We build on Chapter three’s description of e-waste hubs as vital economic actors, rather than simply dumping sites, and Chapter four’s account of a consensual development vision for the West Line hub, to argue for the pragmatic and ethical necessity and advantages of centering e-waste hubs in e-waste policies. Existing EPR e-waste policies, generated in the Global North and adopted globally, usually ignore informal actors and dynamics, or propose formalizing them in a way that redirects attention and resources away from the value chains and sites that have historically collected and recycled most of the world’s e-waste. A hub-centered policy would boost the effectiveness and coherence of e-waste policies by accounting for and building on their entrepreneurial agility and expertise, decentralising decisions and interventions to actors with nuanced local knowledge, greater accountability, and long-term stakes in policies that not only propose solutions in the center but grapple with existing capacities and toxic legacies in the periphery. We briefly describe the interlocked arms of the West Line model for such restructuring elaborated in the following three chapters: curbing destructive practices through local enforcement; remediating past damage; and preserving livelihoods though environmental upgrading of the recycling processes.

This chapter details the West Line e-waste economy as an example of global destruction networks operating globally as an under-examined shadow of the more familiar and visible phases of the economy. It traces the highly effective collection pathways developed by Palestinian entrepreneurs to locate and funnel end-of-life materials from Israeli households, institutions, and scrapyards to the West Line, along with lesser inputs from Palestinian areas. We describe the navigation of borders, including through mediation of Israeli settlers, as a cascading flow of scrap arrives to the West Line, for resale, repair, and processing, with valuable metals extracted for export back to Israel, and low value remnants disposed. This informal economic value chain employs a complex hierarchy of a thousand workers, operating in an ecosystem of interlocked dynamic niches of specialization and synergy, ranging from multi-million dollar metal traders to children picking through ash for pieces of copper, producing one of the largest Palestinian exports to Israel. At the same time, similar to other hubs globally, these vibrant economic contributions in a context of scarce opportunity are in increasingly tense relations with the wide-ranging severe environmental and health impacts of the crude extraction and disposal practices employed and international scrutiny.

This chapter describes the cross border geopolitical terrain within which we advocated Israeli and Palestinian authorities on behalf of the hub-driven path to reform described in previous chapters. The impressive entrepreneurial accomplishments of the West-Line’s informal recycling industry, and our arguments for its social and environmental upgrading came up against the harsh constraints of regional politics and policies. On the Israeli side, an increasingly tense and militarized response to waste smuggling and burning meshed with a narrow vision of Israeli e-waste management policies modeled on the internationally dominant EPR system. This impulse converged, ironically, with the stance of the Palestinian Authority. Here, officials regarded waste flows as a joint manifestation of Israeli dumping and the criminality of marginal individual Palestinians. The Authority’s battle for symbolic expressions of sovereignty in a context where it possesses almost none of its substance, formally allows the recycling of only that small fraction of e-waste that is indigenously Palestinian—a convenient fiction that blocks formal commercial recycling. For example, the foremost example of a Palestinian company performing large scale clean recycling on a commercial basis is not showcased as a way forward, but faces constant friction from both Israeli and Palestinian institutional and regulatory barriers.

The preface describes how a chance story about black rain interfering with the traditional drinking water collection from village rooftops, led us to a massive but little-known Palestinian e-waste hub in the southern West Bank, employing a thousand people who work to collect, refurbish, and recycle a large portion of Israeli e-waste, creating livelihoods in a setting of few options after prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank. We describe our efforts to learn with and from these communities about the dynamics and scale of the informal e-waste value chain, and its serious environmental and health consequences, and to forge and test a vision for development that would preserve this precious source of livelihood while eliminating its crippling harms. We overview the intertwined stories we tell in the book about our years of community-based research and advocacy, and their lessons for different audiences.

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.

Open-source intelligence is readily available and inexpensive. Hamas collected a lot of information from open sources, mainly the Israeli press. In this case, Hamas exploited the fact that Israel is a democratic state with a relatively free press to get valuable information for its operations. This sort of collection activity became more organized after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and was Hamas’s main source for strategic analysis. This chapter describes the intelligence content Hamas gathered from open sources and that content’s contribution to its activities.

Chapter 7 concludes the Jordanian case study by analyzing the theory’s expectations for how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence repression, protest, and accountability in authoritarian political systems. Original protest data indicates that the monarchy permits hundreds of protests each year and that security forces repress only a tiny fraction of these events. Instead, repression is highly targeted at those individuals who cross the regime’s redlines by publicly blaming and criticizing the king. The chapter explains how this approach to repression complicates anti-royal coordination, even among those opposition figures who personally blame the monarchy for Jordan’s ills. The chapter also illustrates how the monarchy provides limited accountability by removing prime ministers and cabinet ministers when the public becomes visibly dissatisfied with the government’s performance.

Chapter 1 builds from the example of the Arab Spring uprisings to illustrate the importance of blame for authoritarian politics and its relevance to the stability of ruling monarchies. The chapter summarizes the book’s argument about how power sharing affects attributions under autocracy and how autocrats strategically try to limit their exposure to blame by delegating decision-making powers to other political elites. It then describes why autocratic monarchs are better positioned than other autocrats to avoid blame by sharing power. The chapter also discusses the book’s contributions to scholarship on authoritarianism, including how popular politics affect regime stability, when autocrats are more or less likely to share power, why autocratic monarchies have been so stable, and how power sharing and popular politics interact in authoritarian settings. The chapter ends with an outline of the remainder of the book.

Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organization Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas’s intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the author analyzes the development of Hamas’s various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas’s activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organization Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas’s intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the author analyzes the development of Hamas’s various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas’s activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

The conclusion chapter sums up the contribution of Hamas’s intelligence to the organization’s activities associated with its struggle against Israel. It details the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s efforts to gather intelligence on Israel, counter Israeli intelligence activity, and assess Israel’s intentions and capabilities. This chapter also examines lessons from the case study of Hamas that may be applied to a general understanding of intelligence warfare by VNSAs.