Occupational Hazards

This research was made possible by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I also re-ceived support from the Palestinian American Research Center. For con-ceptual guidance and myriad forms of practical support, I wish to thank Hussein Aamar, Nadia Abu El- Haj, Ilan Alleson, Lila Abu- Lughod, Fuad Bateh, Shmuel Brenner, Beshara Doumani, Roni Gilboa and family, Sami Hermez, Kaet Heupel, Ahmad Hindi, Muhammad Said Hmeidi, Tarek Is-mail, Rashid Khalidi, Raja Khalidi, Reem Khalil, Nitsan Levy, Orly Lubin, Claudio Lomnitz, Brinkley Messick, Misyef Misyef, Dina Omar, Kirsten Scheid, Hillel Shuval, Rabbah Thabata, ‘Adel Yassin, Assaf Yazdi, Dina Zbidat and my family on both sides of the Atlantic. With the exception

of telephone interviews I conducted in 2013, observations, interviews and archival research took place in the West Bank in the summer of 2007, from October 2009 to September 2011, and again in the summer of 2012.

1. The civil administration is the Israeli body that governs the West Bank under the command of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. “The task of the civil administration is to ‘see to the civilian affairs of the local resi-dents.’ ” Benvenisti, West Bank Data Project, 83.

2. Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 28.

476 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 34, No. 3, 2014 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-2826049 • © 2014 by Duke University Press

Occupational Hazards

Sophia Stamatopoulou- Robbins

S itting on yellow plastic chairs in a brightly lit room, a group of Palestinian men from the West Bank village of Rammun signed a document with several Israeli settlers — including the representatives of forty- two nearby settlements and two settlement- based organizations. The document was a peti-

tion. It was addressed to the civil administration — the branch of the Israeli military that controls the West Bank — objecting to plans to construct a regional landfill for the Ramallah and Al- Bireh governorate. An Israeli environmental activist and settler named Roee Simon had drafted the statement. The meeting took place in the house of a Bedouin family near Rimonim settlement junction in April 2013. The peti-tion was titled “Peace with the Environment.” This was not about politics, Simon and other settlers later told the media, but it was a step toward peace. Peace, they said, would happen at the garbage dump.

Infrastructures create connections between people and things. Through their entanglements with nonhuman objects — even before infrastructure’s construction and operation — human groups whose op-posing interests should preclude cooperation become provisional allies. Or at least they seem to. Planning for this landfill, like the objections to it, had involved people of a number of legal and ethnonational statuses, including Palestinians, Germans, and Israelis. It had been proposed by the Palestinian Author-ity, which has governed Gaza- and West Bank–based Palestinians since 1995. It was funded by a Ger-man development bank. And construction designs had been vetted and approved by Israel through the civil administration.1 Landfill planning thus seemed to yield two “radical transformations in the social landscape” — one as designs were planned and the other as they were contested.2

In this sense the landfill story is not unique. Lines are drawn in similarly unpredictable ways in most large- scale infrastructural endeavors. Scholarship on infrastructure in other parts of the world, especially that attending to the agentive capacities of the nonhuman, has shown that unlikely alliances among individuals and interests across political and geographical divides can be mediated by the mate-

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

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3. See, for example, Anand, “Pressure”; Callon and Law, “Engineering and Sociology”; Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Mukerji, Impossible Engineering; Pritchard, Confluence; and von Schnitzler, “Citizenship Prepaid.”

4. Anand, “Pressure,” 545.

5. See, for example, Dobson and Bell, Environ-mental Citizenship, and Schattle, Practices of Global Citizenship.

6. See Horton, “Demonstrating Environmental Citizenship?”

7. Lorimer, “International Conservation,” 312.

8. See Larkin, Signal and Noise.

9. Callon and Law, “Engineering and Sociology,” 284. See also Callon et al., Acting in an Uncer-tain World.

10. This echoes what Sara Pritchard found in her recent work on the remaking of the Rhône in France. In Confluence, she argues that en-vironmentalism was an unintended conse-quence of the technocratic management of the river.

47 7Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins • Occupational Hazards

rial substrates of the infrastructures themselves.3 This can result in dominant structures of power being unsettled or, as some have argued, in poli-tics itself being circumvented or exceeded. In the struggles of settlers in Mumbai to acquire running water, for example, Nikhil Anand argues that wa-ter’s physical properties “destabilized its regimes” of governance by municipal bureaucrats, thereby “exceed[ing] politics.”4

Environmental CitizenshipThough they did not put it in these terms, Israeli signatories and their supporters in the media pro-posed that the meeting enacted something akin to what scholars and policy makers call environmen-tal citizenship.5 By physically appearing in a single place at a single moment and jointly signing the document, people who were otherwise assumed to be enemies or partners in cold economic exchange were “demonstrating their environmental commit-ment not only through membership in environ-mental organizations but by living their lives in particular ways” — at least for the twenty to thirty minutes that the meeting lasted (depending on whom you ask).6

To some, signatories were legible as people committed to environmental protection. A key as-pect of their appearance as such was the fact that they expressed their belonging not just at the same time as others, but also that they did so in tandem with supposedly distant others. Bodily presence evidenced in the commonly signed document seemed to suggest the two groups were expressing a form of belonging to the territory that extended beyond ethnonational identity, beyond legal sta-tus, and indeed ostensibly beyond the sovereign territory of the state (Israel) that was their main addressee. Their commitment to environmental protection seemed to “spill over the traditional boundaries of the nation- state,” precipitating “a

‘post- national’ ” concern “for fellow humans and global environmental problems” that was both “re-flexive” and “cosmopolitan.”7

More Unlikely AlliesAt the time of writing ( July 2014), the landfill had yet to be built. This article is thus a story of an infrastructure- in- the- making. It highlights the significance of investigating infrastructures in that fleeting, though often prolonged, moment be-tween the time when they begin to circulate as de-signs, applications, and maps and the time when, once constructed, they become discursive and material mediators among complex institutions and the people they serve and employ.8 Planning and protest can be understood as elements in “the social worlds, institutions, and roles contained in the machines” — or the machines- to- be — around which infrastructural controversies center.9 The practices of protest against an infrastructural project can then be seen as an effect of, and at the same time as essential to, the form the infrastruc-ture will eventually take. Or, as may just as well be the case, the form the infrastructure will not take. Protest, in other words, is part of infrastructure as an assemblage, even before the assemblage has fully formed into an infrastructure.10

Paying attention to this transitional infra-structural moment also sheds light on an unlikely conceptual alliance, or kinship, between the two above theoretical strands. Those who argue for the agentive capacities of infrastructure’s mate-rials or material substrates usually point out the hubris of human classification. They suggest that were humans (scholars among them) to correctly recognize the multiplicity of agencies at work in a socio technical assemblage, they would realize their mistake in assuming the material world to be the inert recipient of cultural constructions. Those who promote environmental citizenship seem to



11. See Barry, “Anti- Political Economy.”

12. On “destruction as a regime feature,” see Azoulay, “Demolished House,” 215.

13. See, for example, Gordon, Israel’s Occupa-tion. Gordon is one in the growing group of scholars who carve up the occupation into sequential pieces as a way of explaining why particular logics (e.g., forms of power) have pre-

vailed in different historical moments. See also Weizman, Hollow Land, and Ophir et al., Power of Inclusive Exclusion.

14. For a comparative approach to ruins and ru-ination as an ongoing process—one that also complicates the notion of colonial legacy—see Stoler, Imperial Debris. For a consideration of how the Israeli military’s destruction of Pales-

tinian infrastructures has been taken up by the field of “forensic architecture” in the search for evidence for the evaluation of violations of hu-manitarian law, see Weizman, Least of All Pos-sible Evils.

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be arguing something quite similar: that recogni-tion of the material world’s agentive capacities is both what can allow opposing human groups to agree on how to govern themselves and what differ-entiates the national citizen from her environmental counterpart.

It is possible to read the title of Simon’s pe-tition, “Peace with the Environment,” in a literal sense following Anand. The physical properties of the environment — e.g., the aquifer’s vulnerability to toxic wastes — seemed to force sworn enemies to meet and to cooperate with one another. In this sense a nonhuman object called “the environ-ment” would seem to have caused human action to exceed or bypass politics by provisionally closing the “space of disagreement” between two sides.11 However, this interpretation of what had brought the petition’s signatories together both necessi-tated significant omissions and rested on temporal contradictions that, together, ultimately rendered that interpretation untenable.

In attending to the content of the separate objections mobilized by those who came together at the Rimonim junction encounter, we see that the political — as the space of disagreement — was merely suspended. Its suspension served to displace it into the future (or to make it a question of the fu-ture rather than one of the present). The condi-tions for the future political, in other words, were carved out of the political’s momentary suspen-sion. Paradoxically, then, attending to the unlikely alliances among humans (and among humans and things) can help reveal the limitations of doing so as a final analysis.

Infrastructure and Military OccupationInfrastructure can also structure how we think about conflict, and in particular how we build and periodize historical narratives. Though they have only recently become a central focus of scholarly

analysis, infrastructures such as roads, the separa-tion barrier, water pipelines and wells, checkpoints, sewage treatment facilities, and electric grids have figured prominently in scholarship on Israel’s oc-cupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. Infrastructural histories are highlighted to paint a portrait of the occupation’s chief characteristics. Observing the operation of checkpoints, settlement construction, and the demolition of Palestinian houses becomes a way of knowing the occupation’s “regime features” and therefore the occupation it-self.12 Such accounts either argue that a coherent and sustained Israeli ideology is materialized in Is-rael’s approach to infrastructures or, increasingly, cite infrastructure to substantiate claims that the occupation has changed over time.13

In both types of account infrastructure be-comes useful for studying the legal and informal relations bound up in infrastructural planning, as well as the persuasions necessary for the mobi-lization of large amounts of capital. Its construc-tion (like its destruction) seems to offer a window into long- term political imaginaries. Because of its tangible, visible, and sustained material presence, infrastructure (like its debris) also lends itself to empiricist analyses of the occupation for those not satisfied with “giving voice” to the people served, excluded, or otherwise affected by it.14 For students of Palestine, a place so often understood as a sym-bolic product of multiple, irreconcilable narra-tives, infrastructure seems to offer an epistemolog-ical antidote to presumably less reliable, discursive fields of study — or to representation.

But those who write the occupation in terms of infrastructure often make two assumptions at whose center are questions of representation. First, they ascribe neat ethnonational identifiers to acts of constructing, funding, or destroying it. This paves the way for ethnonational and other identi-fiers to be ascribed to infrastructure itself, as well



15. By questioning this line of reasoning I am indirectly responding to Stoler’s recent edited volume, Imperial Debris: What exactly makes “the material refuse of imperial projects” im-perial? Is it merely the refuse having remained since the official time of imperial rule or is there something more specific to the way that which was ruined had been built — destroyed, or had decayed — that rendered it identifiably impe-rial? See Stoler, “Introduction.”

16. Here I am thinking for example of infra-structure’s legal ownership (whose public or private property it is or becomes), as well as who manages the infrastructure or which pop-ulations it serves or, for that matter, its geo-graphical location.

17. Electric grids and water pipelines extend across the boundaries between Israel and the territories it occupies. There are also five wastewater treatment plants on Israel’s side of the separation barrier along the Green Line. The fact that these are connected to sewage networks that extend from Palestinian towns and villages within the West Bank (e.g., Tulk-arem, Baqa al- Sharqieh) is often glossed as a sign of good water “neighborliness.” This rests on the same logic that assumes ethnonational identifiers to be accurate and the most salient feature of the infrastructures in question. For more on how this is part of the growing environmental peacemaking movement see, for example, “Environmental Peacemaking,” Friends of the Earth Middle East, accessed 11 July 2014, foeme.org/www /?module=about_us&record_id=15.

18. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering, 223.

19. I highlight these infrastructure- oriented practices because of their distinction from oth-ers, such as construction work (since West Bank Palestinians have often provided the labor for the construction of settlements and the sepa-ration barrier).

20. See Bishara, Back Stories. For a discussion of infrastructure as embodiment of ideology, see Graham, Disrupted Cities, 4, 13.

21. Bishara, Back Stories, 240.

22. Fatin Farhat, cultural director of the promi-nent Sakakini Center, cited in ibid., 243 – 44.

23. Ibid., 249.


as to its debris,15 to the exclusion of other ways of identifying the infrastructure.16 Infrastructures lo-cated in or extending into or out of the West Bank and Gaza tend to be read as Israeli, as Palestinian, or as “international” (e.g., American). Or, if its ethnonational identifiers seem to be multiple (e.g., Israeli and Palestinian), an infrastructure may be read as a material pathway to peace or “good neighborliness.”17 Ascriptions of ethnonational identifiers to infrastructure also tend to presup-pose the singularity of infrastructure’s authorship: that infrastructure is either Israeli- or Palestinian- made, for instance.18

Considerations of infrastructure tend to presuppose that knowing the legal status, institu-tional or religious affiliation, or place of residence of those who plan, construct, or destroy an infra-structure is a way of knowing about the logic be-hind its construction or destruction. Ideologies and processes like nationalism, Zionism, settler colonialism, terrorism, neoliberalism, capitalism, and ethnic cleansing are as a result also ascribed to acts of constructing or destroying infrastruc-ture. If infrastructure is Israeli- made, it is often seamlessly identified as a material tool of the Zion-ist project or of Judaization, for example. If it is American- made, it is a tool of neoliberalism. If it is Palestinian- made, it is part of (e.g., neoliberal) state building, and so on.

The identification of singular ideologies or processes with infrastructures also tends to frame how the practices of people who come into contact with them are understood. Most scholars writing about the occupation in terms of infrastructure

focus on that which Israelis (with or without the help of the state, though usually under its protec-tion) have constructed or that which Israelis have funded or planned.19 This includes the separation barrier, settlement housing, settlement infrastruc-tures, and military installations such as check-points and roadblocks. Acts that destroy, repur-pose, or reappropriate these infrastructures are often read as resistance to the singular ideologies or processes with which they are associated.

As Amahl Bishara’s work demonstrates, how-ever, reading such responsive acts backward from the ideology the infrastructure is thought to em-body may be too hasty.20 Her work demonstrates the semiotic diversity that infrastructures both em-body and elicit once built. She shows for instance how North American and European murals on the separation barrier failed to “demonstrate any special knowledge about Palestinian society” be-cause they beautified the barrier. She argues that beautification — like foreigners’ op- ed- like graffiti stating that “peace comes [by] agreement not sepa-ration” — upheld rather than undermined the nor-mative register used by proponents of the barrier, who claimed that through it Israel sought peace.21

By contrast, local Palestinian residents, some of whom burned parts of the barrier, argued that it should be left “ugly and terrible.”22 This offered one way of calling for its demolition. These re-sponses to the barrier were less legible to inter-national audiences, who might have seen “setting fire to tires next to the wall as reflecting a violence internal to Palestinian society rather than as pro-test driven by a particular context.”23 This legibil-



24. Assessments have been one of the most im-portant calculative devices for the construction of sanitary landfills in a number of countries since the 1960s. On “obligatory points of pas-sage” see Latour, Pasteurization of France.

25. Li, “Documenting Accountability,” 219.

26. See ibid.

27. See Callon and Muniesa, “Engineering and Sociology.”

28. Stakeholders in this sense can be likened to guests at a wedding. The guest list delimits which individuals have the right to “speak now or forever hold their peace.”

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ity gap indicates that only by paying attention to the meanings produced on and through infra-structures by those who respond to its construc-tion (or destruction) is it possible to understand the meanings produced by the construction of the infrastructure in the first place. Responses to infrastructure can both diagnose infrastructure’s effects and impact the ideologies and processes with which infrastructures may have been initially associated. The effects of infrastructure are thus multiple for different audiences synchronically as well as diachronically.

This article remains upstream of practices like those Bishara describes. It considers the way that meanings are produced and made to circu-late as an infrastructure is planned. Palestinian villagers, Palestinian engineers, Israeli settlers, military employees, engineers and environmental-ists, international consultancies, Canadian, Ger-man, American, and Brazilian citizens were dis-tributed across both sides of this infrastructural controversy, which began around 2008. As a result neither the authorship of the landfill nor that of objections to it was ethnonationally, legally, or in-stitutionally singular. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to attribute a singular nationalist, colo-nial, neoliberal, or other logic either to the process of planning the landfill or to attempts to obstruct it. On the other hand, for several Israeli signato-ries and their supporters, jointly objecting across ethnonational and institutional lines suggested that objection to the landfill had bypassed, or ex-ceeded, what many referred to interchangeably as politics or “the conflict.” It suggested that peace could “happen at the dump” — or, perhaps more accurately, at the dump’s preemption.

Ramallah’s landfill controversy allows us to explore the role of calculative devices such as en-vironmental impact assessments (known as EIAs), in helping define the ways in which the landfill could be assessed “environmentally” and, as a re-sult, where (“peace with”) the environment ended and politics began. Environmental impact assess-

ments are documents that act as obligatory points of passage24 in large- scale infrastructural planning in much of the West Bank, as they have done in many countries since the late twentieth century. Recent research in Peru has shown that the “ form of the documents produced for the EIA (i.e., their required components, as established in legal frameworks) and the process of making them pub-lic (participatory meetings and public forums) can take precedence over their content.”25 The Ramal-lah landfill case reveals a similar dynamic. It also valorizes scholarship on other contexts by explor-ing how understanding EIAs as calculative devices can shed light on the shaping of what Fabiana Li calls “process” and “content” themselves.26 By what means does a device’s ability to frame discussions around infrastructure also intervene at the level of the “content” of discussions that exceed the pro-cess’s formal frame?

Calculative Devices and Their SupplementsCalculative DevicesLike infrastructure in material form, calculative devices used to design, plan, and license infra-structures move, gather, and associate disparate entities into closed fields of calculation.27 Calcula-tive devices produce new entities out of these ar-rangements and, when successfully “detached,” these new entities circulate outside the devices that calculated them. EIAs are often legally mandated by planning laws and usually compiled by teams of experts that calculate the potential risks and benefits of a particular project. Two of the most important entities that they produce are “the en-vironment” and “the stakeholder.”28 While as texts assessments allow these categories to comingle — the stakeholder can move between the two — they produce these two entities as distinct from one an-other. This is evident in the way they circulate in the steps that follow assessment, one of which can be the so- called objection period.

Once approved, assessments objectify, singu-larize, and detach the environment as a calculable



29. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145.


31. Udasin and Lazaroff, “Settlers, Palestinians Together.”

32. See ibid., and Winer, “Settlers, Palestinians.”


object of risk in relation to a project. Both Israeli military and Palestinian Authority planning regu-lations required an EIA for the landfill. The Oslo agreements that had established the Authority in the mid- 1990s dictated that the Authority’s assess-ment be approved by Israel through the civil ad-ministration. The Authority complied, eventually producing an assessment report that was approved by the administration by 2012. An objection period was declared in the spring of 2013.

SupplementarityObjection periods function both as occasions for the circulation of newly produced entities made calculable by environmental impact assessments and as diagnostics of their effects. The objection period can thus be viewed as a supplement in the double sense proposed by Jacques Derrida.29 The objection period is external to the environmen-tal impact assessment report, secondarily adding something to an assessment already made (and thereby presumably whole). It provides the re-quired temporal bridge between the approval of the assessment report and construction of an in-frastructure. But it also signals an originary lack in the initial assessment process, while at the same time offering an ostensibly external means to cor-rect it.

The landfill assessment distinguished be-tween experts and stakeholders. Experts produced environmental impact assessments. Stakehold-ers were objects of assessment. We will see that the tension inherent in the objection period’s supplementarity meant that the assessment’s ap-proval established two fraught relationships: one between the environmental impact report and the objection period and the other between experts and stakeholders. In this sense, objection periods qua supplements are inbuilt pathways to socio- technical controversies, as the latter “contribute to the realization of . . . an inventory of the possible connections between the problems under discus-sion and other problems with which some com-mitted groups strive to establish links.”30 Before discussing the dynamics of these relationships, I

want to consider the argument that the meeting with which I began this essay offered respite from another fraught relationship: that between Israelis and Palestinians.

Not PoliticsThe meeting of unlikely allies received a brief but intense burst of press attention during the ob-jection period and immediately after it. Israeli, American, and German journalists and bloggers were impressed. The meeting showed that com-peting interests could be put aside in the name of the common goal of environmental protection. It showed, they said, that trash could “trump the conflict.” That people could cooperate “despite politics.” Consider the first sentence of one Jeru-salem Post article: “Trash issues have trumped the conflict, as settlers and Palestinians band together to protest a new German funded landfill near a nature reserve in Area C of the West Bank.”31 To remark on the meeting having been absent of con-flict is to assume that these groups normally have conflict, or politics, between them. Like one settler with whom I spoke in October 2013, the article’s authors were less interested in the meeting having assembled Israelis and Palestinians than they were in its having assembled Palestinians (in general) and those Israelis most known for their conflicted relationship to them: settlers. The Times of Israel published an article titled “Settlers, Palestinians, United to Trash Garbage Plan,” while the Jerusalem Post published an article titled “Settlers, Palestin-ians Together against Waste Dump.”32

What exactly was usually assumed to be po-litical, or conflict- ridden, about that relationship, such that this meeting could represent unity de-spite it? What does it mean to say that the meeting indexed the abeyance, or bypassing, of politics? What series of logical steps sustained the distinc-tion between environmental concerns and political interests? In what practices did proponents of this distinction locate the abeyance of the political?

A review of the statements made by journal-ists and by some settler objectors reveals that three aspects of the meeting were key to its characteriza-



33. My interest here resonates with that of Fa-biana Li in “Documenting Accountability.”

34. Rammun community members had been protesting the landfill’s construction since 2008. They had hired two lawyers and had formed a Rammun objections committee (ROC). By 2013 the ROC had over thirty mem-bers. It had written numerous letters to Pales-tinian Authority ministries and to leaders in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. ROC mem-bers had held over twenty- five meetings with the Authority’s ministries of local government, local affairs, agriculture, health, and the water and environment authorities. They had met

with the Joint Service Council for Solid Waste Management- Ramallah/al- Bireh over fifteen times. They appeared on news and talk shows on Palestinian television and radio. These cir-culated on Youtube and social media. By 2013 they had collected over 1,200 signatures from village residents. Thousands of Rammunis also live abroad in the United States, Canada, Bra-zil, and Jordan. In 2013, Rammunis in the United States and Jordan formed their own commit-tees against the landfill. They coordinated with Rammun and with informal committees in Bra-zil and Canada. They held international con-ference calls, shared up- to- the- minute news, jointly participated in social media campaigns

(e.g., on Facebook), and published articles on-line. See, for example, Omar, “Trashing Four Generations of Palestinian Inheritance.” Be-tween 2009 and 2013 five Israeli objector orga-nizations coordinated efforts, visited Zahrat al- Finjan landfill in Jenin (another PA- run landfill), arranged “site visits” to the proposed Rammun site for Israeli and international newspapers and radio stations, gave interviews, appeared before the Knesset, published reports about the danger of the landfill, and enlisted Israeli experts to write letters against it. During the spring 2013 objection period, they sent five ob-jection packages to the civil administration for review.


tion as nonpolitical: that the meeting was in person (one settler described it as a “warm” encounter); that it represented a “collective” of disparate indi-viduals; and that it appeared as something vision-ary. It was key to the meeting’s apparent nonpoliti-cal effect that the three aspects were combined. How did objectors and their proponents attempt to pu-rify the environmental aspects of their objections from politics during this period? This conceptual clarification sets the stage for a discussion of how purification may have drawn on concepts from the calculative device of the environmental impact as-sessment that gave rise to its articulation.33

Separating Financial Necessity from Environmental VisionFrom the fact that the meeting was seen as a his-torical precedent (one settler said it had been “ten years” since the “Palestinians had talked to us”), we see that other face- to- face encounters between settlers and Palestinians had not amounted to a vi-sionary trumping of the conflict. The meeting was thus implicitly distinguished from other collective, face- to- face encounters that were political (as in cases of physical violence between settlers and Pal-estinian residents). It was also distinguished from encounters born of financial necessity.

For several decades, for example, numerous settlers have brought their cars to be serviced in Palestinian car repair shops in cities like ‘Azzari-yeh and Abu Dis. Settlers and Palestinians negoti-ate prices, talk about car problems, and trouble-shoot solutions. These are face- to- face encounters with the rare exception that cell phone numbers may be exchanged for coordination and follow- up. But the fact that they are face- to- face does not

amount to a trumping of the conflict according to the logic that saw the Rimonim junction meet-ing as a historical precedent, perhaps because car work is not oriented toward a goal that can be iden-tified as common. The settler who brings her car to ‘Azzariyeh and the Palestinian mechanic who ser-vices it are interacting for pragmatic reasons, it is assumed — one for individual financial gain and the other to buy a service. The goal is individual-ized and has no greater purpose, it might be pos-ited, than to keep business going and to keep the car running. It is face- to- face cooperation but is born of two separate, individualized necessities.

Abstract Subjects of Environmental Protection and FuturityWhat gave the meeting a historically unprec-edented character for its proponents was its per-formance of concern, and vision, for a (common) long- term future. On the one hand, it was pre-sumably necessity that had driven the Rammun residents, the Israeli settlers, and the Bedouin family that hosted them to meet for this unusual occasion. But it must have been necessity, too, that had compelled hundreds of Rammun community members (across five countries) and several Israeli organizations and experts to take time out of their workdays and weekends for over five years in order to build momentum against the landfill.34 On the other hand, for those who saw the meeting as a historical precedent, immediate financial neces-sity (as in the car repairs) and the separate efforts of Rammunis and settlers against the landfill were both qualitatively different from encounters born of urgency about protecting the environment for the future.



35. In 2013 Ariel, one of the four largest settle-ments in the West Bank, was estimated to have had a population of about 18,000 Jewish Israe-lis. See “Statistics on Settlements and Settler Population,” B’Tselem: The Israeli Informa-tion Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, last updated 8 August 2013, www

.btselem.org/settlements/statistics. Aliyah is the migration of non- Israeli Jews to Israel.

36. Zimmerman, “Can Palestinians and Israelis Unite?”


For commentators like those in the Jerusalem Post, the necessity to preserve and to protect the land and natural resources from damage was a visionary one. It was visionary in that it extended into the deep future. At the time, Avi Zimmerman was the international representative of Ariel settle-ment, one of the largest Israeli West Bank settle-ments, and was executive director of Ariel Devel-opment Fund and founder of the Ariel Aliyah program.35 Zimmerman was not at the meeting. But he was captivated by it. In July 2013 he asked, “Can Palestinians and Israelis unite over the envi-ronment?” His answer was yes. Echoing the Post, he wrote: “The growing regional campaign to thwart the short- sighted and environmentally unsound project is driven by those who prefer the long- term sustainability of their shared living space over petty politics and quick fixes.”36

As the subject of individualized, short- term financial necessity, a Palestinian car mechanic would be distinguishable from the subject of en-vironmental protection in that he is situated in a specific geographical and historical context whose imperatives are presentist. The mechanic is as-sumed not to prefer to service settler cars but to be forced to by his present, structural conditions. He is understood as the product of the failing West Bank economy after Oslo. His present acts and his (presumably critical) interiority (that may envision the future) are thus out of sync as a result of his conditions of economic survival. The settler who visits his shop is also fixed to a set of structural circumstances, though less urgently so. She lives in the West Bank and takes advantage of cheaper prices offered by Palestinians. But Zimmerman and others who were impressed that settlers and Palestinians met at Rimonim junction depicted the subject of the necessity to do so quite differently. Rather than individuals trapped in particular, un-evenly distributed circumstances, settler and Pal-estinian signatories at the meeting became, in that instance, a collective of abstract, transhistorical

subjects committed to the good of environmental protection.

What then of other face- to- face encounters between Palestinians and Israelis in the name of a greater, future- oriented good? Here a brief history of landfill planning becomes helpful to answer the question, what was particular about an environ-mental orientation toward the deep future? What, in other words, made it different from other forms of future orientation that shaped “ joint” work by Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank?

Flashback: Three Decades of Landfill PlanningIsrael occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Is-raelis governed most aspects of Palestinians’ every-day lives directly between 1967 and the mid- 1990s (and have continued to do so indirectly, through the Palestinian Authority, since then). They also governed the growing number of Israeli settle-ments being established around Palestinian cities and villages. Governance included the manage-ment of the garbage and sewage produced by both populations.

Sewage networks were few and treatment plants fewer. Municipal garbage was being dumped in unlined dumpsites managed by municipalities within individual administrative boundaries. In the mid- 1980s the administration commissioned Tahal, Israel’s Water Planning Authority, to design master plans for the regional, large- scale disposal of solid waste and wastewater in the West Bank. By around 1990 the administration had designated sites for the construction of several landfills, in-cluding in the Jenin, Hebron, Abu Dis, Jericho, and Ramallah districts. All sites were designed for the joint disposal of municipal waste from both Israeli settlements and Palestinian towns and villages.

The administration chose the village of Deir Dibwan, fifteen minutes east of Ramallah, for the central West Bank’s regional landfill. Deir Dibwan residents rejected the proposal, and the project froze. But the Ramallah regional landfill



37. The National Strategy for Solid Waste Man-agement was drafted in the mid- 1990s but was officially unveiled in 2010 (General Manager at Tadweer/PADICO M. S. Al- Hmaidi, interview by the author, 26 July 2010, Nablus). The full doc-ument can be found on the Ministry of Local Government Website; see National Strategy for Solid Waste Management in the Palestinian Ter-ritory, 2010 – 2014, Palestinian National Author-ity, accessed 20 July 2014, www.molg.pna.ps /studies/TheSolidWasteManagementStrategy 2010- 2014.pdf.

38. Palestinian Water Authority Legal Council Fuad Bateh, interview by the author, 16 Sep-tember 2010, al- Bireh; Palestinian Water Au-thority Pricing Expert Ahmad Hindi, interview by the author, 23 May 2010, al- Bireh.

39. Israel has repeatedly made connecting to settlements a precondition for permission to the Palestinian Authority to build wastewater infrastructures, which occurred in the case of

the plant for Salfit near Ariel settlement. See World Bank, “The West Bank and Gaza,” 20, and Dumper, “Jerusalem’s Infrastructure.”

40. “The Green Line” refers to the 1949 Armi-stice Agreements lines agreed upon by Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. After 1967 these lines also came to demarcate Israel from the territories it occupied in that year. These were the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. As a state Israel has never declared its borders, so the Green Line is sometimes referred to as a po-litical boundary between Israel and its territo-ries—especially the West Bank. Israelis on the West Bank side of the Green Line are usually settlers or military personnel. For Authority bu-reaucrats, depositing garbage in a single dump with settlements was political, in other words, while their own interactions with Israelis in a variety of “Israel- based” institutions was tech-nical work for the nation. This is one of the cen-tral themes of my larger project.

41. KfW, “Current Status,” Annex B- 8.

42. There is an ongoing debate about whether “sharing” should be called “outsourcing” or “subcontracting.” See, for example, Gordon, Is-rael’s Occupation, and Hever, Political Economy.

43. It should be said that for Palestinians run-ning businesses, traveling, or building in the West Bank, these designations are subject to dramatic fluidity. Despite the fact that in Area A the Palestinian Authority has nominal se-curity as well as civilian control, for example, the IDF is free to conduct military exercises, arrests, assassinations, and incursions inside Area A at any time. When it does so PA police officers are required to remain in their barracks. This fluidity is experienced as much by those constructing large- scale infrastructures as it is by those they serve. Thus according to Ar-ticle 40 (the “water article”) of Oslo II, for ex-ample, any Palestinian- proposed, large- scale infrastructure that affects or relates to water


plan survived the transfer of authority from the civil administration to the Palestinian Authority in the mid- 1990s. The plan found a new home in the Authority’s efforts to produce “national strategies” for as many sectors of governance as possible — efforts that intensified especially after 2007. Ra-mallah’s plan, like those for Hebron and Jenin, was written into the Authority’s National Strategy for Solid Waste Management.37

This time all three landfills were to be built for the exclusive disposal of Palestinian municipal waste. The official Palestinian Authority line was to refuse to construct or to participate in the opera-tion of joint large- scale infrastructures that were also used or constructed by Israeli settlements. Of-ficials argued that by “sharing” infrastructures the Authority would legitimize the settlements.38 This principle was not simple to uphold, nor did it accu-rately depict how infrastructures had functioned in the West Bank for quite some time.39

Nor, furthermore, did it capture the extent to which Palestinian infrastructure planners were in systematic, daily contact — discussing blue-prints, assessing sites, exchanging technological updates — with Israeli experts, engineers, bureau-crats, and environmentalists on both sides of the Green Line.40 Palestinians were systematically con-sulting Israeli experts and bureaucrats. Israel was also the closest technological and economic model for landfill planners. When, in 2004, the Palestin-ian Authority committee coordinating the Deir

Dibwan landfill conducted workshops and con-sultations with Palestinian environmental NGOs, with the Ramallah and al- Bireh municipalities and local councils, for example, it also met with the Is-raeli Defense Forces (IDF) to show its officers the site. Members of the Authority’s planning commit-tee also took “study tours,” led by Israelis, of Isra-el’s Beer Sheva landfill in the Negev “to verify the suitability of the waste management sites proposed for the site.”41

Area CIn 2005 Deir Dibwan rejected the landfill again. At- Taybeh village offered its lands instead. Resi-dents there eventually refused as well. In 2007 the head of the Rammun Village Council proposed that the landfill be built on Rammun lands. The Authority’s chosen site fell on lands designated “Area C.” In compliance with the Oslo II Agree-ment of 1995, land in the West Bank is zoned A, B, or C, designating its degree of control by the civil administration and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has exclusive military control throughout the West Bank, but it shares its civil governing du-ties with the Palestinian Authority in Areas A and B, which is where most Palestinians reside.42 Most Palestinian- owned arable land, however, is in Area C. Area C makes up about 65 percent of the West Bank, where Israel has full control over both civil and military aspects of governance.43 The site cho-sen for the Deir Dibwan landfill fell on about 1,200



in any way — whether it is in Area A, B, or C — is subject to the approval of Israel. While not all structures built in Area C have been approved by Israel, building there without prior civil ad-ministration approval renders that structure li-able to be destroyed at any moment.

44. One dunam is 1,000 square meters, or 10,764 square feet, or one decare. 1,200 du-nams is therefore 1,200 decares, which is about 296.5 acres.

45. Hampel et al., Environmental Impact Assess-ment, 4 – 5.

46. The irony that Germany was funding the Rammun landfill in 2013 was not lost on many of the objectors.

47. “Unqualified good” is a term I borrow from Joe Jackson (“Smoke, Lies, and the Nanny State”), cited in Metzl, “Introduction,” 6.


49. ERM, originally a UK- based company es-tablished in the 1970s, now has offices in over forty countries and is one of the world’s lead-ing risk assessment consultancies. It is the same company that the US State Department hired to evaluate environmental risk from the Keystone XL pipeline. For details see Johnson, “ ‘State Department.’ ”

4 8 5Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins • Occupational Hazards

dunams of agricultural land that was privately owned by a few hundred families from Rammun and Deir Dibwan.44

For any landfill to be built in Area C a “con-struction permit can only be obtained with the agreement of the Israeli side.” As a result, the Au-thority’s landfill committee initiated yet another series of meetings with the civil administration and with the Israeli military “in order to keep them informed about the project.”45 One of the landfill’s engineers at the time took administra-tion and military personnel on a site visit to the Rammun plot. She recounted how she and her colleagues took regular trips to the offices of sev-eral of the administration’s relevant departments (e.g., environment, infrastructure, transportation, nature reserves) to show officers and staff project designs. She shrugged as she told me about the visit. Working with Israelis — whether meeting with them in one of several district coordinating offices in the West Bank, in conference halls in Jerusalem, or at a landfill in the Negev — was part of her job.

Given the fact that the three-decade-long history of landfill planning had involved numer-ous, sustained, and often face- to- face interac-tions among Israelis and Palestinians — for the oft- repeated goal of protecting the environment and its future — what made the Rimonim junc-tion meeting a historical precedent and a model for peace? In what sense had the environment trumped politics at Rimonim but not for the three decades before it?

Stale VisionsOne likely reason behind the failure of this series of sustained interactions to elicit optimism among the environmentalist settlers who objected, but also in the Israeli and European media, is that the

past ten years have seen declining enthusiasm for landfilling as a technology for managing waste in several countries. Landfills were banned in Ger-many in 2005.46 In Israel plans have been put in place to phase them out within the next decade. Many settlers and journalists were opposed to landfilling on principle. They argued that alterna-tives that used less land, recycled more waste, and encouraged reuse rather than disposal had long surpassed the landfill as a solution to the prolifera-tion of municipal refuse. For them decades of joint work to construct a landfill were demoted to an encounter driven by political or financial interests instead. As an environmentally unsound technol-ogy, the landfill could thus not have catalyzed work between the Palestinian Authority and the civil ad-ministration, they suggested, since that work was not convincingly oriented toward the unqualified good of environmental protection.47 In this sense the landfill controversy made possible “the explo-ration of . . . overflows engendered by the develop-ment of science and techniques.”48

The Objection Period: Extension and Diagnostic of the Calculative DeviceAssessments ReconsideredAfter choosing Rammun the Palestinian Author-ity hired a team of experts at Environmental Re-sources Management (ERM) to write an assess-ment.49 By 30 October 2009 Reem Khalil, the landfill’s director, had signed off on its “letter of submission from proponent” to Mahmoud Abu Shanab at the Authority’s Environmental Qual-ity Authority. The latter approved it. The two- hundred- twenty- page document was then sent for approval to the environment department in the civil administration.

The administration rejected the report,



50. According to one interviewee who pre-ferred to remain anonymous (interview with the author, 25 January 2011, Ramallah), the Pal-estinian Authority had to request that the Ger-man bank hire AYGL on the Authority’s behalf, since Palestinian regulations prohibited the Au-thority from hiring an Israeli company directly.

51. The Rammun landowners refused to sell. The Palestinian Authority committee decided to attempt expropriation. But they could not expropriate the land without civil administra-tion approval since the land was in Area C. So the Authority asked the administration to ex-propriate the land on their behalf. The adminis-tration agreed in the winter of 2012 – 13.

52. Nevertheless, Levy pointed out that the re-port still distinguished between “Israeli settle-ments” and “Palestinian villages.” Nitsan Levy, telephone interview by the author, 2 July 2013.

53. This is my translation from the Arabic ver-sion of the advertisement. The top half fea-

tured a table in which the dunams to be con-fiscated for the landfill were identified in numbered parcels. The bottom half outlined instructions for objectors: “Every person who has a doubt about the plan and every person who sees himself as damaged by it has the right to submit his objection.” Objectors were asked to supply five copies of each objections package and to include a map of the area or other documents identifying the site. Lacking a map, objectors were told they could bring a document from a certified surveyor that pro-vided an “honest description of the property, its location, the area, etc.” They had the right to recommend amendments to the plan. All ob-jectors were required to include an address and phone number where they could be reached.

54. Stakeholders were offered a period in which to submit comments to the objections subcom-mittee. Once the objection period had closed, hearings would commence at Beit Il, the civil administration’s headquarters. Objections

would be read and discussed in the presence of the objectors and their lawyers. The objections subcommittee would deliberate and eventu-ally make a recommendation to the environ-mental subcommittee. The latter was con-stituted by different officers from those who sat on the OSC. It was the EQSC that would come to a final decision in favor or against the project.

55. The ad stated that the landfill plan (and presumably its assessment) could be found at Beit Il military base or at the District Coor-dination Office of Ramallah, where someone would be available (presumably to display it) between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on Sundays and Tuesdays.

56. This also included guidelines from and ex-changes with relevant central Israeli ministries in Tel Aviv.


which had cost tens of thousands of dollars to pro-duce. Fearing another rejection if they used the same company for corrections, in 2011 the landfill planning committee did what had been done for Jenin’s landfill before it: it hired AYGL, an Israeli environmental consulting firm, to produce a new assessment. Another engineer shrugged as she explained what had happened. “AYGL speaks the same language as the civil administration. This should make it easier to pass through the permit process.”50 The AYGL report was approved by 2012.

Objections’ PublicsImplementation of the project included acquiring land.51 Once attempts to do so were in motion, proj-ect managers were required to publicize their plan to implement the project to the designated stakehold-ers. Although Khalil was the project’s official proj-ect manager, it was the civil administration at Beit Il military base that authored the announcement.

The announcement’s “public” had been pre-figured by the EIA’s determination of stakehold-ers. Among other things, AYGL’s second assess-ment added to the category of the stakeholder by making explicit reference to Israeli settlers as stakeholders in the project.52 Per AYGL’s tweaking, the objection period’s public(s) thus included both West Bank Palestinians and Israeli settlers. On 8 March 2013, the civil administration’s environ-mental quality subcommittee thus published an advertisement in two newspapers (one Israeli news-

paper, in Hebrew, and one Palestinian paper, in Arabic). The ad was titled “Announcement on the Deposition of a Detailed Preparation Plan number 58/1592.”53 It was also delivered with a several-week delay to the residents of Rammun.54

The ad opened the objection period as an in-vitation to view the landfill plan and to comment on the potential impact of the project as a response (qua supplement) to how well planners had already assessed it.55 Those who fit within the category of the “stakeholder,” an entity that had been made to circulate by assessment, were thus invited to com-ment on the other entity — the environment — as assessed by their presumably more qualified dop-pelgangers: the experts. The latter had been autho-rized by the assessment’s approval to prefigure the type of comment that would be taken into account in the planners’ calculation of risk.

For those with access to the lengthy process through which environmental assessments were evaluated and the standards of evaluation negoti-ated within the civil administration, the sense in which their objections can be read as a response to assessment reports was actually quite literal.56 I dis-covered this through two years of periodic conver-sations with one of the leaders of the Israeli objec-tion coalition, Nitsan Levy. A Rimonim settlement resident, Levy helped me arrange an interview in the civil administration in July 2011. There I met with Assaf Yazdi, a civilian employee in the Envi-ronment Department.



57. The soldier was a twenty- year- old Califor-nia native. Broadly speaking, non- Israeli, Jew-ish men between the ages of eighteen and twenty- four and non- Israeli, Jewish women between the ages of eighteen and twenty- one are eligible to serve in the Israeli military. For details see Mahal- IDF, “Who Can Volun-teer for the IDF?,” accessed 6 April 2014, www .mahal- idf- volunteers.org/about/join.htm #closelinktoisrael.

58. The groups included three organizations associated with settlements, all of which had been represented at the meeting at Rimonim junction: the Binyamin Regional Council, the Rimonim Council, and the Association for the Protection of the Environment for Judea and Samaria. The other two organizations were Green Now, whose work focused largely on environmental issues in the West Bank, and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Is-

rael, which was Israel- based but had made an exception for this case.

59. Levy was doing radiological testing when he drove me to meet Yazdi.

60. Levy took me on tours of the Abu Dis and al- Bireh sites in June 2011.

4 8 7Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins • Occupational Hazards

Yazdi’s department evaluated environmen-tal impact assessments for projects in Area C. He called in an American soldier to interpret for us.57 The soldier picked up one of the two- inch- thick plastic white binders on Yazdi’s desk. It was the 2009 report by Environmental Resources Manage-ment. “What you see here — they didn’t do it right the first time,” he said. “So they had to do it again and complete what was missing. . . . This [binder] is for our comments.” Yazdi and the soldier ex-plained that one reason they had rejected the first assessment was that its authors lacked “knowledge of the area” and “didn’t know the rules” that pro-tected it. “Then they hired an Israeli company that does know the laws here.”

Points of Passage and Prosthetic ExpertiseFive Israeli groups had been objecting to the land-fill since 2009 — when the civil administration had received the first assessment for approval. Levy was the director of the “Judea” branch of the As-sociation for the Protection of the Environment in Judea and Samaria, one of the five groups.58 Mem-bers described how they and their colleagues had read both the Environmental Resources Manage-ment and the AYGL assessments before submitting their objections. Since the reports were not actu-ally published (e.g., in newspapers), the fact that these objectors had had access to them (for a Pales-tinian Authority – managed landfill meant only for Palestinian garbage) reflected a broader flow of information that was common, I learned, between the individuals who represented Israeli objecting organizations and particular offices within the administration. The flow of information passed through specific points of passage. The directors of the association were two such points.

Information flowed in both directions. Both Yazdi and the soldier depicted Levy as a resident expert in the field of environmental management

within the West Bank. Yazdi described how he reg-ularly consulted with settlers during the planning stages of infrastructural projects as well as in mat-ters of regulation — whether or not the project was designed for settler use. Though not administra-tion staff, Levy offered Beit Il military base radio-logical testing.59 He was also the chief supervisor of municipal and regional waste dumps in the area (all of which received Palestinian garbage as well), including the dumps in Abu Dis (where much of Jerusalem’s waste was being dumped along with central West Bank waste), Al- Bireh (Ramallah’s twin city), Yatta, as well as al- Bireh’s wastewater treatment plant.60 He also monitored the environ-mental impacts of factories and industrial zones throughout the central and southern West Bank. He reported what he found to the civil adminis-tration as well as to his own association and to his settlement’s municipal government. It was the ad-ministration, however, that retained the authority to order facilities revamped or closed.

Levy’s history in the civil administration ex-tended back at least two decades. He had begun attending the administration’s meetings as a rep-resentative from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel in the late 1980s. Following his cofounding of the Association for the Protection of the Environment in Judea and Samaria (with Yitzhak Meir), he had continued attending as its Judea director. By the early 1990s he was serving as an observer on civil administration health and environment committees. As an observer, he could not vote in the administration’s committee meet-ings. But he often raised points there “because,” as Yazdi described it, “[Levy] also has expertise in that field. You know, occasionally some people will ask him some things.” When I asked about the origins of Israel’s standards for environmental im-pact assessments, for example, the soldier replied: “If you have other questions about that, Nitsan is



61. Callon and Muniesa, “Peripheral Vision,” 1231.

62. The first (ERM) assessment can be said to have failed as a calculative device in that its re-jection prevented the new entity it stabilized “to leave the calculative space and circulate elsewhere in an acceptable way” (ibid.). The first report did, however, serve as the blue-

print for the second (AYGL) assessment, which cited the first extensively and which was de-signed to fill in its gaps. Since the AYGL assess-ment mainly added details to the first one, it is worth describing what Environmental Re-sources Management meant by “potential project impacts.”

63. See Hampel et al., “Environmental Impact Assessment,” 6 – 3, 6 – 12.

64. Callon and Muniesa, “Peripheral Vision,” 1232.


around. You can ask him.” “Yes, Nitsan is an ex-pert,” said Yazdi. Levy and his colleagues had not only seen the final, approved assessment, in other words. They had also been privy to the civil admin-istration’s process of assessment evaluation. Given their strategic interest in preventing the landfill’s construction, it is fair to assume that the framing of the coalition’s objections was diagnostic of — if not a direct response to — the calculative device of the environmental impact assessment.

Assessing Stakeholder StakesBut if close working ties bound key figures among the Israeli objectors and relevant civil administra-tion staff, what was at stake for settlers in main-taining the distinction between environmental and political objections to the landfill? As months of sustained media attention demonstrated, the meeting at Rimonim junction had multiple ad-dressees. These included the Israeli, American, and European media and their reading publics. But it also included the civil administration. Since information did flow both ways, Levy and his col-leagues were acutely aware of what staff in the ad-ministration knew — or thought — about their mo-tives in opposing the project.

Callon and Muniesa argue that “calcula-tion starts by establishing distinctions between things or states of the world, and by imagining and estimating courses of action associated with those things or with those states as well as their consequences.”61 The 2012 (AYGL) environmental impact assessment framed environmental risk by excluding what might be construed as political concerns. Yazdi told me that it was likely that the settlers would object to the landfill. When I asked why, his answer was quick and firm: “For political reasons!” These reasons “can be legitimate,” he added. “But we are not political people. We are trying to be objective and professional.” As far as Yazdi was concerned, his role was to apply the same

assessment standards to Israeli and to Palestinian projects in Area C. For him “the environment” en-compassed both. Although his office did not actu-ally write the environmental impact assessments, the assessments they required, evaluated, and had rewritten thus prefigured the environment while also helping produce it.

Objects Isolated and AssembledEnvironmental impact assessment moved, ar-ranged, and ordered “a finite number of entities” into the single space of a document.62 It classified impacts into four categories: biophysical, resource, and land- use components; social and economic components; cultural heritage components and landscape features; and health components. Bio-physical, resource, and land- use components in-cluded climate and air quality, surface and ground water hydrology and quality, terrain and natural hazards, geology and soils, flora and wildlife re-sources, and use. Social and economic compo-nents included land values, agriculture and water use, recreation and tourism resources and use, transportation and traffic, labor market, employ-ment and income, Bedouins, scavengers, children, dump- site closure, and gender equity. Cultural heritage components and landscape features to be considered included historic or archaeological sites. Finally, health components included commu-nity water supply, water quality, and public health risks.63 Framing these objects together established “original relations between them, classifying them and summing them up” under the heading of “en-vironmental impact.”64

Object AvoidanceIn speaking with both Yazdi and Levy it was clear that objects under the banner of politics were ex-cluded from the frame. The list of objects that made up “environmental impact” excluded any ethnonational, linguistic, legal, or religiously identifiable




66. Zimmerman, “Can Palestinians and Israe-lis Unite?”

67. Bishara, “Watching U.S. Television,” 489 – 90.

68. The Israeli daily Makor Rishon published photographs, credited to Simon, of what it called the “secret meeting.” One was a shot of a younger- looking kippah- clad man hunched over the table signing a document while four middle- aged Palestinian men looked on.

69. This echoes one of Clifford Geertz’s argu-ments about cultural practices: that they are both instantiations and interpretations of cul-ture at the same time. See Geertz, “Thick De-scription,” 6.


objects, for example. Those categories — specifically “Palestinian villagers” and “Israeli settlers” — were relevant only insofar as they helped define the cat-egory of “stakeholders.” Assessment also excluded any discussion of geopolitical boundaries (such as the Green Line). ERM only used the words “bor-der” and “boundary” to refer to the limits of the landfill itself. The only population groups identi-fied within environmental impact were Bedouin, children, and, implicitly, women (under “gender equity”). Rights to land were excluded from the dis-cussion of environmental impact, as were the terms “nation” and “national future.”

Purifying and Proving EnvironmentalismThis framing could not directly determine how stakeholders framed objections. After all, socio- technical controversies “allow the exploration of conceivable options by going beyond the list estab-lished by the official actors.”65 But the device did make certain distinctions salient and authoritative while also masking their messy purifications. Why would objectors who had direct access to the civil administration’s departments stage a “clandestine meeting” (as it was phrased by Zimmerman66) in-stead of explaining themselves directly to the staff who might doubt them? How was the encounter at Rimonim junction mobilized to help purify Israeli objectors’ environmental motivations from their potentially political ones?

The meeting can be read as a performance of what I call environmentalist sincerity. It was con-sciously envisioned by some of its participants as a future depiction. The meeting thus combined what Bishara, drawing on Bruno Latour, calls “representation- as- gathering” with “representation- as- depicting.”67 Simon, the petition’s author, repre-sented the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. In addition to filing the petition with the civil administration, he, Levy, and his colleagues in the coalition also contacted local Israeli and interna-tional newspapers in order to give interviews (and

share photographs) that hailed its success.68 It was objectors’ liaising with the media, in other words, that made the meeting a story and an enactment of environmentalist sincerity simultaneously.69

Above I delineated three ways in which set-tler objectors and their supporters in the media narrated the encounter as a bypassing of politics. One was that the encounter involved settlers and Palestinians, another was that it was collective, and the third was that it was visionary. Here I juxtapose the event in its interpretive and performative ca-pacities with the content of some of the objections that were filed (separately) by those who partici-pated in the encounter. Three aspects of the en-counter in the Kaabaneh family’s house that day were foundational to the settlers’ performance of environmentalist sincerity in the media depic-tions that ensued. One was signatories’ apparently regional (borderless) vision. Another was their assertion of the Palestinian Authority’s expert in-adequacies (insisting that this was a “technical” rather than a “political” critique). And the third was the groups’ geographical proximity to one an-other and to the landfill site (which rendered them “local communities”).

RegionalismThe gathering could appear to have a regional vi-sion that extended beyond concerns about nations or political boundaries in that, as some newspa-pers wrote, it involved Israelis and Palestinians. Here Israeli settlers’ legal status as Israeli citizens elided the fact that they were residents of mili-tarily occupied lands that lay outside the state’s (albeit undeclared) borders. (The Rammun site could be seen from atop Rimonim settlement.) Palestinians, by contrast, were fixed as local West Bankers since it was their garbage that was to be dumped in this Palestinian Authority landfill. The two groups appeared in the encounter to have met across a political boundary, thereby performing regional — rather than national or local — concern



70. Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 28 – 29.


about the landfill’s impacts. Key to the regional-ist argument, in other words, was that the signato-ries appeared as two “really emergent concerned groups” rather than as “new actors who were not really new.”70

Expert InadequaciesIsraeli objectors highlighted what they framed as the Palestinian Authority’s expert inadequacy. This was a baseline assumption shared by the ob-jectors and the journalists who covered the event. They were able to do so without appearing to be opposed to the Authority because it was Palestinian by enlisting the Authority’s constituents (Ram-mun residents) to support Israeli settler objections. After all, the Israeli coalition could have simply signed and filed the petition on its own, resting on the five thick objections packages that would be sent to the civil administration. Through the staged Rimonim junction encounter, Israeli objec-tors performed their evaluation of the Authority’s technical capacity as one not about politics (here meaning conflict between two ethnonational cat-egories). Since other Palestinians seemed to agree with Israeli objectors, they could show with Pales-tinians’ attendance at the meeting that there were locally acknowledged risks in the Authority man-aging a landfill.

LocalismFinally, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (which, through Simon, had led the event’s staging) had been Israel- based and Israel- focused since its founding in 1953. That it exceeded its mandated geographical frame by participating in objections to the landfill meant that the orga-nization seemed to have reached into the West Bank to help bring two “local communities” to-gether. Settlers became local by comparison with the Israel- based organization that was suddenly in their midst. Here, by contrast with the logic of regionalism above, the settlers appeared as distinct from Israelis who resided within Israel’s 1967 bor-ders. Settlers were local and Israeli environmental-ists represented by SPNI (an organization several

of my Palestinian interlocutors seemed to admire) were thus posited as Israeli in the strict sense of the term. That distinction further afforded an image of the meeting as regional. Paradoxically, it also contradicted the image of settlers as (regular) Is-raeli citizens — an image that also contributed to the meeting’s apparent regional vision.

Constitutive OmissionsLike the calculative device of the impact assess-ment, however, the capacity of the meeting to offer the Israeli objecting coalition environmental credibility also resided in its ability to exclude ob-jects. Settlers’ environmentalist sincerity was thus based on constitutive absences. For example, the physical presence of Rammun community mem-bers at the signing as well as their signatures on the document were necessary to the signification of all three aspects of the event. The content of Rammun community members’ actual objections (as it was articulated on Palestinian television, in meetings between Rammun residents and landfill planners, and in interviews I conducted), by con-trast, was elided in order for the above aspects to be mobilized in the service of settlers’ environmen-talist sincerity.

In fact, important aspects of the content of objections put forth by both the Israeli coalition and the Rammun residents were omitted from the depictions of the Rimonim meeting. Simply put, settlers and Rammun residents disagreed about why the landfill should not be built on the Ram-mun site. They agreed that the problem had po-tentially long- term, future impacts. But they dis-agreed on the significance of those impacts. On the one hand, their disagreement provided one implicit way in which their meeting could appear to have crossed an intangible political boundary. On the other hand, the failure of the Rimonim meeting’s enthusiasts to acknowledge those dif-ferences rendered the argument that the meeting could serve as a model for peace logically and prac-tically untenable.



71. Society for the Protection of Nature in Is-rael, “Threats from Planning,” Annual Report for 2013, item 90. The report can be found on the SPNI website, accessed 20 July 2014, www .natureisrael.org/cms_uploads/threats_report 2013.pdf (in Hebrew).

72. Udasin and Lazaroff, “Settlers, Palestinians Together.”

73. This also happened to be the first of the Binyamin Council’s seven objections. It was the only one of Binyamin’s objections that could be classified as strictly “environmental” in the sense that it asserted potential damage to nonhuman elements. The other six objec-tions are titled Damage to Communities, Se-

curity, Safety, Policy Trends, Discrimination, and Justice and are characterized by concerns about impacts on humans (and, apart from one objection, Israeli humans in particular). Titled “Quality of Environment,” this Binyamin Council objection presented the risk of “envi-ronmental damage from potential seismic ac-tivity in the nearby Syrian African rift . . . harm to the water sources in the Jericho area[,] and serious damage to the unique Nahal Machoch stream nature sanctuary.” It stated that “the landfill will pose a hazard to the flora and fauna of the area and is liable to pollute the ground-water in the eastern aquifer.” Media reports on the SPNI petition focused almost exclusively on this particular objection.

74. This was suggested in the title of one article written by a Rammuni residing in the United States, “Trashing Four Generations of Palestin-ian Inheritance.” Its author, Dina Omar, under-scored the fact that “the founding of the village dates back to the early 1800s and is over forty generations old.”

75. I compiled these from several of the Ram-mun objections committee’s appearances on Palestinian television, from objection docu-ments, and from my interview with one of the leaders of the committee, Rabbah Thabata (telephone interview by the author, 9 Novem-ber 2013). I want to thank Dina Omar for mak-ing that possible.

491Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins • Occupational Hazards

Temporalities of a Common Goal: Heritage and Open SpacesIsraeli, German, and American media accounts of the meeting rarely mentioned the institutional af-filiations or the details of the two groups’ objec-tions as they were filed with the civil administra-tion. The one exception was the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and its main objec-tions.71 These centered on the argument that the landfill location was “liable to cause the pollution of the groundwater in the eastern aquifer” and that “the site [was] adjacent to the Nahal Machoch stream nature sanctuary and is on the eastern slopes of the central mountain ridge.”72 In claim-ing that the effort against the landfill was “led by Roee Simon” (which happened to be untrue — he had only led the effort to stage the meeting and left his job soon thereafter), the objection on which the Jerusalem Post placed the greatest em-phasis, for example, was concern that the landfill site was located “ just steps north of the Nahal Ma-koch Nature Reserve in the north Judean Desert” and that its “unique characteristics” and its four springs were at risk.73

The fact that many Rammun residents framed their opposition to the landfill as a na-tional duty (“Palestine begins with Rammun,” one objector said on Palestinian television) was never mentioned. Nor was the fact that many Rammun objectors described their opposition as a matter of preserving Rammun’s heritage (turath) for gen-erations to come.74 Rammun’s six basic objections were the following75: One, there was no guarantee that the land of the landfill would be returned to them in twenty- five to thirty years. Two, these lands were among the most fertile in the area, and

the landfill might damage the water and soil and make it unfit for cultivation in the future. Three, this was currently fertile agricultural land that the landowners had the right to cultivate in the pres-ent. Four, this land was part of Rammun’s heri-tage and inheritance, and the land, therefore, had symbolic significance for Rammunis locally and abroad. Five, the Palestinian Authority would not be able to prevent settlers from using the landfill, which would result in both the legitimization of settlements and in the potential for toxic dumping without the Authority’s ability to monitor it. Six, it was therefore Rammun’s national duty to protect Rammun’s lands, even if that meant obstructing the national project to solve the Ramallah area garbage problem (that there was no sanitary dis-posal system). These objections, too, were missing from meeting enthusiasts’ accounts.

Note the temporalities of these objections. In five of six cases, they were based on a vision for the long- term future — specifically about the land after the landfill’s closing. The landfill is slated to op-erate for twenty- five to thirty years. An added five years for reclamation meant thirty- five years from the time of construction, when many of the objec-tors and current owners of the land would likely be in their eighties or nineties. Their concern for the future of the land was therefore a concern for the following generations who would reclaim it. Con-cern about long- term pollution evokes a less easily quantifiable number of years into the future and suggests, more importantly, the potential for per-manent or irreversible damage. From a perspective that sees the environment as abstract and univer-sal, objections about the risk of long- term pollu-tion appeared to center on the problem of pollu-



76. Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ), “Rammun Village Profile,” funded by Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for De-velopment (AECID), 2012, accessed 20 July 2014, vprofile.arij.org/ramallah/pdfs/vprofile /Rammun_Vp_en.pdf. It should be noted, how-ever, that when unemployment in Rammun was recorded at 20 percent in 2012, it was ob-served that unemployment persisted “mostly amongst people depending on [the] agricul-tural sector” (10). Furthermore, of Rammun’s

27,342 dunams, only 5,302 are arable. The land-fill proposal estimated that the site would take up about 1,200 dunams, or just over 20 percent of the village’s arable lands.

77. The television channels on which Rammuni objectors appeared included Al- Aqsa, Filastin al- Yom, and Palestinian Satellite Television.

78. Omar, “Trashing Four Generations of Pales-tinian Inheritance.”

79. Under “Damage to Communities,” the po-sition paper states, “The Landfill will cause serious harm to the nearby communities, by emitting noxious smells, pollutants and visual nuisance that will adversely affect residents and make it harder for them to attract more residents in the future.” Mateh Binyamin Re-gional Council, “Position Paper — Rimonim Landfill,” 7 April 2013, 1 – 2.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:3 • 2014492

tion in and of itself as a tautology: “pollution is bad because pollution is bad.” However, for Rammunis the consistent qualifier to this particular objection was that this land was above all agricultural and fertile. Damage to the land would therefore dam-age agriculture as an ongoing human practice, and that practice was a part (if a relatively small part) of village life within Rammun.

Rammun’s argument was not one about economic survival, at least not in the short term. As of 2012, agriculture constituted only 10 per-cent of Rammun’s economic activities.76 Rather, it integrated a commitment to pass land down through the generations with a commitment to self- determination. This is something Rammunis remarked on several times on Palestinian televi-sion.77 The objection about the danger of polluting agricultural lands can be read as both nationalist and localist. For Dina Omar, for example, it com-bined the two as an expression of hope for greater Palestinian economic autonomy: “The farming villages surround Ramallah,” she wrote, “sustain one of the few local, Palestinian- owned and self- sustaining economic activities left in the West Bank — agriculture.”78

The Binyamin Regional Council, represent-ing forty- two settlements, for its part, sought to protect the (same) land for the long- term posses-sion and expansion of the area by Jewish Israelis: what the council’s “Position Paper — Rimonim Landfill” called “more residents in the future.” Furthermore, the document stated that “parts of the land for the plan are within the regional ju-risdictions of two Israeli local councils (Mateh Binyamin and Bik’at HaYarden).”79 I asked Levy, who had helped edit the paper, how this squared with the fact that the land was the private prop-erty of Palestinians from Rammun, at- Taybeh, and Deir Dibwan. “When land is in the jurisdiction of a [settler] regional council it means it is under its

provision and care,” he answered. There was dis-agreement between the civil administration and the settler councils about the size of settlement ju-risdictions. Levy explained, “The CA considers the jurisdictions of the regional councils to be the bor-ders of the settlements that belong to each regional council. Not the open spaces between settlements. Even though they are still in the maps drawn in the early 1980s and authorized as the jurisdictions of the councils.” In other words the council saw at least some of the land of the proposed site as open spaces that fell within its jurisdiction. That was why, Levy continued, “the council says maybe you [the CA] can build on it and make plans on it — but consult with us before.”

Projecting into or Bracketing the Future?The fact that enthusiasts read the Rimonim meet-ing as a putting aside of essential differences rests on a key temporal contradiction. Two temporali-ties simultaneously organized their arguments: the short- term temporality aimed at the obstruc-tion of the landfill’s construction on the site, and the long- term temporality aimed at the protection of the land and resources. In order to take the meeting of members of the above groups as a sign of their having put political interests aside, the long- term element of each group’s imputed inter-ests had to be bracketed. One could not, in other words, see the oppositional long- term goals of set-tler expansion onto Rammun’s lands and Ram-mun’s continued possession of those same lands as significant and at the same time consider their common objection to the landfill as an index of a shared environmental citizenship. To take their joint signing as an act that bypassed the political was therefore to treat the short- term negative goal of blocking the landfill as the more important of the two temporalities.

The long- term temporal bracketing allowed



80. Over the past four decades many millions of dollars, hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organizations, and thousands of experts have been assembled to form what has come to be known as the “environmen-tal peacebuilding” industry. The United Na-tions Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Development Agency (UNDP), Germany, Switzerland, Japan, South Africa, the United States, and Russia have been among those at the forefront of efforts “to use environmental cooperation to transform the risks of conflict over resources into opportunities for peace in war- torn or fragile countries.” United Nations Environment Programme, “Environmental Co-operation for Peacebuilding,” accessed 20 July

2014, www.unep.org/disastersandconflicts /Introduction/EnvironmentalCooperationfor Peacebuilding/tabid/54355/Default.aspx. Ex-pertise in environmental peace building has also proliferated. Since 2008, for example, two hundred twenty- five researchers, practi-tioners, and decision makers have taken part in a project called “Environmental Peace-building” led by the Environmental Law Insti-tute (ELI), UNEP, the University of Tokyo, and McGill University that has thus far produced six edited books that include over one hun-dred fifty case studies from more than sixty conflict- affected countries and territories. Their funders include Canada, USAID, the MacArthur Foundation, and the European Union. There

have been hundreds of similar efforts since the industry’s emergence. For more infor-mation see “Environmental Peacebuilding,” www.environmentalpeacebuilding.org/about /about/; UNEP, “Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding,” www.unep.org/disasters andconflicts/Introduction/Environmental-CooperationforPeacebuilding/tabid/54355 /Default.aspx; and Schoenfeld, “Environmen-tal Peacebuilding.” See also the bibliography collected by the website Environment and Cli-mate in the Middle East titled “Environmental Peacebuilding, Security and Conflict,” mideast environment.apps01.yorku.ca/bibliography /environmentalpeacebuilding.


a provisional unity to appear less provisional, per-haps because of its temporal proximity to the im-puted final, shared goal: obstructing construction of the landfill on that particular site. From the day the civil administration published its decision to build, the process of submitting objections, at-tending public hearings, and awaiting the admin-istration’s decision may take one to two years — not long enough for longer- term questions about fu-ture generations’ land ownership, control over re-sources and population, Palestinian sovereignty, or Israeli annexation to insert their “cynical” politics, as Levy put it, into the mix. All the while the clash-ing of long- term interests remained at play, only sometimes eclipsed by a sustained focus on the short- term goal of obstructing the landfill. What is more, this temporal arrangement was a reversal of the usual one that operates in arguments for environmental protection — including those that claimed the meeting to have been a collectively vi-sionary one. Arguments for environmental protec-tion tend to pit its longer- term temporal horizons against nearsighted political arguments, as some enthusiasts had in fact done.

Environmental Citizenship?Rather than setting aside their (opposing) long- term concerns, these “settlers” and “Palestinians” put them center stage for all to see. They stated them in the media. They filed them with — and, in the summer of 2013, defended them in front of — the civil administration objections commit-tee. This suggests the limits of interpreting their having objected to the same project, at the same time, in the same house as a model for “peace with the environment.” That it was interpreted that way

tells us more, I want to suggest, about the force of impact assessments (and the institutions that were authorized to assess them) to frame the terms in which environmental protection is rendered uni-versal and abstract.

The enthusiasm expressed by proponents of the encounter in Rimonim is also worth exploring for its similarity to a growing subfield in twenty- first- century environmental governance that is based on the concept of environmental citizen-ship. The industry is called environmental peace building or peacemaking.80 Its foci are materials such as air, fresh water, and wastewater, as well as animals of all kinds, whose physical properties (or biological or social needs) cause them to move across political borders. Once they cross, they become sources of competition. Or they become grounds for accusations of transboundary pollu-tion or species invasion. Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have been the industry’s main target regions. In the Middle East, the role of en-vironmental peace building both in high politics and in the everyday experience of sanitary life for Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Leba-nese, and Egyptians is rapidly expanding. Among other things this is because possibilities for secur-ing aid for infrastructural projects are increasingly tied to cooperation across borders.

Environmental peace building seeks to tem-per strident social scientific and humanist claims about humans’ capacity to determine, direct, or construct the material world in which they live. It is premised on an idea that understanding the limits of society’s control over nature — especially when humans draw political boundaries — has re-demptive potential for humankind. Its redemp-



81. Anand, “Pressure,” 545. 82. Bryant, “A West Bank Crusade,” and Zim-merman, “Can Palestinians and Israelis Unite?”

83 . See Benjamin e t al . , Greenwashing Apartheid.


tive potential resides in its apparent applicability to any place and any time — to its abstraction, in other words, and to its universal reach. As an ab-straction the environment seems to be an equal-izer of humans otherwise plagued by historically specific and culturally constructed differences. It is therefore premised on the idea that if people realize their shared exposure, responsibility, and vulnerability to the material forces in which they live (e.g., pollution, water scarcity) they will also realize that their differences of opinion are just that — mere differences derived from the narrow biases of human experience.

In his work on water pressures in Mumbai, Anand argues that the claims residents made to water helped constitute what he calls “hydraulic citizenship.” By that he means “a form of belonging to the city enabled by social and material claims made to the city’s infrastructure.”81 There is an echo between the idea that assemblages of water, settlers, municipal employees, and councilors can form the conditions of possibility for hydraulic citi-zenship and the claims of the Rimonim meeting’s proponents about the Rammun landfill- to- be. The idea that an unlikely assemblage of those demand-ing water and making it move through pipes (as in Mumbai) can be bound by the term “hydraulic citizenship” seems to suggest that the unlikely as-semblage of those demanding that the landfill not be built could be bound by the notion of environ-mental citizenship.

That notion is a version of what has driven the international industry of environmental peace building in this corner of the Middle East. If hy-draulic citizenship can exist in India, could en-vironmental citizenship be claimed in the West Bank, or among residents of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt? Or, paraphrasing Anand, couldn’t the Rimonim meeting represent a moment in which a form of belonging to the West Bank was enabled by social and material claims made to the West Bank’s environment? My claim here is that it is both politically dangerous and logically untenable to say that it could.

When setters and Rammunis met at Rimonim junction, it seemed according to some that “the

environment” had brought them together. Both groups seemed to share the same understanding of its vulnerability to garbage and therefore the same human understanding of responsibility toward it and of exposure to its dangers. According to the Christian Science Monitor: “If Israelis and Palestinians don’t find peace at the negotiating table, maybe they will find it while sorting their trash.” Israeli Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut was quoted as having stated that “peace [was] in the dumps.” “Peace will be at the garbage [dump],” said Yitzak Meir, a resident of a northern West Bank settlement and codirector of the Association for the Protection of the Environment for Judea and Samaria with Levy. Peace, or its catalyst, was to be found some-where buried in the garbage dump- to- be.82

I have purposely taken a different approach to the environment in examining the content of objections in light of the calculative devices that shaped them. In this way the environment ceases to appear as an entity ontologically distinct from human action. It no longer seems to have the agency to assemble or the vulnerability to fall vic-tim. It also ceases to be external to politics, econ-omy, culture, or historical processes. It thereby becomes possible to analyze practices of objecting on their own terms. It becomes possible to take them as diagnostics of relations of power, of claims to land, institutional hierarchies, and of multiple and, finally, conflicting aspirations for the land’s infrastructural futures.

My argument thus differs from greenwashing scholarship,83 which is premised on the distinction between real and false environmentalisms. This scholarship tends to see real environmentalisms as practices that do not serve human (i.e., political, economic) aims. It sees false environmentalisms as mere rhetorical covers for interested human goals. I have pointed to some ways in which true and false environmentalisms are externalized from human realms of thought and action. In the post- Oslo West Bank a similar distinction had been inscribed into the system for regulating infrastructural plan-ning. It had also gained a significant discursive presence in the writing and speech of Israeli objec-tors to the landfill.




Those same forms of speech and writing, as well as the calculative devices that framed and evaluated them, made evident the particular chan-nels of bureaucratic and technocratic authority that produced the effect of the environment as an abstraction. The practices made plain the histori-cal contingency of the abstraction that they also claimed to uphold. It seemed that the environment had demanded the need for the production of standards (to which civil administration staff had dutifully complied). But it was the standards them-selves that systematically reproduced (and were required to reproduce) the appearance of the en-vironment as an external, independent entity that had to be protected.

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