Throughout history, communities of peasants, urban dwellers, and Bedouins in Palestine have cultivated a local knowledge of infrastructure—shaped through a close relationship with the natural environment and evolving socio-economic structures. This knowledge has included collective stewardship over water, means of production, and transportation. Simultaneously, the geography of Palestine has been, for millennia, a palimpsest of mega-infrastructure projects that fulfilled the dreams of imperial and colonial expansion—from Roman aqueducts and Ottoman railways to the British Mandate’s electrification project and Israel’s National Water Carrier. These projects have profoundly influenced the lives of ordinary people and their relationship with their surroundings. Against this backdrop, the “infrastructural turn” in Middle East and Palestine studies urges a closer examination of how infrastructure shapes spatial relations of power and dissent, while simultaneously connecting the region to global structures of capitalism and colonialism. Nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine, where everyday infrastructures—and their failures—are entangled with settler-colonial rule, humanitarian interventionism, developmentalist agendas, and segregationist logics. Whether through roads and checkpoints, waste management systems, or digital connectivity, infrastructure actively assembles political life—shaping how colonized space is governed and controlled by the colonial, and inhabited and resisted by the colonized.

Key Questions

  • What forms of localized knowledge have Palestinians developed in relation to infrastructure, and how are these shaped by their specific historical and geographical contexts?
  • How do systems of infrastructure articulate settler colonial logics—not only through their presence, but through their absences, breakdowns, and deliberate neglect as tools of governance and biopolitical control of Palestinians? 
  • What strategies do Palestinians employ to navigate, subvert, or repurpose colonial infrastructural systems in their everyday lives? 

Key Cases

Key Resources

  1. Jabary Salamanca, Omar. 2016 “Assembling the Fabric of Life: When Settler Colonialism Becomes Development.” Journal of Palestine Studies 45 (4): 64–80. ( open access link )
  2. Jabary Salamanca, Omar. 2014. “Hooked on electricity: the charged political economy of electrification in the Palestinian West Bank.” Working paper (February) presented in the symposium “Political Economy and Economy of the Political” at Brown University. ( open access link )
  3. Mansour, Johnny. 2006. “The Hijaz-Palestine Railway and the Development of Haifa.” Jerusalem Quarterly 28 (Autumn):5-21. ( open-access link )
  4. Tawil-Souri, Helga. 2022. “Speculation on Infrastructural Ecology: Pigeons, Gaza, and Internet Access.” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 40 (6): 1064–81. ( open-access link )
  5. Violante, Cristina. 2022. “The Tempo of Water.” Journal of Palestine Studies 51 (4): 68–88.  ( open-access link )

Further Resources

  1. Abushama, Hashem. 2024. “a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies”. The Stuart Hall Foundation. 26 March 2024. ( open-access link )
  2. Abusaada, Nadi. 2022. “‘The Pit and the Pond’: Hydraulic Projects and Municipal Rights in Modern Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 51 (4): 8–23.  ( open-access link )
  3. Arefin, Mohammed Rafi, and Benjamin Kaplan Weinger. 2020. “Infrastructural Occupations: Waste and Electricity in Palestine.” Cultural Geographies 28 (3): 569–72. ( link )
  4. عودة الله، خالد. 2018. ”يافا – القدس: تاريخٌ موجزٌ لسكّة الاستعمار.“ باب الواد، أكتوبر 16، 2018. ( مصدر مفتوح الوصول ) 
  5. Dader, Khalid, and Mikko Joronen. 2025. “Fitful Infrastructures: Dwelling With Infrastructural Elimination in Gaza.” Antipode 57 (3): 886-906. ( open-access link )
  6. Dimitriadis, Sotirios. 2018. “The Tramway Concession of Jerusalem, 1908–1914: Elite Citizenship, Urban Infrastructure, and the Abortive Modernization of a Late Ottoman City.”_ _In Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, edited by Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire, 475–89. BRILL eBooks. ( open-access link )
  7. El Sakka, Abaher. 2023. “Electricity in the Palestinian Society in the Gaza Strip: Daily Life Practices and Mechanisms of Resilience and Community Resistance.” Arab Urbanism, special issue “Imaginaries from a Blackout” edited by Lana Judeh and Mohammed Abualrob. ( open-access link )

بالعربية: السقا، أباهر. 2023. ”الكهرباء في المجتمع الفلسطيني في قطاع غزة: ممارسات الحياة اليومية وآليات الجَلَد والمقاومة المجتمعية،“ في ”لوين بتروح الكهربا.“عدد خاص من العمران العربي (يونيو). ( مصدر مفتوح الوصول )

  1. Haddad, Toufic. 2018. “Insurgent Infrastructure: Tunnels of the Gaza Strip.” Middle East - Topics & Arguments 10 (June): 71–85. ( open-access link )
  2. Hammami, Rema. 2005. “On The Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economy of a Checkpoint.” Jerusalem Quarterly 22/23 (Winter/Autumn): 16-28. ( open-access link )
  3. Harb, Samir. 2025. “‘… They Can’t Occupy the Sun …’: Cementing Heterogeneous Energy Configurations as Disentanglement in Imagining a Palestinian Cement Factory.” Geoforum 159 (January): 104203. ( open-access link )
  4. Khalidi, Rashid, and Sherene Seikaly, eds. 2022. Journal of Palestine Studies 51 (4). Special issue on infrastructure, environment, and health in Palestine. ( open-access link )
  5. Plonski, Sharri. 2017. “The View From the Train—Interrogating the HaEmek Train Corridor.” Bulletin for the Council for British Research in the Levant 12 (1): 72–74. ( open-access link )
  6. منصور، جوني. 2008. الخط الحديدي الحجازي: تاريخ وتطور قطار درعا-حيفا. بيروت: مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية ( مصدر )
  7. Sa’di-Ibraheem, Yara, and Shira Wilkof. 2024. “Cabling and Un-cabling Palestine/Israel: Toward a Theory of Cumulative Infrastructural Injustice.” Political Geography 116 (December): 103242. ( open-access link ).
  8. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. 2019. Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press. ( WorldCat link )
  9. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. 2021. “Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4 (1): 28-42. ( link )
  10. Tawil-Souri, Helga. 2012. “Digital occupation: Gaza’s high-tech enclosure.” Journal of Palestine Studies 41(2): 27-43. ( open-access link )
  11. Tawil-Souri, Helga. 2017. “Checkpoint Time.” Qui Parle 26 (2): 383–422. ( open-access link )
  12. Who Profits. 2019. “Industrial Zones in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” ( open-access link ) 
  13. Ziadah, Rafeef, Christian Henderson, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Sharri Plonski, Charmaine Chua, Riya Al Sanah, and Elia El Khazen. 2025. “Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity.” Geopolitics June, 1–39.  ( open-access link )
  14. Masalmeh, Asmaa. 2024 “‘Coffins’ on Wheels: Israel Floods West Bank with ‘Totaled’ Cars.” Environment and Development Horizons, March 1, 2024. ( open-access link )

بالعربية:  مسالمة، أسماء. 2023. ”إسرائيل تغزو الضفة بـ ’توابيت‘ سيارة مشطوبة.“ أريج، ديسمبر 28، 2023. ( مصدر مفتوح الوصول )

Audiovisual Material

  1. Nayfeh,  Ameen, director. 2020. 200 meters. Odeh Films, 96 min.  ( link ).
  2. Andoni, Raed, director. 2017. Ghost Hunting. Palmyre Badinier, 94 min. ( link ).
  3. Jarrar, Khaled, director. 2012. Infiltrators. Sami Said and Mohanad Yaqubi, 94 min. ( link )
  4. شحادة، لمى. 2019. ”محاضرة حين يعطش الغرباء: الإدارة الصهيونية للمياه وتخريب طبيعة فلسطين.“ يناير، 2019. رابط يوتيوب :52:25. ( مصدر مفتوح الوصول )

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Image: postcard with a photograph titled “Sakieh at Der el-Belah” of a group of workers and soldiers surrounding the water-raiser near Gaza. The Widad Kawar Collection. the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.

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