Book contents
9 - Open Questions, Opening Futures
from Part II - Pathways and Predicaments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2024
Summary
This chapter captures the current state-of-play of the West Line hub in a continually turbulent region, speculating on how things might and should go in the future – both in the West Line and in other e-waste hubs that share many dynamics and predicaments. The future of the West Line and its long-standing e-waste industry teeter in the balance, buffeted by geopolitical currents. The West Line waste flows and burning emerged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have embodied it for decades, in a way that is increasingly salient in the recent years of a right-wing coalition government, and intensified conflict after October 7, 2023. The politics of waste is now explicit, with Palestinian municipal rubbish collection trucks blocked by military checkpoints, and Israelis calling for a creeping “green” annexation of Area C and whittling away of Palestinian authority in Areas A and B as the only way to prevent the “chemical terrorism” of waste burning. While these regional politics, which have so frustratingly frozen our promising hub-driven efforts, are surely sui generis, the underlying challenges are instructive globally for the interfaces between the e-waste hubs, environmental NGOs, and national e-waste policies, and this chapter closes in teasing out these broader lessons.
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- Polluted PoliticsThe Development of an Israeli-Palestinian E-Waste Economy, pp. 205 - 220Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024