City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (29 page)

Meeus believes Arabs previously avoided the diamond business because of its Jewish flavor. That attitude, and Dubai’s willingness to circumvent it, has turned the city into something of a cultural bridge. In 2004, Dubai hosted the World Diamond Council’s annual conference, where Sheikh Mohammed personally welcomed prominent Jews including De Beers chief Nicky Oppenheimer and diamond council chairman Eli Izhakoff. Sheikh Mohammed sat in the audience between the two men.

The Dubai leader must have known this might be seen as risqué in Arab capitals. But Sheikh Mohammed’s dream for Dubai is to emulate tenth-century Córdoba, a Muslim city where Jews held important roles in business and academia. If that is the case, the city has a ways to go to build up its Jewish population.

But it wasn’t Arabs who initially fought Dubai’s foray into diamonds. It was the Jewish diamond establishment. Dubai faced prickly
opposition in 2004, when it tried to join the World Federation of Diamond Bourses in New York, even though the city was already trading more diamonds than several of the federation’s weaker members. Meeus, who was Antwerp’s representative at the time, said Belgian kingpins tried to block Dubai’s entry. There were complaints that Israeli members could be prohibited from traveling to the UAE because it doesn’t recognize Israel. In the end, the opposition failed and the federation accepted its first Arab member, with Israel voting in favor.
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In 2006, in what seemed like atonement, the largely Jewish New York Diamond Dealers Club on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue threw a party at the Rainbow Room for Ahmed bin Sulayem, probably the first Arab to be feted by the club.

While bin Sulayem mingled with Jewish diamond dons, Dubai moved to add a Muslim flavor to the business. The bourse announced that it had created a unique new stone: the Dubai Cut diamond. It’s a dazzling rectangle with ninety-nine separate facets. Each represents one of the holy names of Allah.

Israel’s quiet openings in the Gulf tend to dry up in times of conflict. Oman shut Israel’s trade mission in 2000 after the outbreak of the second intifada. Relations plunged again after the 2006 Israeli onslaught on Lebanon that killed more than a thousand people. In 2008, Israel’s threats to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites got in the way, and the Jewish State’s subsequent killing of hundreds of civilians in Gaza triggered war crimes accusations from the UAE government.

Even so, America’s Israel lobby has pleaded Israel’s case in the UAE, while trying to persuade Dubai to take a tougher line with Iran. The American Jewish Committee has sent four delegations to Dubai since 2006. The Anti-Defamation League sent one. The pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy also sent a group to high-level meetings with Emirati officials, including at a mixer at the home of U.S. Consul Paul Sutphin. A person who attended the gathering said the anti-Iran rhetoric made little headway among Dubai leaders, many of them descended from Iranian migrants. (In Abu Dhabi, however, the U.S.-Israeli position on Iran gains more traction.)

Still, the UAE is more receptive to Jewish concerns than most of the Gulf. The AJC wangled meetings with Gergawi and other top officials. It threw a Shabbat dinner in October 2007 in the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel. Most of the guests were Israelis in town for a dental conference.
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“There’s a reason we keep going to the UAE. There is a sense of openness. Every time we go, it gets easier,” says the American Jewish Committee’s Carmiel Arbit. “It’d be great to see the Jewish community organizing comfortably in Dubai.”

Israel’s inroads aren’t always so surreptitious. Israeli jeweler Lev Leviev, who operates the Levant diamond shops, triggered an uproar when he sent press releases announcing the opening of new stores in Dubai. A flurry of newspaper articles documented Leviev’s support for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Dubai’s
Gulf News
reported that UNICEF halted its partnership with Leviev after learning that his companies were building four Jewish outposts on seized Arab land.
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Leviev’s Dubai shops opened anyway. One operates in Sheikh Mohammed’s Al Qasr Hotel, another in his Mina A’Salaam Hotel.

No such outcry has emerged over a joint venture between Dubai-owned port operator DP World and Israel’s chief shipper, Zim Integrated Shipping. In June 2008, the two firms announced a joint purchase of Spain’s port operator Contarsa, which runs the Spanish port of Tarragona. The deal handed DP World a 60 percent share and Zim the remaining 40 percent. Dubai ports chairman Sultan bin Sulayem is known to be a friend of Zim president Idan Ofer, who stood up for Dubai during the furor in Washington.

“Idan is a very good businessman, very decent. These people don’t mix business with politics,” says Jamal Majid bin Thaniah, CEO of DP World’s shipping group. “When you’re operating in a global marketplace, you can’t pick and choose. You’re bound by international business practices to deal with companies like Zim. We’ll continue to conduct business on an unbiased basis.”

Dubai also owns a 20 percent slice of the Nasdaq, which lists more than seventy Israeli stocks, its largest foreign contingent. Dubai exchanges are linking operations with the Nasdaq. When that is complete, Nasdaq listings, including Israeli ones, could be bought and sold in Dubai.
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In July 2008, Gregg Rickman, the U.S. State Department envoy who
documents global anti-Semitism, stopped in Dubai. I met him and a colleague during their visit to the Dubai School of Government, where they was escorted by Susan Unruh, the political and economic officer at the U.S. Consulate in Dubai.

As yet, Dubai has no synagogue. Rickman asked whether Sheikh Mohammed would allow one. Unruh said she thought he would; if not allowing a synagogue to be purpose-built, at least he wouldn’t object to one being allowed to open quietly, like the Mormon temple that operates in a Dubai villa.

“I can’t believe they wouldn’t tolerate it. It would be out of their nature,” said Unruh, who, like the envoy, is Jewish. “Their brand image of tolerance is incredibly important to them.”

The intricacies of Jewish travel to Dubai is a popular topic on the online discussion group FlyerTalk. The forum’s “Kosher Food in Dubai” thread has Dubai’s Jewish residents and frequent visitors giving advice to newcomers.

Dubai’s don’t ask, don’t tell policies aren’t going to bring peace to the wilds of the Middle East. But the city’s spirit of tolerance and its willingness to compromise for the sake of commerce are steps in that direction, and stand as examples to others.

SHEIKH MOHAMMED: BORN TO RULE

ON MARCH 30
, 2008, students at Zayed University got a civics lesson, Dubai style.

That day, Sheikh Mohammed turned up at the women-only campus to hear two of his daughters recite poetry. But when he arrived, Sheikh Mohammed appeared less interested in poetry than with a marketplace erected in the campus’s soaring central atrium. There, hundreds of students—all of them young local women dressed in black
abayas
and
shayla
headscarves—staffed flea-market booths. They flogged necklaces, earrings, clothes, and even Krispy Kreme donuts. Sheikh Mohammed, who has long struggled to kindle a spirit of entrepreneurship in Dubaians, was excited by what he saw.

A student named Amna al-Akraf escorted the Dubai leader and fielded his questions. “Who financed this?” he asked. “Where did the idea come from? Where do the profits go?” Before he left, Sheikh Mohammed asked for al-Akraf’s phone number.

The next day, she got a call from the ruler’s
diwan
asking for a list of the students involved. Not long afterward, men from the diwan arrived on campus with several briefcases. Each was crammed with cash. The men handed the briefcases to the incredulous American administrators
of the university. One told them: This money is a gift from Sheikh Mohammed. Divide it among the Emirati girls who ran booths at the crafts fair.
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It took administrators a few days to count it: 6.2 million dirhams, or $1.7 million, to be split among the 300-odd students who’d operated booths. It worked out to just over $5,300 each.

The ruler’s handouts left students giddy. But administrators and teachers, mainly Americans, were aghast. “What kind of message does that send?” one teacher asked over lunch in the cafeteria. Another groused that the students had probably ordered their maids to craft the jewelry for them. The teachers felt that the cash would’ve been better spent on new computers. I wasn’t so sure. Sheikh Mohammed was keeping up his end of the tribal ruling bargain with these handouts, of course. But he had also been trying to inculcate entrepreneurship among Emiratis. I asked a student named Shayma, a tall and slender young woman in a plain black
abaya
, what lesson she took away from her handout.

“We should start a business and we will earn money,” Shayma said with a smile. The ruler would’ve been proud.

Sheikh Mohammed, the muscular, blunt-spoken, sixty-year-old monarch, is Dubai’s chief architect. He is a man’s man, with the entrepreneurship bravado of Richard Branson, the city-building prowess of Robert Moses, and the social engineering ambition of Ataturk.

Paul Bagatelas, who directs the Carlyle Group’s Dubai headquarters, likens him to a cross between Teddy Roosevelt, the big game-hunter who represented emerging America, and Bill Gates, the entrepreneur whose personality is inseparable from his empire.

Sheikh Mohammed is simultaneously raising a city from the sand, creating business opportunities to power it, and preparing a population of desert dwellers to rise to the task of running it. His ideas are so stamped on the landscape that two of his poems are being written on the sea as a group of islands.

Sheikh Mohammed is not an eloquent speaker, at least not in English, in which he seems to have difficulty expressing himself. Interviews are rare. When he does them, his answers are abrupt and simplistic, but allude to a grand outlook, akin to America’s manifest destiny. His manner is serious, his voice gruff. He is not a man of jokes and chitchat. He
is a public figure, but distant and difficult to know. He prefers to express himself through deeds.

“Am I a good leader? I don’t know and I guess no one else does,” he writes in
My Vision
. “The people, the future and history will stand judge and I’ll accept their judgement no matter what it might be. Nevertheless, I’m fully convinced that I’m leading my people not only on the right path but on the only one available.”

Sheikh Mohammed says in his book that he never wanted to rule Dubai. He was happy with his job in the security forces and ports. But his elder brother, the ruler Sheikh Maktoum, asked him several times to accept the title of crown prince. Each time, Mohammed said he asked to be excused. Finally, in 1995, Maktoum ordered him to take it.

“What’s important for me is to always do what I consider is my duty, to God, my conscience, my homeland, my people and my leader,” he writes. “I’m therefore working today as if I will die tomorrow and working for tomorrow as if I’m going to live forever.”