This presentation examined the crisis of waste management in Arab localities in the Galilee to explore broader processes of mafia formation in Israel. Drawing on three detailed case studies, it showed how privatization, regulatory failure, and regional clustering reforms created fertile ground for the entrenchment of organized crime within municipal services. Waste collection contracts, tied to monopolized landfills and inflated prices, became key arenas for extortion, political manipulation, and violent enforcement. Criminal organizations operated not outside the system but through it, exploiting subcontracting structures and the absence of effective state protection. Local municipalities, often impoverished and underfunded, found themselves caught between predatory contractors and indifferent state agencies. Rather than a simple collapse of governance, the crisis revealed the emergence of complex colonial power relations, where state actors, crime organizations, and municipal authorities became entangled in a violent economy of protection, intimidation, and dependency. The presentation thus challenged conventional notions of state absence, instead portraying the state as fragmented, complicit, and relationally embedded in new forms of coercive governance.
Photo credit: אזרחים למען אוויר נקי