Drawing on extensive ethnographic field-work in East Jerusalem, this paper tracks the rapid Jewish territorialization of the Wadi Rababa neighborhood in Silwan—a valley considered ‘untouched’ by modern development and the figurative backyard of the city, serving in different historical moments as landfill, burial site, and dumping grounds. In 2020 Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority (NPA) deemed the privately owned Palestinian olive groves at Wadi Rababa as an unkempt part of the Old City Walls National Park, prompting the Jerusalem municipality to issue “gardening decrees” in order to make the private lands useable for the public. The NPA turned control of the project to “revive” the barren landscape to the private settler organization Elad, who set out to “rejuvenate” the valley by building an ecologically focused educational park teaching biblical agricultural techniques. Over the past two years and under the auspice of conservation and environmentalism Elad has seized more and more land, and radically changed the visual and demographic makeshift of Wadi Rababa’s landscape. This paper argues that the century-long desire to “make the desert bloom” continues to mask colonial processes of elimination (Wolfe 2016), currently performed through an ecologically moralizing discourse that disavows Palestinian ways of life, relationship to land, and sovereignty. Indeed, notions of cleanliness and purity of landscape have long been mobilized by colonial powers to re-imagine Palestine as an uninhabited “wasteland,” absent of culture and peoples—an emptiness that justified settlement and denied sovereignty to a racialized colonial Other (Benvenisti 2000; Stein 2009; Long 2009; Baumann and Massalha 2021; Makdisi 2022; Kaminer 2022). More recently, Anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has suggested that the colonial logic of wasteland has been flipped. Since the Oslo accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, material waste has been used by Israel to lay siege to the everyday lives of Palestinians, who are inundated with Israeli trash, coerced to buy disposable cheap goods, and cut from the resources needed to manage their own waste (Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2020). Thus, it is the excess of waste and toxicity that are mobilized as evidence of mismanagement and the indigenous peoples’ inaptitude for self-governance (Baumann and Massalha 2021). This paper thus expands the notion of “waste siege” to demonstrate that the denial of sovereignty based on notions of an environmental discourse in the settler-colonial context is predicated on racial categories that are coded through a moralizing discourse of cleanliness and purity of the land.