Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation by Fredrik Meiton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation by Fredrik Meiton Xiaoyue Li (bio) Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation By Fredrik Meiton. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. 312. Whereas Thomas Hughes's seminal Networks of Power (1983) sets the tone for studying electricity in Western societies, Electrical Palestine offers new insight into this infrastructure in a non-Western and colonial context. Fredrik Meiton excellently demonstrates that the physical materials for electrification both embodied and enacted modern political power. Meiton thus pushes STS scholarship to rethink the critical role of infrastructure in ethnic conflict and nation-building. Although electricity networks were not the only infrastructure under-girding Israel, Electrical Palestine eloquently convinces readers that electricity was the foundational technology in two major ways. Meiton persuasively argues that electricity contributed significantly to the Jewish sector's rapid industrialization and exponential economic growth in the interwar period, while the Arab sector, unlit due to deliberate electric grid arrangements that bypassed it, remained unindustrialized and underdeveloped (p. 5). In addition, electrification functioned as an integral substrate for other heterogeneous infrastructure systems, such as electrified railways and Jewish settlements (p. 62, 71). Therefore, electrification was the infrastructure of all infrastructures and substrate of the modern Jewish economy and political power. In what is his major contribution to technology studies—also constituting his central arguments—Meiton positions his delicate and powerful explanation of the electricity infrastructure as a trinity of material technology, capital, and politics. He vigorously highlights Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg's state-building agenda embedded within the apolitical and developmentalist languages of his technical proposals, strategies that Meiton [End Page 563] calls "politics of the non-politics" (p. 89, chs. 1–4). By skillfully using British and Zionist archives, as well as electricity company records, Electrical Palestine highlights how the material infrastructure of power plants and electric grids concretized and inscribed the Zionist movement's ideal nation-building ambitions. It thus reveals from a material perspective the founding myth of modern Israel. In the classic STS literature by Bruno Latour, Susan Leigh Star, and James Griesemer, "boundary work" seeks mutually recognizable objects, standards, or rules, laying the foundation for scientific collaboration (Star and Griesemer, Social Studies of Science, 1989; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005). Meiton showcases that "boundary work," in a colonial context, can be at once inclusive and exclusive. Rutenberg's apolitical and developmentalist outlook enabled him to forge an alliance with British officials, European capital, and Jewish settlers. In contrast with this inclusiveness, the next set of chapters demonstrate that Rutenberg excluded the Arab population in Palestine from enjoying equal access to electricity, resulting in widespread disillusionment among Arab communities and the subsequent mass revolt between 1936 and 1939 (chs. 5–7). Through the lens of Rutenberg's boundary work, the author diagnoses a root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict from an infrastructural perspective. Unlike an earlier monograph on this topic—Ronen Shamir's Current Flow (2013)—Electrical Palestine includes "Palestinian perspectives on electrification" (p. 10). Of note, the asymmetrical structure of political power is also fully reflected in the historical sources. Hebrew, English, and other European-language materials produced in Britain and Israel are used far more frequently in Shamir's work. In this respect, Meiton's meticulously researched project impressively excavates the Arabic municipal archives in Nablus, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Haifa, revealing new perspectives of Palestinian elites that Shamir does not access. These uncovered Arabic sources shed light on the Palestinian elites' aborted attempts to restructure Zionist infrastructure. The municipalities of Jaffa, for instance, never opposed Rutenberg's electrification plan, and even sought to invest in and operate local electric grids (p. 97). Future research could adopt a non-elite perspective, investigating if historians can view illicit acts such as sabotage and electricity theft as "political leverage" of Palestinian nationalist leaders or as spontaneous, grassroots activities countering unfavorable conditions (p. 82, 93). In the Jewish and Arab communities' increasingly heroic nationalist narratives, how can histories account for the everyday experiences of non-elites, the segment who suffer directly from ever-rigid ethno-religious segregation and opposition? Anthropologist Nikhil Anand argues that the "banality of infrastructure" often makes people ignore...