I suppose the least that could be said is that this wasn't a well thought out intervention by Norman Finkelstein.  He knows this, which is why he asked for the original video of the interview to be taken down - a futile gesture on the internet, but a meaningful one inasmuch as he acknowledges the harm done, and also an important one inasmuch as Finkelstein will continue to be an asset to the pro-Palestine movement.  However, as Finkelstein's position is inescapably 'out there', as it is already sending the pro-Israel commentariat into gyrations of pleasure, and as the air is already thick with the smell of burning bridges, I feel no compunction about adding to the blogorhoea generated by the interview.  There are two basic points which I think are worth making.  The first is that insofar as there is a substantive strategic argument, it is incoherent.  And in saying so, I am not denying the presence of his usual strengths: forensic scholarship, moral commitment, and candour.  The second is that insofar as it consists of invective, it is a hypertrophied manifestation of the worst aspects of Finkelstein's polemical style, and is a gift to the Zionists.  These are not unrelated points, as will become clear as I unravel them.

Finkelstein's strategic posture is roughly as follows.  If you are serious about engaging in politics, and building mass movements, you cannot go further in your demands than the public is willing to go.  You have to calibrate your goals.  You have to calculate what will be acceptable to a viable mass of public opinion.  The public is presently willing to support a two-state settlement based on a rock solid international legal consensus.  This would be a liveable settlement, acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians, and moreover is within reach because Israel's position makes it increasingly isolated in the international system.  It would be possible to leverage the international legal consensus to force Israel to accomodate a Palestinian state based on the June 1967 borders.  Any movement of solidarity which attempts to go beyond this isn't going anywhere, because the public is unwilling to accept a one-state solution.  The BDS movement, despite having the correct tactics, leaves itself wide open to Israeli propaganda counter-offensives, because it has the wrong goal.  Implicitly, it favours measures that in their totality would mean Israel would cease to exist (as a Zionist state): end the occupation, recognise full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and respect and implement the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees.  By contrast with this 'leftist posturing', it should clearly and explicitly state that it favours a two-state settlement in accordance with international law.  Otherwise it will be seen to be cherry-picking those parts of the law that it supports in order to smuggle in an agenda of destroying Israel, and as a consequence will squander an historic opportunity.

***

The first argument hits upon an important strategic consideration in any movement, which is how to pose demands that relate to the balance of opinion, forces etc. in wider society rather than to the minute doctrinal fissures among the movement's organised core.  To this extent, Finkelstein is quite right.  A participating group in such a movement can argue for their own position, but their orientation should be toward taking the movement forward, not simply taking themselves forward within the movement.  So, I understand exactly what he means when he says that he evaluates his colleagues' positions not primarily in terms of their morality or accuracy, but above all in terms of whether they can be 'defended' in public.  Having said that, this is exactly where Finkelstein's argument begins to collapse into messy self-contradiction.  

First of all, it fails because Finkelstein is known to contribute ideas and polemical over-statements that neither could nor should be defended in public.  He has been unfairly attacked, and just as vigorously defended by many of those now unfortunately labelled 'cult' members.  His book The Holocaust Industry was mostly unfairly criticised in my opinion.  But it is also true that he has sometimes said or done things that didn't help.  So, if one is in this position, a little bit of humility - even for a thirty year veteran - is surely called for when strategy and tactics are under discussion.  This is particularly so since the nature and tone of his intervention here is hardly calibrated to take the movement forward.  It places his own sense of exasperation with the movement ahead of its success. 

Secondly, and relatedly, it fails because of what it omits, or does not specify.  It does not specify the relevant 'public'.  In another discussion, he makes it clear that this public is construed either in terms of authority (human rights or legal bodies) or representation (the United Nations general assembly being esteemed the most representative political body in the world).  I don't accept this way of construing 'the public'.  The UN general assembly is not representative of anyone but national ruling classes.  Pressed on this, I expect Finkelstein would grudgingly concede the point, but would insist that the isolation of Israel among global ruling classes is a strategic opportunity, particularly if Israel's traditional supporters are becoming uneasy.  This may be true, but it doesn't follow that the 'publics' whom BDS activists want to reach are those represented at the UN general assembly, or in human rights bodies, or in the ICJ.  

I would argue as a counterpoint that the relevant publics for the BDS activists he is addressing are those based in the states supporting Israel - the US, Canada, the EU, and so on.  And in those societies, the public is not an undifferentiated, or unchanging mass.  Those who are most inclined to be sympathetic to the Palestinians will have been relatively unaware of the situation some years ago, or perhaps indifferent or hostile.  Public attitudes change, and sometimes you have to embark on an initiative without public support or legal backing, on the assumption that attitudes will begin to change in response to the struggle.  This was as true if you were a civil rights advocate in the southern United States during the Jim Crow period, or a supporter of women's suffrage in 1920s Britain.  Finkelstein has acknowledged this, but insists that they have changed 'within a framework', that of the two-state settlement, which legal framework has been static for decades.  This is casuistry, as it illicitly shifts the terms of the argument from a problem of persuasion and mobilization within the field of 'public opinion' to one of intervention in an international legal system where the congealed 'interests' and perspectives of the world's ruling classes are at stake.  There is no reason why the two-state idea has to be the final default of 'public opinion'.

Moreover, there's a conflict here between Finkelstein's insistence on reaching a public with a viable set of goals, and his insistence elsewhere on settling issues related to the conflict not by reference to the point of view of the oppressed, the Palestinians, but by reference to "justice and right".  But he immediately qualifies this by saying that he means "justice and right", not "in the abstract", but in terms of how the conflict is concretely understood - ie by the international legal consensus.  I'll return to this, but if you bear in mind that this - the final determination of justice and right by law - is the overriding political-strategic coordinate in Finkelstein's perspective, it helps to make sense of much else that he says.

Aside from attitudes changing, they have changed in an uneven fashion.  The most pro-Palestinian sections of the public will also be the more politically conscious sections of the oppressed and the working class.  Organising and educating those people is, I would suggest, the starting point for building any mass movement.  It is therefore significant that Finkelstein also overlooks an important condition of building such a movement: unity among highly diverse political forces.  There has to be some compromise within any movement.  He notes that an explicit endorsement of a two-state settlement would split BDS down the middle.  He is right.  A large number of those who are most active in the pro-Palestinian movement, and most educated about the situation of the Palestinians, are in favour of a one-state solution and think it more viable than two-states.  Not all of them are stupid, or less educated or insightful than Norman Finkelstein.  Yet they have arrived at a fundamentally different strategic perspective.  In this situation, suspending the question of whether the final settlement should be based on a one or two-state system is a compromise.  Without such compromise, the movement, such as it is, disintegrates into rivalrous factions.

But this is exactly what Finkelstein has a problem with, because it is a compromise in favour of orienting toward a series of objectives that operate on and expose the antagonism between Zionism and liberal-democratic norms.  He doesn't think that the movement should be focused on de-legitimising Zionism in this way, because a precondition for his strategic purview to be viable is that one must accept that Zionism - not merely a state called Israel in which some form of comity is achieved, but Zionism as such - will endure.  He thinks that the language of the 'rule of law' is "the dominant language of our epoch"; coupled with the "language of human rights", it is the language which liberal American Jews, and other significant sections of the public, most understand.  One has to work within the legal terrain, otherwise there is no possibility of advance.  The law is 'unambiguous': a two-state settlement, an end to the occupation, and a just settlement of the refugee question.  It means accepting Israel.  If you use the law as a weapon, you are also bound by its restrictions, otherwise you are dishonest.

There is no need to get into hair-splitting arguments over whether the 'rule of law' is really as 'dominant' as Finkelstein suggests.  Nor will I linger on the idea that liberal American Jews are the privileged demographic we need to be reaching.  It suffices to say that Finkelstein's is partially a 'framing' argument, which works just as well against his position.  After all, the implication of stressing a legalist framework is that the acceptability or otherwise of certain positions depends in part on how they are articulated.  For example, the demand for the full equality of Palestinians in Israel with Israeli Jews may in the long-run not be consistent with Israel's 'right to exist' as a Zionist state - but then, as it happens, so much the worse for Zionism.  Few people in the core pro-Israel societies are so committed to Zionist ideology that they are prepared to support an ongoing system of apartheid in its name.  This is particularly true of those who are attracted by liberal-democratic and human rights arguments.  Let's be honest: a large number of people, including even some antiwar activists and peaceniks supportive of the Palestinians, have not the first clue what Zionism is.  This is a legacy of decades of disinformation, historical revisionism and the usual uneducating effects of the capitalist media.  This is why it is important that BDS targets its specific injustices rather than simply targeting the label 'Zionism'.

***

But it is on the question of the law itself that I find Finkelstein's position most problematic.  He insists that the law is not merely a terrain in which Israel is at a disadvantage, not merely one in which the public can be reached, but actually one in which there is no ambiguity.  This is the real framework within which international politics is conducted, the 'real world of politics' as he puts it, and it is unambiguously in favour of a particular final status as regards Israel and Palestine.  Accept it, or stop claiming to cite the law.  He is extremely learned, versed in every relevant piece of legislation, a close reader of the UN resolutions, the ICJ judgments and so on.  It is for this reason that he has annihilated Israel's vulgar apologists, time after time, making mince of the false controversies that they generate in the name of 'hasbara'.  He is also wrong.  First of all, as he himself acknowledges, several terms in the international 'consensus' are in fact highly ambiguous.  For example, the 'thorny' question of the refugees, and what constitutes a just settlement of their situation, is not unambiguous.  Second, ambiguity is not the same as dissensus.  If 99% of the states in the UN general assembly support one particular interpretation of the law, that lends strong credence to that interpretation, but it does not resolve the fact of there being an ambiguity, of there being multiple possible interpretations, of there being indeterminacy.  The only thing that does actually resolve this, is physical force: by this, I mean not merely violence, but all the material (economic, political, diplomatic etc) inducements or coercions that could be deployed.  

I would like to return to this in a future post, but for now I would just ask the reader simply to be positively disposed toward the thesis that, in the last analysis, the law is congealed class power.  In the international sphere, this is also imperialist class power, inasmuch as there is a chain of imperialist states and sub-imperialism whose ruling classes exploit a sequence of dominated formations.  The juridical forms of equality between subjects of the law, and of enfranchisement through representation, are just the legal forms that this domination takes.  I ask you to be positively disposed toward this thesis for now anyway, because it helps explain a set of concrete facts that are present in Finkelstein's case but nonetheless somewhat mystified.  It explains, for example, the fact that the international legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers has never been efficacious in stopping Israel's expansion for a second.  It explains why, contrary to all appearances, Israel is not remotely 'lost' when it comes to the law, and never has been.  It explains why Israel does not simply reject the terrain of the law, but rather insists on forcefully prosecuting its case and remaining a member of the relevant bodies.  It explains why the law can be made to ex post facto recognise, accept and protect a state of affairs that some years previously was considered legally dubious at best.  

Or, perhaps more urgently, it explains why the legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers was actually built on a series of ambiguities.  UN Resolution 242, in which the US and European powers were important negotiating parties, deliberately adopted a certain terminological inexactitude as regards what constituted occupied territory; as regards how and when occupation should end (negotiations and secure frontiers first, then withdrawal, is the usual formulation - which basically means that occupation can proceed indefinitely); and as regards the final status of the frontiers and particularly of Jerusalem.  This was not because the drafters liked to tease, but because the resolution reflected the emergence of a broad 'line' from the jostling and mutual struggle of the powers involved and because the US, as the dominant party framing the legislation, wanted a very wide space for manouevre on Israel's part.  Israel has had that space, and made ample use of it.  This is what "justice and right" means, not "in the abstract", but concretely. 

So, there are two problems here.  First, that in accepting the law as the only proper terrain of activism, he moralises and exalts it in wholly inappropriate terms, and avoids the power relations concentrated within the law.  This leads him to gloss over the problems with the 'international legal consensus' and the gargantuan obstacles (the size of the US military arsenal) to achieving anything on that terrain, and also allows him to gloss over certain inconsistencies in his own position: as in, 'I am not imposing my own morality, merely siding with justice and right as instantiated in multiple resolutions'.  Above all, it leads to a profound strategic and tactical conservatism: because the law is in fact congealed power, it follows that any consensus which emerges within it will reflect the priorities of those exercising power, rather than resisting it.  That is what entering 'the real world of politics' means.  Second, that in giving the law a spurious consistency and determinacy in his rhetoric, he fails to recognise that it is both a strategic stake and a strategic field of contestation, and that to fight within it there is no neutral, non-selective, non-partial way to interpret and decide between the relevant provisions and resolutions.  One can attempt to be more or less reasonable, more or less objective, more or less serious about the material: but any serious, reasonable and objective study will acknowledge that indeterminacy is structurally built into the field of international law, and deliberately inscribed in the relevant bases for the 'consensus'.  But construing the law as a consistent body of doctrine allows Finkelstein to belabour BDS for choosing to cite international law in its propaganda without explicitly endorsing the ongoing existence of Israel.  

Now, you may say that this sort of argument is all very well, but is conducted in a sort of arid, academicist, or even cult-like, sphere.  It may persuade some educated leftists, but there's no way to translate these sorts of arguments into slogans and demands for public consumption.  That is, it may be correct, but it is practically useless.  In fact, there's no difficulty here.  I am merely outlining a very rough theoretical basis for explaining certain observations, the veracity of which almost anyone can be persuaded of in short order: the law, however much you may wish it were otherwise, is completely hypocritical, riddled with ambiguities, and close to impotent unless the US authorises something (obviously that's putting it crudely).  For Finkelstein to depict the law as the source of justice and right is simply at odds with the evidence of one's senses.  For the UN to be seen as the motor of liberatory change in the Middle East, amid a series of revolutions, is equally counterintuitive.  Inasmuch as there is a strategically crucial conjuncture forming which could fatally weaken Israel, which is already weakening Israel, it is being significantly driven by the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, while the UN is playing its usual role of organising imperialist responses to the situation.  It is not clear what agency or combination of agencies can be brought to bear to turn the 'international legal consensus' into an effective force other than those populations in the Middle East - and if they are already remaking the Middle East of their own accord, why on earth would they defer to this 'consensus' moulded by people who didn't have their interests in mind?  In fact, the more you study this lynchpin of Finkelstein's strategic perspective, the less it looks like the solution, much less something we must defer to without qualification.

Some of Finkelstein's defenders say "well, he's just saying what he's been saying for a while, and behind the invective is a real argument which people need to take on board".  In fact, it's true, he has been saying some of this for a while.  And while it hasn't always been as pungently overdetermined as this intervention (rich with contempt for his maoist past), it has tended to display the same polemical weaknesses as are evident here: a tendency to moralise, to rhetorically over-reach, to hector a little bit, to caricature his opponents, and so on.  It doesn't seem to be possible to disaggregate Finkelstein's position, and his arguments for it, from these tendencies.  His arguments for a two-state strategy are moralistic and browbeating, if sometimes witty and insightful; yet they are not "serious about politics", because they omit sustained analysis of the field in which he proposes to conduct this strategy, or any but the most vague outlines of the agencies he thinks BDS activists should appeal to, or any critical reflection whatsoever on the concepts ('the public', 'justice', 'legal consensus', etc) that he is deploying so loosely.

Why do the rich and right-wing in Britain so love their Nazi uniforms?  Whether it is Tory students, royals, politicians, or upper class jocks, the naughty pleasures of pretending to be a fascist bomber or concentration camp guard are irresistible for some.  Lately, some LSE students, most likely fitting into the category of the aforementioned upper class jocks, were discovered engaging in a drinking game called the 'Nazi Ring of Fire'.  You can imagine the sorts of rituals involved - saluting the fuhrer, that sort of thing.  A Jewish student who objected to this display was assaulted.  Now, I'm sure the students involved don't quite get the furore that has resulted.  Most likely, they think the affair was maybe a bit off-side, but otherwise bloody good sport.  Too bad for them.  Let them suck it up.

I'm rather more concerned about the way the political reaction has panned out.  First of all, it's worth saying that there's a fairly sensible article by Jay Stoll, president of the LSESU's Jewish Society in the LSE newspaper, The Beaver.  (I don't know why they called it that.)  Stoll rejects the scapegoating of Muslims for antisemitism, and suggests that the usual culprit is actually the upper middle class boarding school type.  That's probably true in the UK.  Even here, though, there's already something odd going on.  The newspaper calls the affair an 'antisemitic' drinking game.  Now, I hope you understand what I mean when I say this is bordering on euphemistic.  I just mean that there's a lot more involved in Nazism than antisemitism, and the decision to inhabit a Nazi persona for kicks signifies something more than judeophobia.  

What more?  Well, what more is involved in 'national socialist' politics?  Nationalism, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, patriarchy, homophobia, strains of virulent biological racism other than antisemitism, social Darwinism, extreme political authoritarianism, class chauvinism, contempt for the poor and weak, etc.  It is absolutely correct to identify and attack the vicious antisemitism involved in such Nazi performance, particularly as it was a Jewish student who was assaulted.  But antisemitism won't stand in for every evil of Nazism.  I think what's really going on with such people is not just antisemitism, but more fundamentally a certain admiration for supermen, hatred for the weak and vulnerable, enjoyment in the imperial bunting, the festivities and aesthetics of domination and hierarchy.  It's not fascism, but the licensed pleasure of a class on the offensive, people who are intent on clinging on to everything they have and taking more, exhaling with gratification and relief as the opposition is violently policed, or bombed.

In this connection, a less sensible response to the affair came from Tanya Gold of The Guardian, who usually makes her wedge writing lighter fare.  (I click on the links, sometimes).  She proves the old adage that if antisemitism prompts you to defend Israel, you have already forfeited your probity on both subjects.  Actually, that isn't an old adage, I just made it up: but it is nonetheless true.  I suppose one could make the 'paradoxical' point that Israel is organised antisemitism, which is also true.  Or, in a more elaborate version of the same basic idea: Israel is an apartheid state that can only exist through the expropriation and murder of Palestinians, and to identify its interests with those of Jewish people as such is to defile the latter, to defame them, to blood libel them.  This, while correct, is utterly inadequate, because the perspective of Israel's victims is lost in this.  What I really mean is that defending the state of Israel by reference to instances of antisemitism in modern day Europe is, wittingly or otherwise, another way of identifying with a would-be master race - with no sense of irony.  Worse still when they rank instances of legitimate protest by pro-Palestinian groups as examples of mounting antisemitism, or worry about a "demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society", as if it wasn't the victims of Israeli oppression and their allies who are debarred from 'polite society'.  Of course, Zionism is not fascism, but nor is it the eternal other of fascism.  You can't have it both ways.  Either racist, nationalist, imperialist ideology is objectionable, in which case its organisation in a state is calamitous, or you must count the thuggish Nazi impersonators as bedfellows.  This is a choice that Israel's founders and planners have always faced, and they have always opted for the latter without embarrassment.

When, in 1968, the British government announced that Britain's formal protectorate in the Gulf would end in 1971, American planners were anxious and distraught. After Suez, the US had taken the lead in defending Anglo-American interests in the Middle East, but the structure of power in the 'East of Suez' was still conserved by the old colonial power. The Persian Gulf states at that time supplied 30% of total oil resources. The reconstruction of Europe and especially Japan after WWII was driven by Gulf oil. And the US had no alternative structure of security elaborated for when Britain let go.

Bahrain, off the eastern shore of the Saudi Kingdom, had been subject to many of the same basic forms of state and market formation as the Saudi monarchy itself. Its commercial markets were first penetrated by British capitalism when East India company adventurers first arrived in the eighteenth century. It became a British 'protectorate', courtesy of gunboat diplomacy, in 1861. When I say 'gunboat diplomacy', I am being quite literal. The British had first imposed a 'General Treaty of Peace' on Gulf states, signalling their subordination to British power in the 1820s. This stated that Bahrain was not permitted to dispose of its territory except to the United Kingdom, or get involved in a relationship with any government without British consent. It was a way of keeping competing European powers out of the Gulf. The British later imposed their own 'Resident in the Persian Gulf' to manage their growing paramountcy in the region through a series of local advisors in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. All of this was supported and maintained by a large naval squadron. In return Britain promised to support the rule of Shaikh Al Khalifa, which established the UK's tradition of supporting Sunni dynastic rule over a largely Shia population. This system of rule was later centred on the British Raj, which maintained a Shaikhdom in Bahrain, and used the islands-state as a base for defending its regional interests, particularly during WWI.

Until the discovery and use of oil, Bahrain's major trades had included pearling, but throughout the 19th Century it diversified sufficiently for Manama to become the dominant trading city in the Gulf region, overtaking Basra and Kuwait. When oil was discovered in 1932, however, and Bahrain began exporting in 1934, it was just as traditional industries were suffering a severe decline amid global Depression. Unemployment had been soaring, and the pearl industry sinking. The sudden availability of oil revenues, a third of which were nominally controlled by the Shaikdom, paid for state-led capitalist development. Bahrain became what some social scientists call a 'rentier state', inasmuch as it depended by far on revenues derived from the sale of its oil on international markets than from the productive efforts of the society as a whole. The modern state of Saudi Arabia was formed under King Abdul Aziz bin Saud with British support in 1932, and it too began to export oil, with the industry taking off in 1938. This is when the current ties with the Saudi kingdom and US capital were first forged.

When Socal and Texaco initially combined in 1936 to form Aramco, the subsidiary was intended to run the oil concessions in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Aramco, we know from Robert Vitalis, simultaneously created a public identity for itself as a partner in development and modernization, and reproduced the Jim Crow labour market structures then prevalent in the United States. The racial hierarchies maintained in the labour force, with white American workers at the apex and migrant workers from southern Asia at the bottom, still have operative effects in Bahrain's political system today. But the PR efforts, which involved paying a platoon of journalists, writers and scholars, building up research centres. Writers like Wallace Stegner took the 'myth of the frontier' elaborated by Frederick Jackson Turner, in which America's rugged democratic experiment was held to depend on the restless advance westward as hardy American citizens settled and improved otherwise empty land (oh yeah), and applied it to the oil frontiers. There, the oil companies were the pioneering heroes of civilization, the natives barely registering except as grateful recipients of racial uplift. At the same time, the British established more bases on the islands to entrench its control.

In partnership with British imperialism, represented in the person of 'advisor' Charles Belgrave, the oil firms helped construct forms of governance, geographies of accumulation, and market structures that guaranteed that this miraculous substance of myriad uses, this black gold, this vital source of industrialisation and advancement, would be controlled and directed by the 'West'. Bahrain, along with other Gulf states, was controlled from British India until 1947. In the postwar era, Britain maintained its 'informal' empire in the Gulf through a system of local advisors and client regimes backed by military force. Modernisation projects, such as the creation of a national education system, were built under British imperial tutelage. Challenges to the regime were assisted by British weaponry, as during the suppression of anti-British riots in the immediate post-war years, the containment of strikes by the left-wing National Union Committee, the crushing of pro-Egyptian demonstrations in 1956, and the putting down of the pro-independence March Intifada in 1965.

Until 1971, then, the British provided the security and patronage framework within which US oil capital operated. Under the banner of 'guided development', the British ruling class cultivated sterling-based networks of regional clients, and developed internal security apparati (mukhabarat) to sustain regimes which would operate only minimally within the integument of formal sovereignty. This model could occasionally conflict with US strategy. If American planners were not keen for rapid decolonization, fearing not just the exclusion of US investors but also the emergence of a worldwide systemic alternative to capitalism, they nonetheless had a conception of geographical accumulation, based substantially on the work of geographer Isaiah Bowman and other social scientists in light of their own experiments in direct colonial rule, which did not necessarily depend on direct territorial control. A global hierarchy of sovereign states operating an 'open door' policy was in principle compatible with US imperial hegemony, provided there was no revolutionary challenge to that hegemony. As such, the US had not initially worried overly about the Free Officers taking over Egypt in 1952, or Iraq in 1958. The real worry came later, in the 1960s, when Arab nationalism took a radical leftist turn. And though one context of Britain's declaration of withdrawal from its 'East of Suez' engagements was a traumatic defeat for Arab nationalism, there was still no certainty that ensuing movements and regimes would provide favourable territories for continued US capital accumulation. Britain's retreat from its imperial commitments 'East of Suez reflected defeat of a similar kind to that being inflicted on the US in Vietnam - this despite often brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaysia and Aden (Yemen). Because of the growing political and economic costs of these commitments for a crisis-hit British capitalism, the Conservatives pledged to honour Wilson's withdrawal plans.

The US strategy in the Gulf was thus to engage in a Metternichian 'power-balancing' strategy. This involved strengthening its ally, the Shah, who asserted an Iranian claim to Bahrain, while also working to bolster the opposing Ba'athist regime in Iraq. With respect to Bahrain, a US naval squadron took up where the British navy departed. The formally independent emirate of Bahrain maintained its cosy relationship with Anglo-American power. Despite the creation of a parliament elected solely by male voters in 1973, the monarch retained the ability to impose laws by decree, such as the highly repressive State Security Law. Surging oil revenues in the 1970s contributed to the restoration of relative political stability, and attracted waves of migrant workers from civil war struck Lebanon and from southern Asia. The decline of the Left and of Arab nationalism in the same period opened the field of dissent to Islamists inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. In this context, the Anglo-American archipelago became an important counter-weight to the Islamic Republic, as its hosting of the US Navy's 'Fifth Fleet' provided a basis for the US military to threaten and contain Iran while Saddam Hussein mounted his invasion.

The ties with the Saudi kingdom, which was engaged in a region-wide struggle to prevent the influence of the Iranian revolution from spreading, were crucial in helping the Bahrain monarch defeat the Islamist challenge. In 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council was forged to coordinate economic and political strategies among six key Gulf states, under Saudi hegemony. Economic associations were created to avoid the duplication of outlay. The Saudi-Kuwaiti-Bahraini Petrochemicals Company (Gulf Petrochemicals Company) was also formed. The Saudi-Bahrain connection was even rendered manifest by the King Fahd Causeway, a World Bank supported white elephant which has connected the Aramco city of Dahran to the refineries of Bahrain since completion in 1986. When oil prices collapsed in the 1990s, unemployment protests culminated in a wave of uprisings took place lasting from 1994 to 2000. The challenge to the monarchy united leftists, Islamists and liberals, and was met with much the same forms of indiscriminate violence by Saudi-backed security forces as we have witnessed recently. In fact, 'indiscriminate' may not be quite the word I'm looking for - the attacks were clearly targeted at Shi'ite areas. The uprising only ended when a new emir promised a series of liberalising political reforms specified in the National Action Charter, which - while carefully conserving private property and the market - included some promises of social justice, the defence of public property, and the extension of democracy. The official state of emergency imposed since 1975 was dropped, and women were permitted to vote for the first time in 2002. This reform was intended to do what repression had not succeeded in doing, conserving the power of the ruling clan. And it was supported by over 98% of the population in a nationwide referendum.

While these reforms did not turn Bahrain into a democracy, they did permit previously covert opposition groups to emerge into the open. Nationwide protests and strikes favouring real democracy and opposing the demeaning, racist treatment of migrant workers, have been a regular occurrence since, often defying official protest bans. These have combined the Shi'ite opposition with leftist and Arab nationalist opposition currents. Official racism, not only discriminating against and repressing the majority Shia population, who are deprived of all military-oriented jobs as well as roles in strategically important government positions, but also attempting to 'reclaim' Manama 'for Bahrainis' has been part of the conservative response to these protests. In the 2000s, the al-Wefaq (Islamic National Accord) party has been the major political vehicle through which the Shi'ite majority has attempted to resist discrimination. Though they boycotted the 2002 elections in protest at the dominance of royal-appointed placemen in the upper chamber, their participation in the 2006 elections saw 16 of their 17 candidates for a 40-seat lower chamber get elected. Al-Wefaq's support for greater democracy, the decentralisation of power and the redistribution of wealth and resources has always posed at least a latent challenge to the ruling royals. In place of governorates, it aims to transfer considerable power to municipal councils which would be controlled by the Shia majority. In place of a royal-dominated upper chamber, it seeks to place legislative power decisively in the hands of the elected majority and will work with other opposition parties to this end. Meanwhile its socially conservative 'morality' campaigns challenge the avowedly secular culture of the regime. Its emergence and support in the mosques is significant given the traditionally quietist role of religious authorities schooled in the conservative Akhbari Shia tradition. The biggest leftist bloc is National Democratic Action, which also boycotted the 2002 elections and has participated in the major protest movements. It is rooted in workers movements and womens' associations. In terms of members and votes, it is smaller than al-Wefaq, but both have been willing to work together in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary battles. The 'Democratic Bloc', formerly the Communist Party of Bahrain, did stand in the 2002 elections and received a decent share of the vote. There are also Sunni Islamist and salafist groups which are occasionally oppositional, and a relatively large liberal-right parliamentary group called the 'Economists Bloc' which supports the status quo.

The uprising in Bahrain began on the 10th anniversary of the National Action Charter being passed by referendum. The accumulated grievances over the lack of democracy, discrimination against the Shia, the use of torture and repression, and the lack of workers' rights were already producing a serious challenge to the monarchy. But then, Tunisia. Then, Egypt. As protests were prepared for 14th February, the regime panicked. The kingdom ordered that every family be given 1000 Bahraini dinars (equivalent to $2,600) to celebrate the anniversary of the National Action Charter. But the bribe didn't work. Nor did the King's gesture of releasing 450 political prisoners. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets on 14th February. On 15th, they fired on the funeral of a protester killed the previous day. Protesters took control of the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. On 16th, the protests grew larger. On 17th, hundreds were injured and dozens killed as police attacked the occupation of Pearl Square. The government imposed a state of emergency. Yesterday, security forces crackdowns included the murder of paramedics tending to injured protesters. Today, weapons from Britain and the US sustain Bahrain's crackdown, and the Saudi kingdom is reported to be supporting the repression in Bahrain. So, as in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East - above all Palestine - what the rebels are up against is not just their own state but a global configuration of power predicated on oil flows that stands behind it. It is that system of power based on neoliberal accumulation and oil capital If the Bahrain monarchy falls, then the crisis of US imperialism is intensified. The country may cease to host the US Navy. Saudi Arabia may no longer have its junior ally, and its own population, not least the Shia majority, may start to build on the protests already in evidence. At some point, the US will have to up its ante. But what will it do? Invade? Let Israel off the leash? And if it does either of these things, what are the chances that it may just radicalise and spread the revolution further still?

Mubarak has been ousted. Just after four o'clock GMT he announced his resignation. He has fled, reportedly to Sharm el-Shaikh. He should be arrested and tried. Egypt is celebrating. It is not over, of course. But the generals who made their move are not in control of events, and they can't crush the real forms of grassroots democracy that have developed in this revolution. They can't risk taking on the people who forced their hand today with such unprecedented, furious protests. Don't forget what bloody clashes preceded Mubarak's departure, how many Egyptians were killed in his crazed last gamble for power. Two million protesters thronged into Tahrir Square, and people kept coming. People marched on the presidential palace. An NDP headquarters was taken over. In el-Arish, cops killed five people. This was won with heavy losses, and there's further to go. Next stop, open the Rafah crossings. And it doesn't end with Egypt. Look at what's happening in Bahrain, in Yemen, Algeria, even Saudi Arabia. In Algeria even now, police are trying to repress a celebration of the revolt. These are beginnings, not conclusions. America's chain of icily psychopathic despotisms is beginning to shake.

Update: found this at Socialist Unity. Watch as the crowd suddenly roars:

JamieSW's comprehensive summary of the Palestine Papers asks if the comprador regime's pandering to Israeli rejectionism means it is finished:

Most of the Arab world’s anger so far has been directed not at the Israeli government but at the PA. This makes sense: Arabs take Israeli rejectionism for granted. Unlike many liberals in Europe and America, they cannot afford the luxury of delusions about our ally’s role in the region. The PA’s collaboration has also long been clear, but the extent of the betrayal revealed in the documents is nauseating. They record Abbas greeting Condoleeza “birth pangs” Rice with, “[y]ou bring back life to the region when you come.” “I would vote for you”, senior negotiator Ahmed Qureia told Livni; Ariel Sharon was my “friend”, Abbas enthused. We already knew about the PA’s collaboration with the US and Israel to overthrow Hamas; its support for the Gaza siege; its close cooperation with the Israeli military; and its diplomatic manoeuvres to bury the UN inquiry into the 2008-9 Gaza massacre. These new leaks promise to reveal how PA “leaders were privately tipped off” in advance about the Gaza massacre – something previous leaks have already confirmed.

Again, none of this should come as a surprise. The PA is a product of the Oslo process, which was designed, as former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami put it, to groom a Palestinian leadership class to act as “Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the [first] intifada and… [cut] short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence”. The aim, another Israeli minister explained, “was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control.” The PA is “almost wholly dependent upon American, European and Arab political and financial support, as well as security and economic cooperation with Israel” and so can only operate within limits dictated by Israel and its international backers. This was dramatically illustrated when Palestinians elected a government that didn’t enjoy the backing of their occupiers in 2006. The US, Europe and Israel responded by starving it of funds, isolating it diplomatically, kidnapping a third of the cabinet, killing hundreds of Palestinians, destroying Gaza’s only power station, and training and arming Fatah militias to overthrow it. It is a mistake, then, to focus overly on the corruption and venality of Abbas, Erekat, et al. The more important point is that the PA is structurally incapable of serving as an instrument of Palestinian liberation. Our takeaway lesson from the documents should be the need to end our government’s support for Israel’s occupation and Abbas’s quasi-police state in the West Bank.

The PA’s strategy as revealed in the documents is delusional, on the (perhaps unreasonable) assumption that its objective is to secure a negotiated settlement to the conflict. It appears to be under the impression that if it just offers Israel one more concession, cedes one more bit of territory, compromises on one more basic Palestinian right, then the U.S. will force Israel to accept a settlement. The reality of the American role hardly needs elaborating here; it is encapsulated well enough in Rice’s response to the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948: “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time.” The gaping yawn wasn’t transcribed. When Palestinian negotiators objected to Israel’s insistence on annexing yet more Palestinian territory, Rice was blunt: “You won’t have a state… your children’s children will not have an agreement.”

It is still too early to predict how reaction to the leaks will play out. The PA is denying everything on the grounds that, paraphrasing Erekat, ‘we can’t have offered Israel virtually all of East Jerusalem, because if we had then obviously Israel would have accepted it’. What is the Arabic for ‘facepalm’? “We don’t hide anything from our brothers”, Abbas insisted as the PA threatened to shut down Al Jazeera. Abbas has accused Al Jazeera of declaring “war” on the Palestinians – Erekat is presumably drawing up an agreement to cede East Jerusalem to Riz Khan.

The popular legitimacy of the PA, already damaged, is surely now destroyed. In the long-term – possibly sooner - this could spell its demise. Certainly Palestinians will not achieve their liberation under its auspices.

"An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

This is an example of racist patriarchy. A man, Sabbar Kashur, has been imprisoned for doing nothing more than having consensual sex with a woman, whose name has not been disclosed. Both parties were of age, and no one alleges that the transaction took place without consent. Initially, this was not clear, as the original complaint suggested that there had been some coercion. But as the woman's testimony in the course of the trial made clear, the only crime that Kashur, now convicted of rape, committed was to have allowed the woman to believe that he was Jewish, when in fact he was an Arab. He did not even actively perpetrate a deceit, merely chatted the woman up and didn't say "by the way, I am an Arab". And that has earned him 18 months in prison, on the basis of a plea bargain. Judge Tzvi Segal explained:

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

Are you getting it yet? Sex with an Arab constitutes a violation of the sanctity of body and soul - an "unbearable price". This is not a freakish opinion in Israeli society. For example, half of Israeli Jews believe intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is equivalent to national treason (that demographic 'timebomb', you see). Some are determined to enforce this sexual separation through violence or policy. Gangs of men in a Jerusalem neighbourhood roam around, behaving as a de facto vice and virtue squad, to 'protect' young Jewish girls from Arabs. One local authority has set up a squad of counsellors and psychiatrists to 'rescue' Jewish girls who are dating Arabs.

Hostility to inter-marriage and cross-ethnic dating pervades Zionist culture, and is reproduced at structural and institutional levels from the cradle to the grave. There has been a raft of legislative measures since 1948 that are designed to frustrate socialisation between Jews and Arabs, and the existing structures of segregation in education and housing ensure that intermarriage is already very rare. Jonathan Cook, quoting the Israeli sociologist Dr Yuval Yonay, points out that Israel's education system, designed to inculcate Zionist principles in Israeli Jews, largely succeeds in foreclosing Jewish-Arab relationships. The Israeli far right has long wished to enforce the stigma on such relationships with legislation. Meir Kahane, before he was thrown out of the Knesset in the 1980s, attempted to do just that. The current political climate in Israel, with the most racist Knesset of all time and a host of discriminatory measures in the pipeline, will tend to compound this trend.

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It's not as if it's easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It's not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown - he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial - and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up 'guilty'.

The court has therefore come down on the side of racist patriarchy, effectively joining those vice and virtue squads in 'protecting' Jewish women from any desire they may have to have sex and romance with Arab men, conserving the sanctity of the Jewish body and soul, and ensuring that the female body is strictly harnessed to the urgent task of perpetually regenerating the race. The criminal justice system itself, from the police to the prosecution and the judges, conspired to deliberately frame a consensual sex act as a violation. The fact that the verdict was secured with a plea bargain suggests that the defence also participated in this charade, intimidating and gaslighting Kashur so thoroughly that he ultimately 'confessed' to having committed a 'crime' and officially expressed a desire to be reformed. This is a calculated deterrence of inter-racial love, sex and solidarity. Perhaps it was seen as a necessary move due to the disproportionate presence of women among the Israeli peace movement, and the fear that their fraternising with the enemy is undermining militarist-nationalist morale. More likely, I think, such judgments are a logical corollary of founding a polity on the creation and maintenance of a demographically preponderant oppressor group through sheer military violence. A militarised colonial state, even one with a thin liberal democratic veneer, is necessarily a racially supremacist patriarchy, and would be so even without outlandish stunts like this conviction.