Failure to Reform: Five Years of Dissent in Bahrain

[Bahraini Protestors in Pearl Roundabout, 2011. Image from wikimedia.org] [Bahraini Protestors in Pearl Roundabout, 2011. Image from wikimedia.org]

Failure to Reform: Five Years of Dissent in Bahrain

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following is a summary of an event held on 11 February 2016, in the UK House of Commons, organized by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) in cooperation with Reprieve, Index on Censorship, and the LSE Middle East Society, to discuss the UK Foreign Office’s technical assistance to Bahrain.] 

The discussion was led by the Liberal Democrats Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Tom Brake MP, Academic and Co-Founder of Bahrain Watch Dr. Ala’a Shehabi, CEO of Index on Censorship Jodie Ginsberg, the Deputy Director of the Death Penalty program at Reprieve, Harriet McCulloch and the Director of Advocacy at BIRD, Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei.

Tom Brake MP, who chaired the panel, opened the discussion by criticizing the government’s recent prioritization of trade and economic affairs above human rights in the Gulf. He pointed to the appalling inconsistencies within a British government that claims that it is committed to fighting the use of the death penalty and yet has not made any efforts to address the issue in Bahrain. Mr. Brake has recently questioned the FCO on these priorities, namely the effectiveness of its spending on Bahrain amidst the continuation of systemic torture.

Harriet McCulloch then built upon Mr. Brake’s point, highlighting the UK government’s ambiguous response to the recent mass execution in Saudi Arabia and the potentially fatal consequences that this attitude might have for the young men currently on death row in Bahrain. She explained how these individuals had been targeted as a response to their dissenting political views and had been victims of highly opaque and unfair trials. Ms. McCulloch also commented on the UK government’s technical and practical assistance program in Bahrain that funds and trains two institutional bodies that operate within this flawed criminal justice system. She contended that the UK needed to use its leverage on Bahrain to make representations on behalf of those on death row and that the FCO needed to be more transparent with the millions of British tax payer money going to Bahrain.

Jodie Ginsberg focused on the Bahraini authorities’ increasingly violent clamp down upon freedom of expression. She explained how journalists could be imprisoned for criticizing the king, with the issue of National Security being used as an ambiguous justification for the detention of dissenters. Ms. Ginsberg was highly critical of the UK government’s statement that the Bahraini authorities were moving in the right direction, pointing to the cases of Nabeel Rajab who was jailed for speaking out publicly against the regime, and Abduljalil al-Singace who is serving a life sentence for leading peaceful protests and campaigning for democracy in Bahrain. She finished by urging the UK government to clarify how genuine it’s stated commitment to the flourishing of democracy in Bahrain really is.

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, provided insight into the events of 2011 in Bahrain. He explained how protests in the region reflected the frustration of the Arab people towards their governments and their future. Mr. Alwadaei emphasized that five years on the situation has not improved and that the UK’s funding of the Bahraini institutions that have perpetuated authoritarian control over the Bahraini people, and their positive reviews of the human right situation, is absurd.

Dr. Ala’a Shehabi, reiterated the importance of remembering and channeling the original spirit of the activists who took to the street five years ago. She noted how the Saudi intervention in Bahrain had set a precedent for what was to come in the region: the fracturing of the state, the increased sectarianism, and the polarization of the Arab population. Dr. Shehabi drew attention to 2016 marking the two hundredth anniversary of British-Bahraini relations, an opportunity to reflect upon a sad state of affairs.

Andy Slaughter MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Human Rights, also delivered an intervention. Mr. Slaughter mentioned Bahrain’s manipulation of it’s Human Rights rhetoric and its practice of deflecting criticism of it’s repressive actions against it’s own population. He went on to champion the individuals and organizations that were taking a stand against repression and must enable them to continue to do so through our own efforts.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412