Occupation by other means

Abstract

Waste raises common challenges for all: most Palestinians and most residents of the United States manage waste on a personal as well as on a societal level, and many of us are aware of the crisis that consumption of cheap goods and the neoliberal economy writ large cause. These are structural issues that can nevertheless feel like personal shortcomings, both for Palestinians, as Waste siege asserts, and for many of its readers.Yet, as any visitor to the Palestinian West Bank and any reader of Waste siege will know, the sensory experience of waste in the West Bank is quite different than on or near my New England college campus. Stamatopoulou-Robbins tells us of the piles of cardboard boxes near the vegetable markets, the stench of the sewage on the main road between Ramallah and Bethlehem, and much more. She shows us how this degraded state of a land so cherished by Palestinians who are being dispossessed of it by Israel means that "waste helps shape forms of sociality, politics, and self-understanding for people living under conditions of nonsovereignty" (p. 5). She argues that waste is a primary mode of Israeli degradation today: a way in which that country claims that Palestinians are not ready for statehood, and also a tool by which Israel degrades Palestinian environments, by imposing upon them Israeli waste, even while claiming to be a positive member of the world community because of its environmentalism.The book opens up for us a novel sense of the political in the post-Oslo accords era, and, crucially, the author shows how similar experiences of the political are