There has been, for some while now, a pattern of provocative strikes by Israel against various targets in Gaza.  They killed six civilians in the process.  Routine iniquities in and of themselves.  Israel makes periodic bloodshed, punctuated by eye-rolling acquiescence in 'peace' negotiations, a business and hobby.  Its whole form of state organisation is dependent on this constant hunt.  It would almost be bored if there was no frontier to test, no problem population to molest, no moral red-line to cross.  Lacking this raison d'etre, it would atrophy and die of malaise.  But this time, they sought a definite response: rocket fire, hopefully in abundance, with the usual ineffectuality.  It's not that they really care, they just need the pretext.  Israeli propaganda reels off the list of rocket 'incidents', with resulting psychologically traumatised sheep and car alarms, with impatient listlessness.

Now, a full-scale bombing campaign, with a threat of invasion, appears to be afoot.  We know what this means, and for whom.  The news coming from residents is of constant bombing, electricity being lost throughout Gaza City.  The IDF twitter account brags of the bodies it has already captured - they brandish the head of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader who, they grin, has been 'eliminated', just as his son was when the IDF bombed Gaza in 2008.  And they warn that any Hamas members, however high up or low down in the organisation, had better keep out of the way in Gaza for the next few days.  Without succumbing to the murderous logic according to which Hamas membership is grounds for execution by the bullet, the bomb or the chemical burn, we remember how Israel unilaterally adjusts the concept of Hamas membership to fit the exigencies of its bombing campaigns.  Aha - going to school are you?  That's a Hamas stronghold.  Death. 

Russia Today reports that IDF reservists are being called upon for an invasion.  At this point, the excuses for yet another sadistic gorefest in Gaza are looking care-worn.  The same old tired, robotic half-sense: Hamas.  Rockets.  Sderot.  Terrorism.  Something something something, dark side.  Something something something, complete.  There will be some barbarous, nonsensical, infuriating things said in news broadcasts over the next few days.  All uttered in that exaggerated American accent that high Israeli officials seem to learn. 

Rather than waste time attempting to construct something coherent out of the by now traditional Zionist melange of hysteria and sniggering sadism (waaah look at their rockets, ha ha ha look at their bodies) something that can be addressed as a semi-rational argument, we should just focus on reconstructing what has happened to Israel's position since Operation Cast Lead, and particularly since the Middle East revolutions began.  Just as importantly, we need to trace the links from this venture to the reconstitution of American power in the Middle East, which Obama's Pentagon is now attempting to secure by proxy.  (Leaving aside, for the moment, the argument as to how successful they have been in their attempt to annexe national rebellions).  For it is a crucial question how much the timing and nature of this assault is driven by domestic politics, (viz. the germinal threat posed by the Arab Spring within Israel itself, and the Israeli state's attempt to consolidate its political control over the population), how much by regional politics and Israel's need to recoup some of its losses through a demonstrative beating, and how much the tempo of the war on Hamas and Palestinian resistance is driving it directly.  One part of this question can be answered immediately: Obama gave this venture the green light. 

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.

The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival.  I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow.  The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle.  It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it.  In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition.  Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes.  But without conditions or prevarication.  

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses.  And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased.  And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months.  The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

***

For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present.  The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East.  Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised.  The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces).  The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former.  The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines.  And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.  

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on.  However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance.  The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department.  It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose.  Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq.  Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war.  I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term.  But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France.  Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis.  He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.  (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.)  And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced.  Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

***

Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).  In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy.  Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses.  Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out.  So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes.  The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about.  Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context.  The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia.  The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League.  Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.  

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition.  The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members.  There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism.  Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves.  A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'.  The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot.  Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded.  Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent.  This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).  

There is also the problem of sectarianism.  As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines.  The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment.  The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement.  Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics.  Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket.  Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics.  It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists.  They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds.  Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition.  Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?  

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime.  The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates.  This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists.  These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression.  But their remit has expanded.  While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure.  The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus.  There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy.  I see little proof of this.  Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited.  The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest.  Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open.  So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness.  Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here.  That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians. 

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria.  There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently.  It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air.  From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism.  These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes.  As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles.  To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies.  This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism.  It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism.  As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent.  Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects.  By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured.  Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence.  It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position.  This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away.  It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism.  The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism.  This is even true of partially resistant regimes.  Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon.  Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq.  His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects.  The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism.  So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically?  It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves.  Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention.  This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so.  Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran.  They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do.  For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong.  They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in.  So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly.  Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall.  Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.  

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates.  In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests.  But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it.  Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances.  Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign.  Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

There have been mass protests and strikes in Israel recently.  There's even an attempt to replicate the Tahrir effect, with protest camps being set up in Jerusalem.  Some on the Left are naturally very pessimistic about these events.  After all, the Israeli left has very rarely shown any sign of wanting to seriously overcome the colonial/racial injustice at the heart of the Zionist project.  The current protests show no sign of developing an anti-occupation stance, much less an anti-apartheid stance - far from it.  For all sorts of reasons, the colonial issue is not even mentioned, even though it reaches right into the problems galvanising their protest.  The greatest likelihood is that the Israeli state will try to resolve the social antagonism by displacing it onto the colonial plane - more settlements, more raw material robbery, possibly another war of expansion.  And given the chauvinism and racism of the great majority of Israelis, surely, you might think, they would go along with that?  The only way to properly analyse this is to base it on an understanding of Israel's class antagonisms and their relationship to the colonial project.  For my money, the best analysis of the latter was supplied by Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr.  The core of their argument is that, unlike in many other imperialist societies, the colonial dynamic predominates over domestic class antagonisms.

Certainly, every level of Israeli society, from trade unions to the education systems, the armed forces and the dominant political parties, are implicated in the apartheid system.  That was true from the very inception, in the very germinal forms of the Israeli state built up in the British Mandate period.  Israeli is a society of settlers, and this has enormous ramifications for the development of class consciousness.  As long as it thrives on building colonial outposts, as long as people identify their interests with the expansion of settler-colonialism, then there is little prospect of the working class developing an independent revolutionary agency.  Not only is it a settler-colonial society, it is also one supported with the material resources of US imperialism.  It has enjoyed considerable advantages over all regional rivals in this respect, and has thus typically enjoyed a greater capacity to contain social antagonisms.  Indeed, a certain kind of colonial welfarism was built into the foundations of Zionism.  Even Jabotinsky, the saint of the Israeli Right, held that every settler should have a house, food, education, clothing and medicine - this was essential for as long as much of the society was made up of very recent immigrants.  In the neoliberal era, this has been eroded and undermined, with some important consequences that I'll return to.  Still, Israel is unique among the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in that it is a non-oil-exporting economy with a high per capita income. With one of the highest population densities in the region, it has the ability to satisfy the needs of every citizen, even if it chooses not to do so.  In a region notorious for looming food insecurity and growing water shortages, Israel maintains a high-technology economy with a big financial sector and, for no small number of its citizens, a properous lifestyle.  It also has a large share of the world's billionaires.  Much of this wealth derives directly from the expropriation of the Palestinians, whether it's water or real estate.  In such circumstances, with colonialism such a pervasive feature of Israeli society, so central to its legitimation, and not challenged by any major political party or media outlet, it is delusional to expect the Israeli working class to be the leading agency in overcoming the racialised capitalist system they are integrated into.

Important strategic consequences follow from Machover and Orr's analysis.  If the class antagonism is dominant, then the Left should focus its activism first on organising the Israeli working class as the key to breaking the colonial project.  The self-organisation of that working class would be central to the downfall of that colonial system.  If the colonial dynamic predominates, then Machover and Orr are right to conclude that "as long as Zionism is politically and ideologically dominant within that society, and forms the accepted framework of politics, there is no chance whatsoever of the Israeli working class becoming a revolutionary class".  In which case the only solution is a regional revolutionary upsurge. 

Well, the miraculous beginnings of such a regional revolt have been evident since January this year.  There's no question that these have weakened Israel's regional position.  Internationally, it also led to the very pro-Israel Obama calling for a return to pre-1967 borders, in an attempt to save American dominance in the Middle East.  This shouldn't be exaggerated.  At the moment, it's quite germinal, and unless the revolution deepens and spreads further still, it's unlikely that the US will undertake serious material steps to curb its local watchdog.  Nonetheless, the weakening of Israel's regional position is real.  And this certainly raises the stakes of any escalation of regional aggression that it choosed to undertake.  It's also important that the Arab revolt has set the precedent for the Israeli protests, and has been produced by some of the same circumstances in terms of global recession.  But, of course, while the Arab revolution has so far had a powerful anti-imperialist dynamic (not uniformly, but broadly), any possible anti-imperialist or even 'peace' dynamic in the Israeli protests is at best latent.  Still, there are aspects of Israel's colonial economy that are linked to the sharpening of social divisions within the society.  Generally speaking, it is the Palestinians who are made to bear the costs of the occupation.  However, there are some potential antagonisms that are of relevance here.

First of all, the Israeli state invests a lot in the development of settlements, which requires an unusual degree of investment in the repressive apparatus.  That necessarily diverts resources from 'internal' development, even if the long-term payback for such colonization is expected to outweigh the costs.  Investment in the military vs investment in welfare is one of the issues that has arisen in recent Israeli debates.  Secondly, the concentrations of class power that develop in Israel are bound up with its colonial power.  For example, the specific problem at the centre of recent protests is housing.  Israel's public housing system was developed on a colonial basis - literally built on Palestinian land and property.  The current system allows developers and contractors who have grown very rich from the whole colonial project (look up the Israeli real estate firm named 'Colony') are deliberately refusing to carry out approved building schemes in order to inflate prices.   Netanyahu's decision to grant preferred development status to colonial settlements in the West Bank also helped diverted house-building activity into the frontiers.

Netanyahu's solution is a 'free market' one - reforming the housing sector in a more privatized direction.  The protesters have refused to accept his proposals, and as such the protests will probably continue.  This points to the way in which, under neoliberalism, Israel's class antagonisms have been sharpened somewhat.  Welfare has been run down and the rate of exploitation of Israel's working class has increased quite dramatically.  A recent study within Israel found that "the average Israeli works 12 years before his or her cumulative pay equals the monthly salary of the CEO of a large firm".  Unemployment is high in Israel, with the 'unproductive' the fastest growing sector of workers.  Now, before these recent protests, the predominant response of Israeli workers to this situation was to become more right-wing, and more pro-Zionist.  It was to kick the Palestinians hard.  The far right grew in power, fuelled significantly by the support of Russian immigrants, while the overwhelming majority of Israeli workers could be counted on to support bestial acts of aggression such as Operation Cast Lead.  The state became more obscenely authoritarian and racist, often without much sign of protest.  There's nothing to say things won't continue in that fashion.  As we have seen, the Right has means of racialising the transition to a more savage apartheid capitalism - consider this extraordinarily racist diatribe, published in the LA Times without irony or criticism, by a leading Israeli economist.  The argument is that Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews are lazy, out-breeding the rest of the population, and acting as a drag on the economy.  Welfare is allowing them to be lazy, he says - and one can well imagine policy being made on the basis of such arguments.  

But these protests constitute a form of class struggle that has the potential to weaken the far Right and, if pushed to a certain extent, bring the polity to a crisis that weakens its grip over the Palestinians.  The Israeli state will certainly try to resolve this by transferring the antagonism to the colonial plane, and may even launch another aggressive war.  But such solutions may run up against quite serious limits, especially if the Arab revolt deepens and spreads (what's happening in Hama and Tahrir now is very important in this respect).  Certainly, an Israeli attack on Iran could be suicidally stupid.  So, the options are limited.  

Moreover, another effect of neoliberalism has been the development of an autonomous 'business community', a more or less cohesive elite that owed little to the traditional institutions of Israeli society, looked increasingly outward for its revenues, and pushed the state to move toward direct negotiations with the PLO with the aim of reaching a settlement protecting Israeli supremacy.  (The model of Palestinian 'governance' that emerged from Oslo thus constituted a neoliberal restructuring of Israeli colonialism.)  Historically, the state took on the role of creating a Jewish bourgeoisie, since there was no such thing in Palestine prior to Israel's creation.  For several decades, the state managed a corporatist settlement with the racist trade union federation Histradut incorporated into its development plans, and Labour enjoying electoral dominance.  Substantial sectors of capital were developed on the 'Labour Zionist' model.  The emerging crisis of this model was partly solved by the 1967 colonization project, which gave Israeli capital access to resources, cheap labour, and a larger domestic market.  It further allayed domestic class conflicts by making occupied Palestinians the bottom rung of Israeli society.  Still, Israel was not spared the globalised crisis of Fordism, and undertook a similar series of responses - privatizing state-owned industries, deregulating business, opening up import markets, pursuing export markets, and encouraging finance.  The shift from state-led development to privatised, financialised accumulation was accompanied by a shift to Likud dominance, and consolidated in the 1985 Economic Stabilization plan.  (See Adam Hanieh on this background).  

This has allowed a private sector, business-oriented capitalist class to emerge, and  has thus opened some potential fissures between different sectors of the Israeli ruling class.  The IDF remains the supreme, dominant institution in Israeli society, and it continues to provide a great many profitable opportunities for Israeli capital.  But its interests are increasingly at odds with those of the wider Israeli capitalist class.  The second Palestinian intifada, for example - provoked by IDF incursions and the failure of the Palestinians to get a whiff of justice from the Oslo process - cost Israeli capital a huge amount of potential growth.  Now, the IDF's reputation for military supremacy has meant that it could always promise to extirpate any problem.  In reality, the limits of military power were illustrated quite starkly in Lebanon in 2006.

Because in Israel the colonial dynamic still predominates, and because the vast majority of Israeli workers have not begun to break with Zionism, and indeed many could reasonably claim to get some benefit from it, how these social antagonisms and elite fissures work out depends primarily on the regional context.  If the Arab Spring continues and radicalises, the weakening of Israel's position, its usefulness to Washington, and its ability to sustain military policies that sections of its ruling class already find burdensome, then the prospects of major social struggles in Israel are increased.  If not, then I suspect the Israeli ruling class can resolve its difficulties at the expense of the Palestinians and take a further lurch down the road to some sort of fascism.

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?

The New York Times reports that the US is negotiating with the Egyptian military to force Mubarak, preserve the regime, and put the Vice President and former chief of military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, in charge as transitional president. The US trusts him, of course, because in addition to torturing Egyptians he helped run the CIA's kidnapping and torturing ring, known as 'rendition'. The New Yorker summarises:

So, if we can summarise. The US backed Mubarak for more than three decades after the assassination of Sadat, supplied him with billions in aid, military equipment, torture equipment, tear gas, etc. They trained the army, forging close ties with the military top brass. The IMF vended largesse, with the usual strings attached. Beginning with Sadat's 'Open Door' policies and the peace treaty with Israel, Egypt was transformed from a nationalist, corporatist, anti-imperialist polity, into a neoliberal comprador regime. A new fraction of rentiers emerged as the financial sector grew and private sector capitalists were given greater opportunities to profit from public investments. Every crisis of the system, whether it was produced by a financial crash, a slump in oil prices, the upending of BCCI, or the long-term collapse of fruit and vegetable exports, was an occasion for further austerity, cutting 'profligate' state spending. When revenues from the nationalised petroleum company and the Suez canal bolstered state revenues, the credit for growth was allocated to the IMF and its free market wizardry. The result was that wealth was perpetually transferred to an increasingly aloof ruling class, affiliated to the regime. When Mubarak slaughtered opponents, as during the anti-Islamist counterinsurgency in 1992-97, which included the famously brutal wipe-out in a working class quarter of Embada in 1992, the US sent more money, more weapons. The CIA forged ties with the security apparatus, . Mubarak's regional importance for the US was heightened during the 'war on terror', and especially when he agreed to help impose the Quad's blockade on Gaza. The flow of weapons, money and diplomatic support was not interrupted by a wave of protests arising from the Second Intifada in 2002, or from mass strike action radiating from Mahalla in 2007, both of which Mubarak's police cracked down on viciously. But then the global capitalist system went haywire, sinking into its worst crisis for decades, which struck at the heart of the fragile accumulation regimes pursued by north African states. The protests against the regime did not begin when Tunisia went up, but it was a catalyst for a drastic escalation of the revolt. And in the last couple of weeks, the accumulated grievances and agitation of decades has exploded in an astounding revolt which has withstood waves of massacres from armed police, looting and chaos by officers out of uniform, terror by mounted and armed terror gangs (again, largely populated by Mubarak's police force) . The US responds with concern, calls for protesters to make nice, and pays tribute to Mubarak's courageous work in the fictitious 'peace process'. Officials urge Mubarak to embark on political and economic reforms to placate the opposition. For well over a week, throughout all the bloodshed, Hillary Clinton insists that the US has no plans to revise aid to the regime. US officials fearmonger about the Muslim Brothers, asserting that there must be a managed, 'orderly transition', but do not call for Mubarak to step down. The Egyptian army, presumably under instructions for the US, protects the regime, and allows it to try every measure to crush the revolt. It also moves to secure the Rafah crossing, so that no one gets any ideas. Egyptians form people's committees to manage local resistance. Workers form new trade unions, and embark on a general strike. They fend off wave after wave of assault. The US begins to hint that Mubarak should step aside and appoint a transitional government to replace him. And, unsurprisingly, it emerges that they've been negotiating to impose a trusted regime hard man. And if Egyptians won't accept Suleiman, as they almost certainly won't? Watch this space...