Cabling and un-cabling Palestine/Israel: Toward a theory of cumulative infrastructural injustice

Abstract

Although urban infrastructure is designed to last for many decades and is characterized by its extensive lifecycle, it is typically studied through specific events or effects occurring within a narrow timeframe. What this restricted temporal perspective fails to capture is the enduring patterns through which infrastructural injustice, discrimination and exclusion build over time. To address this lacuna, recent studies, especially those focusing on colonial settings, have adopted a longitudinal perspective. In this article, however, we push the longitudinal perspective further, arguing that more than merely unveiling resemblances, reemergences, or continuities in power relations, it also allows us to (1) reveal the interconnections between different forms of infrastructural injustice across successive regimes and (2) understand the cumulative impact of these inequalities over time. Thus, we propose the concept of ‘cumulative infrastructural injustice’ to enable us both to identify diverse forms and mechanisms of infrastructural injustice that, in the aggregate, result in the continuity of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and racial hierarchies within various regimes and contexts, especially in colonial contexts; and to assess their cumulative impact. To develop this understanding, we focus on the establishment of the physical telecommunications infrastructure in Palestine/Israel, from the British colonial period to contemporary Israel's (infra)structural discrimination against its Palestinian citizens. Drawing on multilingual archival records and media from various periods, we analyze the changing modes of infrastructural inequalities that developed over time by means of what we term strategies of ‘skipping,’ ‘un-cabling,’ and ‘selective (re)cabling’ in the telecommunication system. The ‘cumulative infrastructural injustice’ lens reminds us not only to adopt a long-term view of infrastructural development but also to trace its opposite expressions—sustained lack, obstacles, erasure, willful neglect, and de-prioritization—and uncover the different mechanisms underpinning these strategies.