Creating Community in the Desert: Part I

It has been called "the world's most successful commune movement." When settlers came in the early 1900s to form collective farming communities, many dreams rose from the soil of Palestine. The kibbutz movement was an agrarian dream, where people would be made spiritual and healthy by tilling the holy soil: the religion of labor. It was a socialist dream-- "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"-- a non-materialist dream where goods would be shared, where child-raising would be shared. It was part of a national dream: the Zionist dream of building a new nation which would be the homeland for the Jews.

Today, there are about 270 kibbutzim with roughly 120,000 people living on them. But most kibbutzim look quite different from the early utopian experiments. Along with the social and ideological challenges that face any endeavor rooted in utopian though, the challenges have been economic: subsidized by the government until inflation in the 1980s, many kibbutzim went bankrupt. The government gave a $17 billion bailout, which soured the general public's opinion on the kibbutzim. Now, over 2/3 of the 273 kibbutzim have privatized: people eat at home, rather than in the collective dining hall. Wages are no longer distributed equally: there are schemes where people receive different incomes. While the nobility of tilling the soil helped form the early kibbutzim, many are no longer involved in agriculture. Tourist hotels, factories, and high-tech companies have sprung up to support the kibbutzim: the oldest kibbutz, Degania, now manufactures diamond-cutting tools. Some kibbutzim simply run large dairy operations, others even manufacture arms. Dealing innovatively and adeptly with changing times is a matter of survival for the communities, of course: yet much is sacrificed.

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Is building revolutionary communities in the desert a good idea?

Look at this environment.

People are not meant to settle here. The Bedouins wander here, of course -- you can still find a dark tent between the rocks, now and then; the Bedouins have been moving between these rocks for centuries with their goats. (Now, in Israel, many of them have been put in settlements. Beneath the power lines outside of Be'er Sheba, for example, witness the corrugated tin shacks coating the hills, coated with dust. It reminds one of the U.S. reservations with Natives, of any third-world shantytown. "Where are you from?" a dark man outside the kibbutz hall asks me. "America! I want to go there." He brightens. "But I have no passport. I am Bedouin." The plight of the stateless, left behind by modernity, their way of life exterminated... He runs camel tours for tourists, now, the few that come his way... I digress.)

&nsbp;

The land has a veritable sense of being exhausted, like one finds in Spain or Greece, but more so. Scarcely a shrub can grow: even the most hardy plants no longer sprout, because the water table has dropped too low. To survive here, a settlement needs support and resources from a larger state: a state which has economic or ideological interests in settling the desert.

Despite all this, people are surviving and communities are thriving in this desert, with efforts towards sustainability. Kibbutz Lotan is one such place. They are connected to the grid, but are investigating ways not to be. They are building with sustainable materials, composting, and running an education program where people from around the world learn about green building and organic gardening.

What do these places actually look like? From the road, they look like spots of green, ringed with barbed wire; gated communities along the highway that leads to the border crossings of Aqaba, Jordan, and Taba, Egypt... From the inside, they look like places people create things in. They are filled with children who play on the grass and in the pool, with a cafeteria-like dining hall where people eat crisp lettuce salads on benches, with crates of just-harvested dates. Migratory birds gather thickly here and sing in the trees; crickets; tourists. The sound of the desert highway: noise to break the isolation of the blessedly long, warm night.

Architecture. At Lotan, they are experimenting with building with mud and recycled tires. Witness the fantasyland where the children play; the solar oven where things can slowly bake under the intense desert sun...

 

 

At the airport I discussed with the authorities where I had been in Israel: names, places, dates. At their request I showed them the pictures on my digital camera: "This is the 'Think Globally Act Locally' ecological slogan ... This is the solar oven" etc., no exaggeration... at their request I took of my bra, my pants, to prove my bomblessness. I thought about the exhaustion of the desert, about how the land felt exhausted; wondered if the people would simply get exhausted of this. If peace could come from exhaustion; if people would simply decide they were tired of seeing their children blown up by suicide bombers or military attacks. It is perhaps the wondering of a naive girl from Maryland who does not understand how the rhythms of life in the Middle East really are: granted. I don't know how anyone really lives in Israel, though I now know how it feels to be waved over with a flashlight at a random checkpoint near Jenin, where the military is making sure there are no unauthorized Palestinians in your vehicle... I have seen the manicured nails of the 18-year-old soldier with the rifle slung over her shoulder. It is my simple hope that in Annapolis next month, the officials will feel the exhaustion of the people, and combine it with their own energy to find an agreement.

Then, I lifted off and went to a place where no Israeli can go, since their state is not recognized there: this I will write about next.

November 2007

Building Community in the Desert, part II

SOARING.

The desert sky we sink through is not clarion blue: it is leaden, dust-heavy.

After hours of the red desert of the Arabian Peninusla, rows of California-esque houses suddenly appear in the sand, gated compact McMansions with dust blowing between them.

"Happiness Is Our Goal", proclaims a flashy banner in the Dubai International Airport.

WALKING.

I set out on foot into the humid morning. I wanted to walk until I reached the Persian Gulf, walk the shiny new black streets lined with shiny new black Explorers. The surroundings seemed to absorb all sound. Everything wore a fine trace of dust, new-dust on new streets. Behind the white gates of all the homes, date palms bared their tousled heads. The roofs of the mansions were flat. Nobody walked these streets, except for the figure of a distant Indian or Pakistani construction laborer in a purple jumpsuit. I must have seen three or four of them on this walk, always in the distance. Identical, the purple jumpsuits looked like jail uniforms.

Sensing the presence of the sea nearby, I pushed through the plywood maze of some condos-under-construction to burst out upon a strip of sand. The beach was being constructed before me. The bulldozers on the horizon moved around like mysterious ants, pushing the sand this way and that for no apparent purpose. It was empty, save for the machines. I started walking along the powdery sand. Occasionally, a black Lexus with tinted windows would creep past, stop, and turn around, retracing its tire tracks in the sand.

Finally, I came to a fence. There was a blonde woman in a swimsuit and sunglasses, and two children, settled alone in the sand. The children were making sand castles; I heard their British accents constructing the castles. The three of them were the public beach. I kept walking, dripping in sweat from the 38C heat, beginning to despair of finding water. There was no place with access, no place of water, simply these long walls with villas behind them. I should have asked the British woman if she had any water to spare, but she was somehow inaccessible too. Never had an urban landscape seemed so remote, so inhospitable. Just as I was beginning to slip into dizziness, I saw something looming on a corner: a KFC, randomly dropped amidst the walls and houses. It had what I presume to be Kentucky Fried Chicken written in neon-red-white-and-blue-Arabic. Waves of heat rose from the empty, gleaming parking lot. I entered and became the only customer in the building, accepting a bottle of water gratefully from the lone girl behind the counter. Rescued, I slumped into a plastic chair in the air-conditioned restaurant and wondered where I was.

 

The car salesman an import straight from the US...
though his billboards are broadcasted from the mosque's parking lot.

 

In Dubai one is filled with the sense that this is the USA, but the USA gone past America... that what we are faced with is not "America" but some thing that grew up there, and is now growing here, wherever there are people to be used... it will grow wherever it can, wherever is lucrative. America is too poor now to be of much use to this growing force and its hunger, America is tapped out, or going to be -- the subprime crisis increasing the visibility of the poverty and debt that lies there -- the vacant, dilapidated American landscape betraying the sense of emptiness, loss.

And yet Dubai is making the Great Mistake, the mistake that the United States made.
The idea that bigger is better. That luxury is to be found in towers. That one can create a world from dust and audacity and dirhams or dollars.

Dubai has no center. There is no place to walk, no human-accessible landscape. There are just clusters of towers. Sheikh Zayed Road is Main Street USA on steroids, a multi-lane road with skyscrapers lining it. A parody of Main Street USA. The caption on the postcard I have of this road: "Unrelentingly futuristic."

HISTORY.

Nobody really lived here, before: there were Bedouins, there were pearl divers. Throughout the 1800s, Dubai and its creek existed as a pearl trading hub.
In 1969, Dubai had 59,000 people.
At the beginning of the 1990s, there were 555,000.
In 2007, the population tops 1.5 million.

Notable: In 2006, Dubai had 1,073,000 males and 349,000 females.

As of 1998, 17% of the population of the emirate was made up of UAE nationals. Approximately 85% of the expatriate population (and 71% of the emirate's total population) was Asian, chiefly Indian (51%), Pakistani (16%), Bangladeshi (9%) and Filipino (3%). (Wikipedia)

This is a city that exploded onto the desert in the past 50 years. Does it have a tension with its history... or a tension with the absence thereof? For the most part, it is content to have no past; its eyes are fixed on a future. It has a "Historical Buildings Section," though the buildings here look fabulously new, whitewashed, and vacant. The oldest building dates to 1799-- a squat square fort-- though it looks quite new, like part of a movie set. One suspects the buildings were fabricated for tourists just to give Dubai a history, because tourists are hungry for this: history fabricated to satisfy the appetite for the lost land ago.

The abra driver, his wooden ferryboat crowned with an advertisment for the telecom monopoly, ferrying across the ancient creek towards the Rolex skyscrapers, towards the future...

THE PRESENT.

Presently, one could contend:
-- Dubai is a simulacrum.
-- Dubai is a "fantasy project" that produces "speculative mania."
-- Dubai is a portal to war.

"Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems . . . If Rome was the ‘Eternal City’ and New York’s Manhattan the apotheosis of twentieth-century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea." -- George Katodrytis, quoted by Mike Davis in the New Left Review

When the outside is uninhabitable, you begin to live inside.

Witness this indoor Tunisian court in the Ibn Battuta mall; the indoor ski slope in the Mall of the Emirates...

The second of the islands slated for construction, the Palm Jebel-Ali will feature boardwalks spelling out the Sheikh's poem in Arabic:

Take wisdom from the wise
It takes a man of vision to write on water
Not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey
Great men rise to greater challenges

The third of these islands, the Palm Deira, is supposed to house 1 million people.

Then you have The World, another of the Sheikh's fantasy-projects, which is a 300-island archipelago with different islands representing the whole world (though not Israel). But to walk upon the vacant Palm Jumeirah island raises the question of specualtion, though... who's buying? It seems that, like in many real estate markets across the globe, the structures in this place are built upon wild speculation that someone would actually desire this.

Simulation, fantasy, portal to war. Dubai is the launch point for military contractors going to Baghdad and Kabul. "Every morning, from dawn till about noon, cargo and passenger flights to Iraq and Afghanistan make Dubai airport’s Terminal Two possibly the busiest commercial terminal in the world for the "global war of terrorism." Conveniently located between the two countries, Dubai is the ideal hub for military contractors and a lucrative link in the commercial supply chain of goods and people between Afghanistan or Iraq and the rest of the world." ("Dubai Does Brisk War Business".)

War, simulation, unihabitable outdoors, blasted environment, okay, are you awed, are you convinced by these claims, are you convinced this science-fiction future is the future:

"Dubai faces the future with confidence, in the strength of a modern infrastructure, combined with excellent trade and an international financial reputation." (Dubai Museum).

Yes, Dubai is a near-future; the future appears to be unflowering before one's eyes, standing on the sand of Dubai and watching the cranes on the horizon, the buildings building themselves.

But to believe this is the future requires one to ignore many things.

Consider, first of all, the reality of the desert. It should be evident that people aren't meant to live here in great numbers. Does the world have the energy it takes to run the air conditioners, desalination plants, SUV-clogged arterials of Dubai? The artificial islands are supposedly built with global-warming sea level rise in mind, but some sources say the islands are poorly-built and already sinking.

For something to be the future, a sense of permanence is required... Civilization implies "a sense of permanence," or at least an illusion of permanence.

Dubai does not have this. It has speculative mania, the nervous wild energy of cashing in.

I would even contend that the rapid rise of of Dubai is a symptom of a vaster shift; a symptom of a global system that is preparing to give way to something else. Consider this description of the breakdown of the Mayan empire:

"Militarism takes hold, old alliances break down, dynasties become unstable, the ruling class exalts itself with extravagant building projects. Tikal was buit up over 1500 years, but all the high towers that still watch over the forest went up in the city's final century, costly blooms on the eve of collapse." (Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress)

Standing in the center of the costly blooms, the half-erected towers, it seems impossible to see Dubai as being inhabited. It seems like it can only exist in a state of becoming; that nobody truly desires to inhabit it. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Dubai is here to stay. But watching the cranes shift, it doesn't feel like something that is being built to last, that can last. Yes, it's someone's future, it's a future. But it's a future based on a provincial, unimaginative vision.

Provincial? Yes, provinicial in the sense of "a person of local or restricted interests or outlook". If Dubai was built with intelligence, it would have a public transit system by now; it would not be planned around the automobile; it would have a grander, sustainable vision in mind. But Dubai, like America, is built from a twentieth-century model of what the future might look like. Main Street USA supersized with skyscrapers is not visionary or great: it is incomprehensibly stupid. To embark on erecting the planet's tallest tower is such a conventional, ancient wish-- it springs from a restricted imagination.

Dubai is like the little brother that's exhilirated that he can finally outdo America: excited that he can win the race, though the final destination is a dead-end; exuberant that he can build the biggest sand castle, not yet aware that the tide will wash it away.

It's bewildering, really. If Dubai was a person, I would ask: don't you realise you can't live this way in a desert? That even with the oil reserves and resources of the Gulf, this is no way to live?

It would be touchingly human and sad, if it wasn't irresponsible to have this much power and wealth and use it this way. The ruling family of Dubai could have built anything with their money and power; they could have built an ingenious environmental city, with justice and grace and beauty and art, whatever. They could have celebrated and extended the achievements of the Arabic civilization, honoring their legacy of exquisite architecture, art, poetry; they could have used their resources and technology to create a way to live with the desert instead of sucking incredible amounts of energy to defy it. Instead, they picked the very worst of American culture to model their city after. To have this potential at the dawn of this precarious century, and not use it-- but instead create some high-consumption concrete auto-driven simulacrum-- is an avoidance of moral responsibility. I am wary of bringing morality into the discussion, but it is a part of the vocabulary of public dialogue already, so let's re-examine morality. Do our rulers and developers (in the case of Dubai, they are the same) not have a moral responsibility to create an environment that will be liveable for us and our children?

Speaking of morality: What is Dubai built on?

The workers from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Armenia are here for the Dubai dream. It's not so glamourous or naive as the American dream. In Dubai, you work for an agency, you sleep in a labor camp, you make some money to take home. Maybe you can make $5 a day, send home home $150 a month. This for constructing towers in a place where the temperature is normally over 38C. It is illegal to go on strike here....It is also one of the worst common destinations in the world for the trafficking of women.

One thing people praise Dubai for is being multicultural, a place where the whole world lives in harmony.
Sure, its multicultural as far as race and religion go, from one angle.
There's no apparent "clash of civilizations" here. You can have a prayer room in the mall. No problem.

Of course, there are tiny differences. Speeding is not just illegal, but a sin; a religious leader in a mosque explains to a group of British tourists that the reason Muslim men can have four wives is because there are an uneven number of men and women on the planet. But all these differences in outlook seem to be accepted; remarkably, they lead to head-shrugs and suppressed giggles rather than an angry clash of civilizations. We can all walk as one under capitalism...
if we are rich. It's the socioeconomic lines that form the fractures here; it's the socioeconomic lines that split the worlds. (Of course, it was ethnicity that formed most of the socioeconomic castes to begin with).

Are the workers allowed to walk here, in the mall, the mall which they built? I don't see them, and it seems not: the security guard interviewed in this Dubai documentary reports that the are not.

The two worlds in Dubai, the castes, seem to be delimited very clearly. The other world was so invisible, I could scarcely glimpse it during my brief visit. I felt the shadows of it moving, but in a human-contrived environment like Dubai, the worlds don't have much chance to mingle. You can easily live in your villa and drive in your Hummer to the bars and shopping centers of your caste, and not even experience the other world, the world of the construction sites, the prostitutes from former Soviet states, the labor camps.

Writer Mike Davis suggests that Westerners come to Dubai because "Dubai is an expert at catering to colonial nostalgia." There is definitely a sense of that, of those colonial divisions, still living here... although even the Westerners aren't the top caste here. This is finally not their colony, nor completely their realm, despite their familiar name-brand shops and freedom to roam.

JUSTICE.

"On the outside Dubai is beautiful, but on the inside it's still the third world. It's a dictatorship with a softer touch."

-- "French youth's case takes on Dubai justice", International Herald Tribune, 1 Nov. 2007.

from the article:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 31 — Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai's luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai's status as the Arab world's paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

"They tried to smother this story," Alex said by phone from Switzerland, where he fled a month into his 10th-grade school year, fearing a jail term in Dubai if charged with homosexual activity. "Dubai, they say we build the highest towers, they have the best hotels. But all the news, they hide it. They don't want the world to know that Dubai still lives in the Middle Ages." article continues here...

CENSORSHIP.

Who governs Dubai? Dubai has a ruler, the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also Vice-President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. (There are 7 Emirates, of which Dubai is one). To be honest, I don't understand exactly how it all works: it seems to be government by family-corporation. If you understand it and can explain it to me, please do.

"'People refer to our crown prince as the chief executive officer of Dubai. It's because, genuinely, he runs government as a private business for the sake of the private sector, not for the sake of the state', says Saeed al-Muntafiq, head of the Dubai Development and Investment Authority. Moreover, if the country is a single business, as al-Maktoum maintains, then 'representative government' is besides the point: after all, General Electric and Exxon are not democracies and no one- except for raving socialists- expects either to be so.

The state, accordingly, is almost indistinguishable from private enterprise. Dubai's top managers—all commoners, hired meritocratically—simultaneously hold strategic government portfolios and manage a major Maktoum-controlled real-estate development company. 'Government', indeed, is really an equities management team led by three top players who compete with one another to earn the highest returns for al-Maktoum." -- Mike Davis

Dubai seems to be a smooth, silent machine where nothing bad ever happens. I was suprised, when reading the paper over breakfast, that nothing disturbing had happened. Then I remembered that the press is censored here, though there is much more freedom of the press here than in neighborhing countries. It didn't really hit me what this meant until I was trying to research Dubai from Dubai, and came across this message when trying to visit the site of a film-maker who made a documentary critiquing the labor situation in Dubai: "This site is blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates." As a BBC article notes, "It is not clear how the monopoly internet provider, Etisilat, determines what contravenes the country's values. There is a right of reply on any blocked site message though, allowing surfers to suggest it be made accessible."

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POETRY.

THE BEACH UNDER CONSTRUCTION BY NIGHT. There are a few people sitting around a fire in the distance, which warms me. The cranes are silent black forms against the pinkpurple sky; the black waves roll gently into the powdery sand. I slip into the warm water: and when I clap my hands, the water sparkles. This beach at the Persian Gulf is bioluminescent, its tiny subtle shimmerings speaking their quiet power against up the steady glow of the skyscrapers, speaking for stars in absentia.

AN ABANDONED BEACH NEAR A LABOR CAMP. The water is turquoise; there are clothes drying behind the tents and shacks. There is a fisherman out on a rocky jetty, slowly casting and reeling. A small boy with his father, flying a Spiderman kite, playing in the breeze. An Indian man alone, hands in his pockets, gazing out towards the ocean.

A black BMW cruises up; a girl in the head-to-toe black abbaya steps out. She is carrying a paper sack from McDonalds. Two more girls step out, and then they unwrap their headscarves and tie up the bottoms of their black robes, moving freely in their jeans underneath. As they step onto the beach for their picnic, they are laughing, their black hair blowing in the wind.

Human life does happen here, poetry does happen here, in the spaces between the simulacra, in the midst of one of our time's most surreal hyperfuturistic cities. Human life happens always-- you can't keep it down--

eating a Lebanese sweet at 3am in DXB I am watching the woman at the table beside me. Her face is veiled. A glittering gold dollar sign is studded into her black headscarf...

i spoon pistachio cream into my mouth, i am finishing my travels and i see how all the humanity is the same, caught in this whole big thing which we don't understand, this whole thing which we're not driving, lost in our fog of human hopes & sorrows, confused in our webs of personal dreams and desires, together moving towards something that simultaneously we don't expect-- and something that we know in our bones to be coming--

FRA -> IAD 1 Dec 2007