50 Middle East & Africa The Economist June 11th 2022
Russia in 2015, from which America with
drew in 2018 under President Donald
Trump. Though President Joe Biden says he
wants to revive that deal, talks with Iran
have not yet yielded a formula for doing so.
Mr Bennett argues that Iran’s economy is
in such dire need of relief from sanctions
that if America plays tough it may be able
to reach an agreement that freezes Iran’s
nuclear development indefinitely. (The
original pact has “sunset clauses”, whereby
curbs on Iran lapse after a time.)
Israel, according to Mr Bennett, seeks to
outspend Iran in its weapons programmes
and outmatch it in technology—in the
hope of bankrupting it. Mr Bennett calls
this ploy “a financial Star Wars”, alluding to
America’s development of missile defenc
es in the 1980s which, in Mr Bennett’s view,
forced the Soviet Union in its dying days to
accept agreements on arms control with
America. In the same vein, Israel is plan
ning a laserdefence network. At a later
stage, he says, this may be broadened into a
regional missiledefence umbrella that
could also protect Israel’s new Arab allies
in the Persian Gulf.
Yet this offensive against Iran does not
seem to have given Mr Bennett a political
boost at home. His unwieldy eightparty
coalition, which for the first time includes
an Islamist Arab party, is coming apart at
the seams. It has lost its majority in the
Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Its compo
nents agree on very little. The main reason
for its creation was to dump Israel’s previ
ous prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
It never had much more of an agenda to
bind it together.
As leader of the opposition, Mr Netan
yahu is stillplotting a comeback. He is un
likely to find enough supporters in the
Knesset to form a new government. But he
needs only one more defector from the go
verning coalition to force an election. Isra
el suffered three elections in 201920, as
neither Mr Netanyahu nor his opponents
were able to form a government. It was on
ly after a fourth, a year ago, that Mr Bennett
managed to cobble together his coalition.
Opinion polls suggest that a fifth poll may
at last yield a majority for Mr Netanyahu
and his allies.
Mr Bennett, whose own party has only
six seats in the 120strong Knesset, admits
there is little he can do to stop his govern
ment from disintegrating, bar an appeal to
his partners “not to fall off track, back into
the chaos of elections”. Still, he gamely
hopes to “continue for another month, and
then another”. At least, he claims, “we’ve
shown Israel how a normal country looks
for the past year.” But his laudable “experi
ment” of including an Arab party in gov
ernment has, he laments, enabled Mr Net
anyahu to activate a “machine of poison
and lies” that brands thecoalition as “rely
ing on terror supporters”.nA
centuryagothesiteofBahrain’s
landregistration bureau was not on
land. Like a good bit of the country, it has
been reclaimed from the sea. Bahrain’s
eagerness for such projects is easy to
understand: its natural land area is just
665 square kilometres (257 square miles),
over half the size of Greater London. The
south is mostly desert, good for oilfields,
military bases and little else.
Since the 1960s Bahrain has added
more than 11% to its land area through
reclamation, says Mohammed Al Khalifa,
the head of the property regulator. It may
soon add much more. Last year Bahrain
said it would build five new cities on
reclaimed land. “We’re surrounded by
shallow waters, so it doesn’t take much
to do reclamation—it’s like a bathtub.”
The plan is still aspirational, with
officials yet to secure funding or draw up
blueprints. If it comes to pass, it will
expand the country by more than half its
current size. Yet landreclamation pro
jects, in Bahrain and elsewhere in the
Gulf, come with a slate of environmental
and economic concerns—and perhaps
even existential ones.
If Bahrain has built out of necessity,
other Gulf states do it out of choice. Palm
Jumeirah, a collection of islands shaped
like a palm tree, is one of Dubai’s most
iconic features. Abu Dhabi dredged the
coastline to create attractions like Yas
Island, home to theme parks and fancy
hotels. Saudi Arabia has plenty of empty
land; yet it still wants to build somethingcalledtheOxagon,aneightsided float
ing industrial city in the Red Sea.
Developers say they try not to harm
the environment. But scientists and
locals worry. Fishermen in Bahrain say
landreclamation has damaged their
livelihoods by depleting fish stocks,
forcing them to work farther out at sea.
This annoys neighbouring Qatar, which
regularly detains Bahraini boats that sail
into its waters.
A study found landreclamation
projects shrank the number of man
groves in Tubli Bay, off Bahrain’s east
coast. Using satellite imagery, another
group of researchers concluded that the
Palm increased average water tempera
tures by 7.5°C over 19 years, which is bad
for reefs and hurts some marine life.
These schemes can also be bad for
investors: buying property on an artifi
cial island is the ultimate offplan sale.
When the first residents of the Palm
moved into their villas, they discovered
the properties occupied less land than
promised: developers had to squeeze in
more of them to recoup building costs.
At least they were built. Dubai has a
second palmshaped archipelago near
the main port, 19km southwest of its
betterknown cousin. Workers started
construction in 2002, but the financial
crisis of 2008 put a stop to it. Two de
cades on, the second Palm remains a
featureless expanse of sand.
Then there is The World, the sort of
project you would conceive if you read
Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” as a
howto guide. Nakheel, the developer,
spent billions to create 300 islands in the
rough shape of the world map. Then the
financial crisis hit. Today there is a glitzy
resort around “Tierra del Fuego”, and a
beach club in “Lebanon”, but most of The
World is as barren as the moon.
Climate change menaces the Gulf’s
artificial lands, just as it does all water
front property. The Palm was designed to
handle a 50cm rise in sea levels. Re
searchers at the University of Tehran
have estimated that Gulf waters could
rise 84cm by the end of the century.
No one has ever recorded a cyclone in
the Persian Gulf. But a study published in
Nature Climate Changein 2015 concluded
that they are no longer inconceivable.
Last year Cyclone Shaheen made landfall
in Oman, the first of its kind to do so in at
least a century. What man raised from
the sea, the sea may take back. LandreclamationintheGulfCities in the sea
MANAMA
Artificial islands are costly and often bad for the environmentWill Palm spring eternal?