About a year ago I was watching a young Israeli physician examine an Eritrean boy at the Physicians for Human Rights clinic. The sat looking at the ground as his cousin explained that he wasn’t sleeping at night, often waking up sweating in terror. He said the boy was wetting the bed and that he couldn’t keep his food down. When he was asked to get up and walk to the examination table, he wrapped both his hands around his thin right thigh and lifted- left, lift, right, left, lift, right. Only 13, he was thin and weak because of his trek across the Sinai desert. Along the way he was kidnapped and held captive for three months by a Bedouin criminal organization where he was tortured, deprived of food and water and forced to wait as his family in Eritrea was extorted of thousands of dollars. That day in the clinic, wearing donated clothes that hung off his frame, was his second day in Tel Aviv.
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I first saw M.I.A.’s Bad Girls video (directed by Romain Gavras) a couple months ago, and have been stewing since then to try to figure out why, exactly, I am so fascinated with it.

Sure, on the surface, it is visually enrapturing and musically infectious. It also has deeper layers: it hints at another side to the Middle East, beyond our stereotypical, media-fed images of women in burqas who aren’t allowed to drive. The music video is steeped in sexually charged dancing, beautiful women, fast cars; it’s like The Fast & the Furious, Persian Gulf edition.

From M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" Video, 2012.

But aside from its sheer (and vast) entertainment value, why I am so enamored with this piece of pop culture? I finally figured it out: Bad Girls reflects my own relationship, as I imagine it, with the Middle East. A windy desert, fast cars, beautiful women, a carefree rockstar attitude that is surprisingly applicable across the region combined with a laissez-faire attitude towards money (assuming one has it), a whirlwind of adventuresomeness and an unmatched esprit de corps. Gavras captures this vibe and my fantastical memories perfectly, and makes me want to party like it’s Saudi.

When I watch it, I am reminded of nights partying at clubs in Amman, learning to belly dance from Arab women, both strangers and friends, outdoor neighborhood weddings with raucous music and highly charged and energetic dancing, bonfires on the beach with guitars and ritualized dances around fires in the middle of the desert, midnights on the Sinai with hashish and Stella, driving for hours across the Jordanian desert on a whim and starry nights filled with hookah smoke. Bad Girls captures the passion for aesthetics, for art and music, for glamour and image, for passion itself.

What Bad Girls show us is that the Middle East is, for all its problems and in a bizarre twist of fate, a place of absolute freedom; where devastatingly beautiful women can dance on hoods of cars and men can drag race through the desert in souped up European sports cars, at least metaphorically.

This is how I do, and how I want, to remember the Middle East. Go for the seduction, stay for the beauty, come back for that piece of yourself you left somewhere on the side of the road. Though we might read it as Orientalism, the Bad Girls video embodies at an erotic, mysterious, seductive truth about my Middle East. We can drape these truths in accusations of conservativeness, backwardness, primitiveness, or whatever is designated for “the Orient,” but as in Bad Girls, the Middle East I know is beautiful and irresistible. The video and my Middle East are an embodiment of everything prohibited by our own puritanical fears of the unknown, of desire, and of temptation. This is, I believe, fundamentally what Bad Girls is all about: it challenges us to find the freedom and the perfection in such an unfamiliar place.

A comment on this blog recently suggested we discuss water issues: a loaded topic, to be sure. But I had been wanting to do a photo essay for some time, and this presented a wonderful opportunity.

So much of the Middle East’s regional identity, at least as an outsider, seems to be crafted or defined by the lack of water in its vast deserts. In media, pop culture, and history lessons, we hear far more about the significance of the desert than anything else. But all that the desert is for the Middle East, water is just as powerful of a socio-political and historical force.

I recall an evening in a popular café in downtown Amman—a city filled with Palestinian refugees and the children of Palestinian refugees and their children—when a group of elderly musicians struck up a set list of traditional Palestinian folk songs and ballads (for lack of a better description). They recalled a life next to the water, a life of fishing, exploration, and freedom. It was a life most of the audience had never known. The entire room was in or close to tears: not just for the turbulent national history it recalled, though that was certainly part of it, but also in mourning for the lost traditions of a life alongside the water.

As much as identity in the Middle East is defined by aridity, harshness, and desertification, as much as the harsh natural climate reflects the turbulent political climate, there is a distinct cultural calmness that reflects a deep abiding connection to water. Water everywhere exists just outside the conventional space-time continuum: water, at least in the Middle East, suggests promises of a better future, and it teases us with a better alternate reality.

People’s relationships with the water, and its role in crafting individual identities, is as varied as the presence of the scarce resource itself. Water is sustenance, a requirement of life, but it is also revenue and recreation. From surfing in Haifa to scuba-diving and snorkeling on the Sinai Peninsula, from both sides of the Jordan river to the Yarmouk River to the ever-dwindling Red Sea, the Tigris and Euphrates and the Nile delta, from sustenance to escapism, the Middle East is as much a story of water as it is of deserts.

Human interaction with water in the Middle East is not unique: around the world it is sustaining and recreational at the same time. But in the Middle East, its promise of freedom and the future, its potential as an escape from the everyday, makes it perhaps a perfect identity for the Middle East.

(Photography: Audrey Farber, unless otherwise noted.)

A couple weeks ago, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior released a series of advertisements and billboards in American communities with large Israeli ex-pat populations. The ads touted taglines that included, “You will always be Israeli, but your children won’t.” Or “Before “aba” becomes Daddy, bring him back.” One ad portrays an American-Jewish man, with an Israeli woman coming home together. When they walk in to their apartment candles are lit but she seems sad and solemn. Her boyfriend/husband mistakenly thinks that she is setting the mood for a romantic night in, when in reality she is commemorating Israel’s memorial day. “They will always be Israeli, but their (foreign) partners won’t understand. Help to bring them back,” says the deep, voice over.
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The issue of the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab desert of Israel is one that I’ve written a lot about, and one that <a href="htt

p://midthoughtblog.com/answer/”>dates

back to Ottoman times. Recent developments have pushed the situation to the brink, with the Israeli government’s passage of a plan to forcibly urbanize some 30-40,000 Bedouin citizens. The plan will force them off of their ancestral lands (or lands to which the Israeli army forcibly moved them in 1952) and into overcrowded towns with no jobs or infrastructure or pastural land.

The Bedouin have been fighting in the courts for their land rights for decades, with minimum progress and maximum frustration. In the last several years, the government has increased the pace of home demolitions, in some case razing entire villages to the ground.

But today, finally, some good news. A judge in southern Israel ruled Continue reading →

Cross-posted from www.heartsleevesblog.com, where I write about sustainable fashion.

Our Harvest be gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted…”                               ~Edward Winslow, Plymouth, 1621

That’s all very well and good, but we all know how it ended for the Indians.  So I’d like to dedicate this Black Friday post to

indigenous peoples everywhere. Continue reading →

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