Why is Palestine dirty? This is a question that offices of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and local municipalities in the West Bank have for the past several years been attempting to answer. Efforts to “green Palestine” have ensued. Funded by international donors, they claim to be introducing new ideas about civic responsibility, especially vis-a-vis spaces outside homes. They include anti-littering campaigns, regulation of household and business garbage disposal, textbook reforms, the production of posters and the distribution of dumpsters. Reforms have been far from monolithic in scope or logic, however, among other things because they originate in institutions whose diverse histories and mandates render their relationships to the publics they address very different. “Greening” programs have also been only unevenly and tentatively implemented. By their own standards their success has thus been partial at best. For this paper I draw on fieldwork in Jenin and Ramallah municipalities, where municipal and PA-sponsored anti-littering efforts and “environmental awareness” campaigns are ongoing. This is in part as a result of plans to construct (and in Jenin’s case the successful construction of) a regional sanitary landfill for each corresponding governorate. I juxtapose examination of these endeavors with observations from everyday moments in which pedestrians took leave of objects in public—or “littered”. I am as interested in the scalar imaginaries, expectations and valuations expressed in these different approaches to urban public space as I am In contemporary “publicness” itself. I aim first to characterize the experience of being governed as a resident of a municipality under partial PA jurisdiction. I explore the extent to which, following Foucault, we can read biopolitical or disciplinary logics into these reforms, as scholars writing about sanitation reforms in other colonial and post-colonial contexts have done. Second I propose that from an analysis of minute, fleeting and anonymous acts of discarding in public we gain a sense of how urban space is mapped and remapped on a daily basis through reordering of (and by) people and things. To what extent does framing practices around urban refuse as a form of “mapping” diverge from or intersect with Mary Douglas’ (1966) notion that dirt is a matter of spatial and cultural “order” and order alone? How do local Palestinian and international scientific debates over appropriate environmental policies for Palestine complicate the idea that dirt in Palestine is a mere matter of social order?