Making All Deserts Bloom

The Racist Space/Time of UAE-Israel Collaboration

Bibliographic Data

ID3948102
AuthorsMaia Holtermann Entwistle (Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author), Sharri Plonski (0000-0002-2550-1085, Queen Mary University of London)
Year2025
Volume30
Issue2
Pages859-894
Publication date2025-03-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2024.2398241
OpenAlexW4402931736
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited61

Since the normalisation of political relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, the so-called ‘desert tech’ industry has emerged as a key area of economic collaboration. Desert tech combines technological innovation with speculation and entrepreneurialism, claiming to offer lucrative yet sustainable solutions to the specific dangers of climate change in arid environments. By weaving together their respective climate and security expertise and technologies, political visions, and investment capital, Israel and the UAE promise to save arid states the world over from ecological catastrophe – making themselves and their political and territorial projects indispensable in the process. In this paper, we unravel their promethean vision of making ‘all deserts bloom’. We first situate this vision in the desert’s tangible histories of colonial environmentalism, retracing the inextricable relationship of climate science to the violent expropriation, securitisation and transformation of Indigenous life and land by white, European settlers. We then follow contemporary UAE-Israel desert-tech collaboration across the geographically expansive and historically layered sites and forms of violence that facilitate, circulate, and secure this industry’s vision of the future. In so doing, we argue that normalisation is underwritten by a racialised temporality – one that constructs desert landscapes as eternally on the threshold of climate catastrophe, erasing the deep, historical relationships of Palestinians, Bedouin and other racialised subjects to arid environments

Bloom · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Geology · Oceanography

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