Drawing on fieldwork in Palestine between 2007 and 2016, and in particular on time I spent with Palestinian municipal engineers working to build sewage networks and treatment plants for the would-be Palestinian state, this paper begins by considering two things: One, that Israeli government officials weaponize Palestinians’ sewage flows, turning them into evidentiary tools for justifying collective harassment and continued Israeli control over Palestinian life. And two, that they focus on what they called Palestinians’ “failure to build” sewage infrastructures. I make three arguments: First, that we can think of “the failure to build” as its own thick, disorienting and molasses-like condition, one that constitutes a temporality all its own. I propose this as a contribution to the anthropology of infrastructure more broadly, especially as infrastructural failure has become synonym and metonym for supposedly failed or failing states and postcolonies. Second, I argue that a failure-to-build temporality is structured by nonsovereignty imposed, for example, by settler colonialism or war. But this temporality takes on its specific moral valence from the specific form that environmental politics takes at the turn of the twenty-first century. This I propose as an engagement with growing efforts in the social sciences and humanities to name the effects of growing concern for the environment, for the planet’s ecological connectedness and propensity to change. And third, I argue that Palestinian engineers tasked to be custodians of Palestinian sewage infrastructures inhabit a temporality that both undermines and is shaped by the dominant, and disorienting, Israeli framing of a “failure to build.” This point lies at the intersection of work that investigates the temporal features of waste and its management, on the one hand, and work that explores the temporal experiences of Palestinians and others living without sovereignty, on the other hand.