Paper short abstract

This paper follows a municipal waste crisis in a Palestinian town in Israel to show how garbage infrastructures become key sites of rent-seeking, protection and patronage. Waste reveals infrastructural state capture in which private accumulation and colonial violence are tightly entangled.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Israeli settler colonial state becomes materially legible in the heaps of waste accumulating on the streets of Arraba, a Palestinian town in the Galilee. It follows the journey of newly elected mayor Ahmad Nassar as he seeks to restore waste collection, wrest control of tenders from criminal organizations and secure state protection, to reveal the colonial state as a material social relation.

Building on debates in the anthropology of the state, infrastructure and waste, the paper treats waste infrastructures as an ethnographic entry point into the relational making of the state. It shows how the indeterminate materiality of household waste enables rent extraction through violent protection rackets and their transformation into political patronage. Following the Arraba crisis, it traces how garbage collection and disposal link local contractors backed by crime families, large waste firms, landfill corporations, bureaucrats and politicians into a single tangle of relations, showing how the racialized margins are fastened to the colonial center.

By following Nassar’s attempts to reorganize waste provision outside entrenched circuits of profit, and showing how this experiment in infrastructural autonomy is violently curtailed, the paper recasts organized violence in Palestinian localities as central to the contemporary Israeli state form, rather than as its negation. The paper proposes the notion of infrastructural state capture to describe a configuration in which private and violent actors control material and social networks in ways that simultaneously enable private accumulation and reproduce Jewish supremacy.