interested in infrastructure, where usually they're thinking like they put roads and electricity and oil pipeline, you know, everything goes together and landfills kind of get thrown into that kind of conversation, I do think waste is special, not so much materially, but symbolically, because it's usually trying— it's usually being channeled away. So much of the infrastructure we talk about, we think is connected sort of in terms of its meaning and function by the fact that it's allowing for the flow toward— of a resource toward a population. And here, I think the fact that waste infrastructures are trying to move it away changes how it can function symbolically and materially in society. I do think that landfills, like I said, in particular are kind of interesting because they grow. I was so interested that they eat land. You know, we know that infrastructure projects in general change land, you know, so if you have a road here, it doesn't mean that the sides that are not road are not changed. They are changed, of course, but the landfill will then like Yeah. If it's a road, it'll be the equivalent of growing and growing and eating just by functioning. That's kind of interesting to me. On the other hand, to be honest, this project was so challenging because I went into it— I don't know if you guys here read Latour, but Bruno Latour, but he was important in my moment of graduate school. And so I went into it thinking I'm going to follow the thing and this was going to be a very concretely material obvious project to me. And then I got there and I realized I had a Mary Douglas conception framing my approach, which meant that I was looking for all kinds of waste. I was open to anything that would be discarded. And so the book ends up being really about refuse in that sense, that which is refused or that which is discarded and the way that that functions. In that sense, there's no material specificity at all. But I am interested, once something is in that category, how its material specificities are activated or, you know, play a role in the mediation that that waste can do. So like the example I would give is the fact that sewage is subject to the laws of gravity when it's not in a pipe, you know, or whether or not it's in a pipe, but the fact that the West Bank is hilly and the sewage goes down the mountainside and across the Green Line as a result of gravity, like, makes sewage political in a particular way. Because it moves kind of erratically and outside of the control of either population. So that's kind of interesting to me. But I like your question a lot, and it made me try to think through these old, old problems in my mind in a new way. Thank you.

Jason: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Hannah, go ahead.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Hi.

Speaker 4: Thank you so much.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: This is fascinating. I'm really interested in this idea of waste being generative and like the world and capacities of waste. And so I'm wondering, have you— is there any part of this that has to do with the sound of all of this, like noise pollution as a whole, but also like the sounds produced by waste moving and waste being improvised with by Palestinians in their homes and things like this?

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: That is a great question. No, no, no. In my research, I did not think about sound. You know, I barely, I barely scratched the surface of smell, to be honest, which, you know, I sometimes joke that the book should be like a scratch-and-sniff book. You know, that would have been helpful. And also some nonfiction writing workshops for me would have been helpful to describe smells. In a way that would really deliver that properly. But sound is a great one. I mean, I think, you know, there are noise pollution questions around different infrastructures. Then there's just noise pollution questions that have nothing to do with waste, but that are themselves considered pollution. And, you know, there have been little outbursts of Scandals around you know the use of mosques, you know the sounds that are emitted by mosques and settlements opposing that soundscape as a kind of imposition. You know, so yeah, I think that's a great thank you for giving me that idea to go thinking in that direction. But it's interesting because now that I'm making this film, I wonder you know how I can play with sound. In a way that doesn't force me to describe it. I think, yeah, I don't have any creative thoughts yet. Thank you, though. I look forward to the film. Thanks.

Speaker 1: Karen?

Speaker 4: Hi, Sophia. Thank you for this wonderful talk. I also am really eager to read the book. I mean, I was eager before, and now I'm even more enticed. And there were so many interesting Things that came up in your talk that I'm sure you sort of delve into more deeply in the book. But for me, this idea of— I mean, and you just— to touch on one of the answers you just gave to an earlier question about how infrastructure eats away at the land and that waste also kind of— that landfills eat land away. I think in general, many of us who don't know as much about waste as you do think about waste also in terms of space. Like, it's a spatial thing. There are landfills. We try to put waste in places where we don't see it in our day-to-day lives, or we won't encounter it in the places that we inhabit. But you talked about temporality and the temporality of waste. And I wonder if you could just maybe tell us a little bit more about that, because I'm really intrigued about this, by this idea. I mean, we think about Israel-Palestine, it's also— it's all territorial conflict, and it's so space-based. And so I think that in general, were really spatially oriented in thinking about Israel-Palestine. And so I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about the temporality of waste and why this temporal element is so important.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah, thank you for that question, too. I think that waste is inherently a temporally lively material because arguably, like in the case of bread or something, or really most materials, It is time that can turn them into waste above all. Time erodes that object and leads it down that path to some extent if you take a kind of materialist view of it. I think where time got really interesting for me was in the time I spent with engineers. And that was because honestly, the project was going to be a little bit less engineer-focused than it Ended up being, but those were the people who were really excited to talk about waste. So we talked a lot about waste. Most people, you know, didn't want to talk. There was nothing much to say about it. I throw away— I throw my trash out. But I found that because I happened to do the fieldwork while engineers were making their designs for the infrastructures of the state, they were really having to think about long-term presence on the territory. And it was, you know, so both for landfills and for sewage infrastructures, when they were measuring the diameters of pipes, they were determining what population size that city would have in 30 years, especially because they knew that they don't have the capital, like they're totally dependent on donors, so they don't have the capital to sort of redo this next year if suddenly there's a state and the refugees return. So we're doing this for now. This is our big chance to build the state. And if we do it in a certain way, we're also able to make an argument for being ready for statehood, right? Which is in some ways— I mean, I haven't done this in a serious way, but in some ways it is what the Zionist movement was doing too. You know, I haven't done it in a way to study the infrastructure, the material infrastructures, but I understand that there was a similar process. And I guess what really struck me, like in the landfill case, there was this way in which they used the landfill to not ask big ethical questions by saying like, this is what we have for now, so we're going to live inside the ethics, the ethical space that the landfill allows us because of that time frame. And that will determine our treatment of space, but we think of it as a temporary treatment of space. So I guess it's like a way of thinking about where people's cosmologies come from or their ethics come from for dealing with space. And then for sewage engineers, what struck me most was that they did not plan for refugees returning. And that, you know, that it was interesting because they couldn't really do anything without the PA agreeing to it. Like these were engineers who were appointed to carry out the PA's national plan. So it was interesting to see that in some ways the PA wasn't really building the state for the return. And that corresponds actually to the way that a lot of refugees critique the PA, which is that the PA has kind of forgotten about the cause of the refugees and in favor of building something else. But that— I thought that thinking through the infrastructure about how engineers were thinking about time was a way to really materially see what the PA is right now and for whom it is. Yeah, there's more temporal stuff to play with, but I could— I don't want to go on too long, but it's a great question.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if anybody else kind of wants to jump in. Nobody had like kind of raised their virtual hand. I have some things that I could say, but I want to give you guys more of a chance.

Speaker 6: I think this temporal dimension, if you don't mind, Jason, I'd like to just sort of jump in.

Speaker 1: Go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker 6: Yeah, I think the temporal dimension and certainly Your book probably elaborates on this more, is certainly something that really, you know, I think can be very generative to think about even further, because waste also— you have the lifespan of the waste space that you have, but the lifespan of the waste itself is actually dramatically, infinitesimally longer. I mean, we—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Our current civilization is built upon waste that was deposited millions of years ago and now is gas and oil and things like this. So I think there is— Something to that, I think your notion, and it was kind of implicit in your last comment, which maybe you could develop further, is the parallels between the Zionist movement and the sort of current infrastructure decisions, because those are very presentist infrastructure considerations, which are very much at play in the early Zionist infrastructure considerations of what we can get now. I mean, Ben-Gurion, you know, reading biographies of him, he's always driven by the question of what I can get now.

Jason: Right.

Speaker 6: And the stuff may come later. And people critique that as not being idealistic enough at various points, is critiqued within Zionism itself. But I think in terms of that parallel, sort of pragmatic temporality to it, something maybe you could talk more about as well within the PA or within the— engineers are always pragmatic, so maybe we can discount them, but at least the politicians.

Susie: Yeah.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah, that's really interesting. I want to say also that in a follow-up small project I did on Palestinian Authority climate change adaptation, I found just like a very, in some ways, a small example of the way that this is really like a shifting terrain. Like, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying the PA is only presentist, for example. I think what's interesting is that there's like a patchwork of temporalities that work themselves through maybe different infrastructures, depending on the imperatives of different donors, frankly, you know, because that's where a lot of the kind of conceptualization is coming from. So an example with the climate change adaptation was that the PA realized at some point that it could get certain kinds of funding for infrastructures For which it had needed funding anyway, if it applied to like the Green Fund, I forget what it was called, to get funding at an international level for climate change, if it could frame, reframe infrastructures as climate adaptation infrastructures, especially wastewater treatment, of course, because it sort of prolongs its ability to use water. And what was interesting about that is that there's a format for applying for that kind of funding, you need to make a strategy that thinks in terms of 90 years. And I thought, you know, that was so interesting that that specific chunk of time is imposed by the funding bodies, which of course do that because they're mainly targeting countries that imagine themselves to be stable and to know what their borders are and to know who's going to be there and how many people roughly, and to do kind of reasonable modeling. And so what the PA did was hire a couple of experts to figure out, like in Beersheba and in London, to figure out how to model this 90-year period and make an argument for what it was going to look like. And what was interesting to me was that they finally decided the risk is higher if we imagine that there's no occupation, that we do have a state. So we're going to model as if we don't have a state. So we assume— so basically, they wrote the occupation into the plan for the 90-year plan. But, you know, but what's funny about that is that it's just this climate strategy, and it's only going to affect some of the infrastructures in ways that also are kind of unpredictable, because suddenly the Israelis come in and they do a stop-work order, so infrastructure doesn't continue. And anyway, so I think it's interesting to take, like, if I could have Done like a set of books that touch on different infrastructures and compared them. That would have been fun. Might have taken longer, though.

Speaker 4: You know, it strikes me also thinking about these different sort of directions in which we can think about temporality that I— when I was doing research years ago for a project on checkpoints, or that sort of touched on the idea of checkpoints and their representation in literature, One of the articles I came across, I don't remember who it was by, was about the way that checkpoints were made a permanent part of the landscape, that they had originally been sort of temporary, and that one of the ways in which the Israelis made them more permanent was sort of disguised as— or this is the way that the article represented it— was that it was disguised as aiding the people who had to wait in hours, the Palestinians waiting for hours every day at the checkpoints.

Susie: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: And so that they would build bathrooms, for example, at the checkpoints, so that there would be a place where women could change the diapers of their babies, or people could go to the bathroom, and so on. And so, on the one hand, it seemed like this was a good thing, because now there would be an actual bathroom to use. But on the other hand, of course, what it did is that it rendered permanent a structure that had been supposed to be temporary, right?

Susie: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: I don't know if you have any thoughts about that or if you encountered anything like that, but I think that that's yet another dimension of temporality that plays into this in very interesting ways.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah, I mean, what that makes me think of, just to riff with you for a second, is that when I was— I did preliminary— I started visiting the West Bank in 2004. So it was during the Second Intifada. Then I visited again in 2007. People were debating whether the Second Intifada was over or not. Like, we sort of were still in it. And in the sense that it took, you know, 5 hours to get from Ramallah to Jenin, which is only actually, like, by car, an hour and a half.

Speaker 4: Right.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Then by the time I did fieldwork in earnest, where I lived there for 2 and a half years, that was 2009 and on, I went back and forth to Jenin every week, and it took about an hour and 45 minutes. And that was because we would breeze by the checkpoints, which almost never stopped us. And that's what I think about relating to what you just said, is that checkpoints were then just sort of like materially there without people there. And that's kind of Another, it's another interesting way to kind of think collapse together waste and infrastructure. You know that this is a kind of not that I think those checkpoints are being allowed to fall into you know to erode too much. Like I'm sure they're maintained to some degree, but that the material presence is there after a person leaves, and that there's you know that that has worlding effects even if the checkpoint isn't functioning in its. formal sense, you know. So they are permanent, but then, you know, their, their use kind of ends up varying and their effects vary, you know. So I would remember like everyone would tighten in the little van we were in a little bit as we're passing. Like there's a quiet in the car just to check, and then we would pass and it was okay. So just that, like, your breathing changes a little bit in itself is kind of an interesting thing to think about if you're Staying low to the ground like anthropologists like to do.

Speaker 1: We've been talking a lot about time, right? But I think also the topography is an interesting aspect of this. One of the slides that you had up there, really, it was very brief towards the beginning, was the map of the runoff from the West Bank, right? You know, water runoff. And, you know, it's interesting, I think. Can you maybe talk about the, perhaps the differences between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in this respect? You know, I think that your research really focused mostly on the West Bank, but the Gaza Strip is also like, you know, under this kind of waste siege that you're describing, you know, and the question of where the waste can go is very different because of the topography.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I'm also thinking here about the nature of Jewish settlements on hilltops, right? So like the waste runoff runs away from these hills towards Palestinians as well. So like, what does all of this mean in terms of like thinking about this question of waste? What's the relationship between topography and—

Speaker 6: Waste.

Speaker 1: So on.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Well, it's huge, as you're pointing out. I mean, I think with the West Bank, there's 2 things that I can briefly say. First, one is, as you said, that in some ways, a residential area that's up high, which is the case for most settlements, escapes the— is both more easily a polluter of other areas around it because of gravity, and Also escapes the effects of others' pollution, unless you're thinking in a kind of broader ecological sense where the aquifer, you know, upon which that settlement sits eventually will be polluted and will presumably affect that settlement as well. But maybe this is where time comes in as well, which is that, you know, the settlement isn't immediately affected. So— a world continues to sustain itself and to feel livable in a way that if a sewage flood enters your town, there's that instantaneous unlivableness of your town. So that's something that's, you know, hugely structuring to Palestinian life. And I didn't even write about it that much because it's been so well documented by human rights organizations and environmental organizations. And I thought, Maybe it was too obvious. But it's very, very important, of course. And the second thing that I did pay more attention to was the fact that the West Bank as a whole is this hill. If you look at it, if you were to look topographically at that whole territory, you know, you have the hill and then you have Israel kind of at the bottom of that hill. So in a way, it's the opposite of what settlements are to to Palestinian areas inside the West Bank. And this hill situation between the West Bank and Israel is, you know, the bane in the existence, if that's the right expression, for the Palestinian Authority. Because if the Palestinian Authority needs permission from Israel to build the treatment plants that will hold on to that sewage and prevent it from going into Israel, but Israel doesn't give permission, and then the sewage flows down the hills, and the PA is very easily and comfortably accused of being a polluter, of polluting. And actually what has happened is that the PA is charged annually, or actually maybe multiple times a year, for the pollution that it is causing to Israel. And meanwhile, there are 5, unless there are more now, wastewater treatment plants that are positioned on the Green Line, just along the Green Line, to catch sewage at those 5 points coming out of the West Bank and to reuse that for farmers. And what's different, I guess, about that from the Gaza Strip is that Gaza sewage, which also goes into the earth and also though mainly goes into the ocean, and it's much harder to capture it if you're Israel and you would like to capture it, for example, just Technically speaking. And also because of the shallowness of the aquifer in Gaza, which is about, I think it's like 3 meters or something, very, very shallow. The sewage that goes into the water, into the ocean, then reenters the aquifer right there. And that's one of the reasons you hear that the water in Gaza is like under 5% of the water in Gaza is drinkable. In the West Bank, you know, I think there's up to 30 meters of depth to get to the aquifer, if not more. So speaking of time, it may take 30 years for the sewage on the surface in the West Bank to get to contaminate the water below. But of course, you have to assume that it's already contaminated from 30 years and more ago, you know. So that's the other thing I think that I've been recently thinking about, the way that anti-pollution language sort of misses the fact that pollution is already here. I guess that's maybe one of the points of Waste Siege is that we're already— we are already in an ecology that is full of waste. And so then the question is like, what do we want to do with life that is now basically— we are contaminated already, you know, and the water is contaminated. I don't know if that helps in some way to change the frame, you know, if that— if we can find hope in that, I'm not sure.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 1: So we only— we have like 3 or 4 minutes left. I don't know if anybody wants to ask kind of like a final sort of question or has anything that they want to add. You know, this has been really excellent. And I also shared a link to the excerpt from the press up in the chat for people who want to take a closer look at the book.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Thank you so much for reading it and giving me the chance to talk with you all.