Precarious Bureaucratic Waiting and the Measurement of Delay at the East Jerusalem Ministry of Interior

Abstract When Palestinian Jerusalemites refer to “the ministry” (al-dakhliya), they also refer to the sense of weightiness, lost time, frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety that accumulate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz. Multiple pressures and limited access produce tedious and outright cruel conditions for Palestinians visiting the institution. This essay attends to the affective associations and meanings the institution represents to Palestinians in Jerusalem by drawing on the author’s own experiences there and while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including conversations and interviews with interlocutors, journalistic reporting, fiction writing, and an examination of Google reviews of the ministry. It attempts to appreciate how the experience of delay at the ministry is configured as a tool of punishment within the context of ongoing Israeli settler colonialization.