Dr. Eilat Maoz

Abstract 

This paper searches for the Israeli state in the heaps of waste accumulating on the streets of Arabah, an Arab town in the Galilee. Following activist Mayor, Ahmad Nassar, in his efforts to ensure reliable waste management services, we will gain a closer look of what the state’s absence and presence mean in practice. Along the way, we will encounter a variety of players—criminal organizations, waste collection cartels, monopoly landfills, police officers, local and national politicians, and environmental regulators—who, both separately and together, combine to produce Israel’s waste crisis, and its particularly devastating effects on the Arab-Palestinian society. The study provides an ethnographic view of contemporary Israel, where profiteering backed by violence—both structural and direct—is used not only to extract exorbitant rents, but also to reinforce networks of patronage that tie racialized peripheries to the center. It contributes to the anthropology of infrastructure and to critical waste studies, by showing how capitalist colonial governance is produced and experienced on the margins.