Occupational Hazards

Abstract

Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s essay begins with an unlikely meeting between two groups—Israeli settlers and Palestinian village residents—who together opposed construction of a Palestinian Authority–run landfill in the central West Bank. Attention to this 2013 moment of infrastructure-in-the-making sheds light on another, conceptual alliance. On one end, “thing theorists” argue for an understanding of infrastructures’ nonhuman, agentive capacity to assemble disparate people, things, and institutions. On the other end, political commentators propose, as many did, that meetings like this one index “environmental citizenship” premised on the recognition of common responsibility for a vulnerable environment. Both suggest nature’s physical properties—e.g., aquifers’ vulnerability to toxic wastes—seemed to have brought sworn enemies together, thereby exceeding or bypassing politics. Instead, Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s essay analyzes objections in light of the bureaucratic, calculative devices that shaped them. These devices structure the terms according to which “environmental impacts” have been evaluated in the Occupied Territories since Oslo (ca. 1995). They reveal how entrenched forms of technocratic authority produced the effect of the environment as both an abstract “good” to be protected and as ontologically “insistent” on protection. While nature seemed to demand the need for infrastructural standards (with which the occupation authorities and objectors attempted to comply), it was the standards imposed by the military occupation’s bureaucratic apparatus that reproduced the appearance of the environment as distinct from, and vulnerable to, human practice. Among some objectors, this catalyzed a need to perform what Stamatopoulou-Robbins calls “sincere environmentalism.” Doing so was aimed at avoiding accusations of “greenwashing,” which sees “false” environmentalisms as covers for politics.

Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine

“…Agrawal, 2005; Barnes et al., 2013; Bishara et al, 2021, this issue; Guarasci, 2015, 2018; Günel, 2019; Haraway, 2015; McKee, 2018; Martinez-Alier, 2003; Ogden et al., 2013; O’Reilly, 2017; Tsing, 2005, 2015; West, 2006, 2012, 2016). I draw from these conversations to propose that, while West Bank Palestinians have arguably lived nonsovereign since 1967, this failure-to-build temporality takes on its distinct moral valence from the contemporary way that actors now ruling Palestinian life—Israel, donors, the PA—define, evaluate, and determine the environmental standards for Palestinian infrastructures (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014).…”

“…Palestinian designs and environmental impact assessments must be evaluated and approved by multiple Israeli offices, including in the Civil Administration, in ministries (e.g. of environment, infrastructure), and are informally vetted by settler groups (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014, 2019). For many Israelis evaluating projects, tertiary treatment is a minimum standard for sewage management.…”

The Delta is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey

“…In this case, residents formed new alliances mediated by a shared concern with an unwanted infrastructure. They did not reify boundaries between environment and politics (Stamatopoulou‐Robbins ) but, rather, emphasized the infrastructural politics of environment. The bridge, the plaintiffs declared, citing Izmir's latest urban plan, was incongruous with the city's transportation needs.…”

Environmental Framing and Its Limits: Campaigns in Palestine and Israel

“…For example, differentially situated Israeli settler and Palestinian participants who were engaged in joint opposition to a garbage dump in the West Bank all "suspended" what they saw as "the political" as they strove to effectively reach an international audience of reporters. 33 Successful activists use socio-cultural savvy to identify and employ frames for their campaigns that will be compatible with the contexts in which they work. Thus, frames reflect both activists' ideas about the key issues at stake and their evaluations of audiences.…”