![]() ![]() Waste Siege illuminates how waste functions within the everyday Israeli occupation of Palestine to subjugate and humiliate a population, as they adapt to life amongst waste. Even when waste is burned in residential areas, the refuse continues to live as toxic smoke particles embedded in the lungs of Palestinians. Given that there is no proper infrastructure to deal with this inundation, waste is always present even as it changes form. Within the Palestinian context of the everyday, Stamatopoulou-Robbins rethinks the definition of waste as “matter out of place” (Douglas, 2005, 44), and argues that for Palestinians, waste has become “matter with no place to go” (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019, 10). Palestinians not only face a military siege, but also a waste siege, as their eroding territories are used as dumping sites for a variety of waste including household trash, disposable goods, medical waste, demolition and construction waste, and untreated human fecal waste sewage – making a life not surrounded by waste inconceivable. Stamatopoulou-Robbins does not just focus on what the Israeli military does to the Palestinians, but the role Palestinian political parties, bureaucrats, humanitarian NGOs, and the international community play in the slow degradation of Palestinian life through waste. Waste Siege is a brilliant and insightful ethnography into the West Bank’s inundation of waste dumped from Israel, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian cities. ![]() Simultaneously, certain types of waste in Palestine are re-evaluated as sacred or valuable commodities that sustain circuits of mutual aid and community building. She demonstrates how infrastructural neglect and toxicity are used as tools of the occupation, perpetuating slow violence while justifying protracted settler-colonialism. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine offers another perspective – that of waste. ![]() Tudies of Palestine are often presented as narratives of physical violence, geopolitics, religion, and territory from the perspective of Israelis or Palestinians. ![]()
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