It was good for former US President Jimmy Carter’s reputation that he lived as long as he did. For those who didn’t experience his administration between 1977 and 1981, Carter was known as an advocate committed to human rights, global public health, and service to the poor. In labelling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2007/may/27/features.review67">“apartheid,” he even won a reputation as a truth-teller</a>. 
The political amnesia that Carter’s post-presidency created led liberals to view the Carter years through rose-tinted glasses. Reverand Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who is little more than a Democratic Party shill on the liberal MSNBC network, praised Carter’s trailblazing for appointing one of Martin Luther King’s lieutenants, Andrew Young, as US ambassador to the United Nations.
Sharpton neglected to note that Carter fired Young in 1979—provoking an outcry from civil rights leaders—for the sin of meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. (Young’s ostensible purpose was to convince the PLO to support the shelving of a UN report calling for a Palestinian state!)
For many in the Washington elite and its punditocracy, Carter’s is the epitome of a failed presidency. In their superficial summaries of Carter’s term, images of lines of cars waiting for hours at gas stations, blind-folded US embassy personnel held in Tehran, or a pasty, stumbling Carter gasping for air during a 10k run combine to form an image of a bumbler in over his head. 
By the time Carter ran for re-election, a substantial section of the Democratic Party had rejected him and supported a liberal primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Carter lost in a 1980 landslide to Ronald Reagan, who many considered too “extreme” to be handed the nuclear codes. When he left office, Carter had the support of just over 30 percent in national opinion surveys.
When looking at the Carter years, we should reject the shallow score-keeping that obsesses the Washington elite. Carter was a terrible president—but not because he was ineffective or preachy in his public pronouncements. He was terrible when he was effective because much of what we have come to call the “neoliberal” era began under Carter, rather than his Republican successor Ronald Reagan.
Two deep recessions signalling the end of the long post-Second World War boom bookended Carter’s term in office. The Democrat-led New Deal political economy that underpinned much of that period unravelled, and Carter’s administration served as a transition to a new paradigm that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in Britain personified. 
What were the hallmarks of Reaganism? Cuts in social spending. Trickle-down economics based on tax cuts for the rich. A military buildup. Regressive social policy. Carter initiated all of this.
Responding to a concerted business offensive pushing for cuts to social spending, Carter reversed a lengthy period of expansion of domestic programs. His 1978 tax plan anticipated Reaganomics by cutting capital gains taxes for the wealthy while increasing Social Security taxes on workers. It was the first time since the 1930s that Congress—with an overwhelmingly Democratic Party majority—passed an unambiguously regressive tax plan.
Carter appointed banker Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve in 1979. With the president’s support, Volcker jacked up interest rates, engineering a recession and mass unemployment to cut workers’ demands for their pay to keep up with inflation.
In 1979, the Carter administration negotiated a federal government bailout of the bankrupt Chrysler Corp., requiring union givebacks and opening the way for a wave of concessionary contracts from major unions over the next decade. Carter deployed the anti-union Taft Hartley Act to halt the 1977-78 coal miners’ strike. A labour law reform intended to help unions organise went down to defeat in Congress in 1977, with Carter letting it twist in the wind.
The Carter administration <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/02/25/lessons-of-the-patco-strike">drew up the plan to fire and replace striking air traffic controllers</a>, which Reagan implemented in 1981, and began the mania for deregulation that became the economic gospel for subsequent administrations. Carter’s deregulation of trucking, air travel and energy prices led to higher prices, worse service and union-busting across key industries.
Considering his post-presidential image as Nobel laureate and international peace envoy, it is essential to recall that Carter launched the military buildup that Reagan pursued vigorously. In 1980, in the wake of revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, and the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, Carter sharply increased the military budget, reinstated registration for the military draft and created the Rapid Deployment Force for intervention in the Middle East.
His administration also changed US nuclear weapons policy to allow a US “first strike” in a “limited nuclear war” and initiated the arming and training of Islamist guerrillas <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-untold-story-of-carters-fateful-foreign-policy/">fighting the pro-Russian government in Afghanistan prior to the USSR’s invasion.</a> This covert action, later championed by the Reagan administration, nurtured the networks from which Al Qaeda emerged.
Carter established the “Carter doctrine”, a declaration that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”. This was the pretence for the US war against Iraq that began in 1991 and continued, in one way or another, for another two decades.
On the domestic front, Carter supported and signed the Hyde Amendment barring Medicaid funding for abortion in 1977. It was one of the anti-abortion movement’s first victories after the US Supreme Court legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. 
When a reporter asked Carter why he approved of a provision that disproportionately affected poor women, he responded: “There are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford, and poor people can’t”. It wasn’t the federal government’s role, he said, to make “opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved”.
Carter’s sense of Christian morality wasn’t moved in 1980 when <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/oscar-romero-el-salvador-junta-jimmy-carter-letter">Archbishop Óscar A. Romero of El Salvador appealed to his</a> “religious sentiments and your feelings for the defence of human rights” to end military aid to that country’s far-right junta, which was carrying out massacres of civilians and murders of activists in its civil war. In the month following Romero’s letter, a far-right death squad assassinated the priest. On his way out of the White House, Carter increased aid to the Salvadoran junta.
No one was more wrong about Carter than Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America. In a <a href="https://library.iire.org/node/36010">debate with the Socialist Workers Party’s Peter Camejo held on the eve of the 1976 election</a>, Harrington argued: “[T]he conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working-class militancy, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually make victories on full employment, national health, and issues like that”.
The exact opposite scenario unfolded. The Carter years marked a hinge point—not for an upsurge of militancy, but for the beginning of decades of retreat and retrenchment. As Ed Burmila wrote in Chaotic Neutral, “Carter did not merely oversee the collapse of the postwar political and economic order; he actively advanced it”.
Today’s liberals may want to put a halo on Carter and blame the generations-long shift to the right on Reagan and the Republicans. But Carter bears significant responsibility for the paving the way.
Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a>
(Haymarket, 2017).

Lance Selfa

Jimmy Carter’s real legacy

How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among the workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria have held popular mobilisations in check. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action.
The Arab Spring revolution that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the Stalinism that long dominated its politics.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
Prior to the 1930s, the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s, the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties thoroughly Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy—the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power in Russia.
The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and his supporters, the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia, not to advance working-class interests.
From the mid-1930s, Moscow directed Communists to adopt a class-collaborationist popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. As the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash put it in 1943: 
“We assure the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth ... We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property ... All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.”
This approach totally contradicted the genuine Marxist tradition. Compare Bakdash’s statement with what Lenin argued about how revolutionaries should relate to their local capitalists in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.
The precise form of the popular front varied over time, and the section of the bourgeoisie that was considered progressive could also change dramatically. During World War Two, Moscow told Arab Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British allies. Consequently, Communists opposed strikes by workers. And in the eyes of the Stalinists, the bourgeois Arab forces that continued to support the struggle against British and French colonial rule went from being progressive allies to outright fascists.
Later, the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist Arab regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:
“At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... However, this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... [T]he central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.”
But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise the masses for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi opposed a popular war of liberation to free Palestine. He argued that the Palestinian guerrilla movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to the strategy laid down by Arab governments.
The popular front approach had an incredibly damaging impact. It led to repeated defeats for the working-class movement. In Iraq following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built mass working-class support and dominated the student movement. But despite intensified repression, the Iraqi Communist Party tailed behind the government of General Kassem, which supposedly represented the “national bourgeoisie”. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat, with at least 5,000 Communists murdered and thousands more sacked from their jobs and sent to prison by the lorry load.
The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s, Iraqi Communist Party members took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.
In Egypt, the Communists initially denounced Abdul Nasser’s nationalist regime as “fascist” after it executed striking workers. But once Nasser developed friendly relations with Moscow, the Communists became cheerleaders for his regime despite the fact Nasser was imprisoning Communist Party leaders. The Egyptian Communists eventually dissolved their party into the highly authoritarian ruling party.
In Lebanon during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, the Communists refused to establish democratic control by workers over the sectors of Beirut the party’s armed wing dominated, instead tailing behind the bourgeois nationalist forces. They even went so far as to adopt communalist slogans that served to divide the working class. In Syria, the Communists were absorbed into the Assad regime’s totalitarian state apparatus, occupying minor cabinet posts. This disoriented the working-class movement, tying it to the exploiters and impeding the possibility of independent working-class actions to defend living standards and democratic rights.
Despite these repeated failures, popular-front-style class-collaborationist politics rather than clear-cut class politics in one form or another remained hegemonic on the Arab left for decades. In Palestine, the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords and clerics. And because the PCP abandoned class politics for nationalism, it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionism among its Jewish worker members (who were a majority of members in the 1930s).
The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.
In 1947, Moscow backed the setting up of the Zionist state as it saw Israel as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world.
The membership of the joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built substantial support during a postwar strike wave, collapsed from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed Moscow’s pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently, Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine. 
The Communists were discredited for many years among Palestinians driven from their land. This explains why the Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP, but had quite different origins.
The tragedy was that when these groups groped towards Marxism, the predominant ideas on offer were still those of Stalinism. They ended up embracing a popular front approach, as reflected in the names of their organisations, and with all the same problems.
The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within the state of Israel. It was, however, a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.
The new Palestinian left of the 1960s originated in the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of whom were George Habash and Wadi Haddad. The ANM was a highly secretive organisation that had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. It viewed armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war against Israel.
In its early years, the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting the upper-middle-class social backgrounds of its members, hostile to working-class politics, which it viewed as disrupting Arab national unity. After 1957, the ANM looked to Nasser’s regime in Egypt to unite the Arab world and drive out the imperialists and Zionists.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited Nasserism. The ANM condemned Nasser’s regime as petty bourgeois rather than socialist and began to look to the Vietnamese model. In December 1967, George Habash established the PFLP based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969, the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. 
Initially, the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined. The Democratic Front strongly rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, which was still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969 and 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and hostage takings.
The DFLP called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities”
as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen. 
In 1970, during the mass upheavals in Jordan, both the DFLP and the PFLP raised the slogan “All power to the resistance” and called for a socialist state. But after the Black September crushing of the resistance, the DFLP moved to the right, purging its more left-wing members and moving towards a more pro-Moscow orientation.
This explains why the DFLP, which had participated in the Left Front in the Lebanese civil war and had been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far-right Lebanese forces, largely dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with Arab regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always going to be sacrificed.
The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream leadership of the PLO. From the late 1970s, the Russians gave the group substantial funding and arms. Consequently, a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.
The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. By the early 1970s, sections of the Fatah leadership supported the idea but faced opposition within their ranks, so they were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse for the idea.
The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP and had less of a base in the refugee camps. But it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles in the Arab world. In the early 1970s, it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals. 
The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. But it was much less critical of the supposed radical Arab regimes such as Algeria, South Yemen, Syria and, at times, Iraq.
In March 1969, George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism”. “We are not as against Arab regimes as they are”, he argued. “We criticise but collaborate with Arab regimes, as Mao did with the Kuomintang against the Japanese threat in China.”
But so-called radical regimes like Algeria, Syria and Iraq were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.
So, while the PFLP called itself Marxist-Leninist and talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces.
In 1970, Habash went to China and North Korea to win support, and the Chinese began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. But this was at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with which China was trying to curry favour.
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1973 war with Israel, Yasser Arafat openly backed the proposal for a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. In response, the PFLP and other groups formed the Rejection Front, which was also backed by the Iraqi regime.
Opposition to a mini-state had a resonance among intellectuals and students and in some refugee camps in Lebanon (after all, the refugees would get nothing out of setting up a state in the Occupied Territories). However, by 1978 Iraq was moving to cosy up to the conservative Arab regimes and it consequently went cold on the Rejection Front, which went into a marked decline.
Despite tensions and battles with Fatah, the PFLP refused to break decisively with the Fatah-dominated PLO and called for the national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the PFLP consistently put nation before class. It sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of Palestinian workers and peasants.
The PFLP came to operate as a ginger group within the PLO rather than trying to build a clear socialist leadership alternative to Fatah. This led the PFLP, on several occasions, to fudge its opposition to official PLO policy in the interests of preserving national unity. 
Eventually, the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution. It came to accept it as inevitable, and when the Palestinian Authority was established, it chose to operate within its framework.
The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to the rightward-moving Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was further compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which all of the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. 
This opened the space for the rise of the Islamists, who cohered around them a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and, just like Fatah, led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.
A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and the broader Arab world that bases itself on a clear rejection of all forms of alliances with capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so-called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. One that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the refugees behind the working class and recognises that freedom for the Palestinian people can be won only by a socialist revolution that sweeps away both the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

Mick Armstrong

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

The Labor government’s deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in 1986 was a pivotal moment in Australian trade union history. Backed by most unions, including the peak Australian Council of Trade Unions, the move against the BLF was brutal. 
The union and its members were stripped of their rights federally, in the ACT and the strongest branches: NSW and Victoria. BLF members were forced to join other unions, such as the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU) or Federated Engine Drivers and Firefighters Union (FEDFA), or be sacked. The BLF could no longer represent members or win legally binding gains in the industrial relations system. A code of conduct was introduced, enforcing fines or cutting off utilities to the construction companies if they allowed BLF members to stay on their jobs. 
The BLF, initially a union of downtrodden labourers, had built itself into one of the most militant Australian unions by the 1970s. Like several unions in construction, the waterfront, mining and manufacturing, it was led by the Communist Party of Australia and contributed to rising militancy in Australia, mirroring a worldwide upsurge during the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, workplace activism accompanied more political demands and action, including anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam War movements, and support for Indigenous, women’s and gay rights. As the 1960s and 1970s militancy ebbed and bosses went on the offensive, the crucial question was which way the workers movement would go. 
Most unions embraced the politics of cosying up to the bosses. In Australia, the class collaboration of the ALP-ACTU Accord propelled the Australian Labor Party to electoral victory in 1983. Union activist Ronnie remembers “a whole layer who were sold on taking that corporate unionism line. They thought it was going to give them a power base and an ‘in’ in decision making [while] providing a minimum of protection for the working class ... a trickle-down effect”. It was “an easy option to say nothing, to sign up and shut up and collect your job and fees”. That’s the kind of unionism that rank-and-file labourer Ivor Lawrence dismisses as “just revenue making, like the bloody poker machines”. 
Apart from direct attacks, the Accord process continued to weaken union organisation. In the building and construction industry, union coverage fell to 47 percent by August 1988. The period between 1986 and 1988 marked the most dramatic decline, a fall of 58,000, the largest since 1929. 
Militancy fell off equally as dramatically, meaning that a construction boom in 1986-88 didn’t benefit workers. “I’ve been in the game since ’49”, said lifelong BL Kyran Nicholls. “I can’t remember any boom, at any time that we didn’t get something out of it. This was the biggest boom of all and we went backwards, thanks to the BWIU, the FEDFA, ACTU and mainly the Labor Party.” 
In the end, that was what even the architects of the Accord were forced to admit. The BWIU’s Tom McDonald later acknowledged that the Accord “disempowered workers and in the end undermined unionism—it took away workers’ right to struggle for higher wages and conditions with everything decided at the top echelons”. 
One of the keys to that disempowerment was the BLF deregistration. From the late 1970s, when the Liberal-National Party was in government, to the Hawke ALP government from 1983, the union was constantly investigated and threatened with fines and other legal penalties for its militancy and workplace gains. 
In 1986, after the latest investigation, which cited the union’s “addiction to slogans such as ‘Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win’” and its ability to act first and negotiate later, Labor used the combined forces of the state, the union bureaucracy and the employers against the BLF. When federal Labor delivered the deregistration blow, a triumphant industrial relations minister—or “minister of war”—in Victoria, Steve Crabb, was on the Sun’s
front page “beating [the union] into submission”. 
BLF leader Norm Gallagher dismissed the threat: “We have been deregistered before. We survived and during that time our membership increased ... We will look after ourselves, just wait and see”.
It was true that the BLF and other unions had previously overcome deregistration, or the draconian anti-union laws of the 1950s and 1960s. But this time was different. Then, other unions had rallied around the unions under attack. Now, almost everyone was acting against them.
Deregistration—D-Day 16 April 1986—and chaotic scenes spread across the industry in three states. Members were shocked on that first day. Melbourne shop steward Ivor and others felt, “How the hell can this happen? How the hell can workers do this to other workers? Disbelief”. On his job, Ivor Lawrence called a meeting, and they walked off, refusing to sign over to rival unions. Some went to the federation’s office, where other meetings and demos were being organised, determined to fight to get their jobs back.
Despite members being told the BLF had no legal status, no industrial rights and could no longer protect their wages and conditions, defiant BLs went to work determined to stay only on their federation tickets. “BLs arriving at work ... were faced with a combination of government officials armed with ‘union transfer’ documents, organisers from other unions, police on a number of sites and employers who had themselves been threatened”. As the
Age had warned earlier, solidarity would have to be broken by force. The paper assumed the government “must ... be ready to use police to clear the sites and make sure construction work can continue”.
The union kept up the struggle to survive for the rest of 1986 and into 1987. Members, many of whom kept their BLF tickets, also reluctantly joined the BWIU or FEDFA to continue the fight on the job, to fight for a principle—the right to be in the union of your choice. However, after the first few months, most of the action was in Victoria because NSW and the ACT branches were too weakened to respond effectively. 
The blows kept coming. On 13 October 1987, the BLF headquarters in Melbourne was raided by 150 Special Operations police in full attack gear amid government claims the union was funded by “Libyan money” and had $6 million in the bank. As the raid launched, a distraught unionist called out: “It’s World War Three! They’ve smashed the office like you wouldn’t believe, had a go at the staff, the women, cut the phones, tried to seize all the assets!” 
Outraged, protesters marched on parliament and again the next day as unionists walked off the Tennis Centre job and the waterfront shut down for three hours. On 15 October, a Trades Hall delegates meeting condemned the raid. At another protest, tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea, whose jailing had led to a general strike in 1969 in defiance of anti-union laws, backed the BLF.
The raid wasn’t aimed just at the BLF; it was designed to undermine the ultimately unsuccessful attempts by ex-BLF members inside the BWIU to build a rank-and-file challenge in the 1987 elections.
Though the BLF survived the raid, the government had dealt a nearly fatal blow. It appointed a custodian and, on $1,000 a day, former Judge Ian Sharp was given control of all the funds and investigative powers over the running of the branches. Instigating a raft of charges against officials and organisers, he mired the union in court cases and in May 1988 froze the union funds until 1991, also refusing to pay the union’s wages and bills. 
Even when the BLF was forced into amalgamation with the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) in 1994, the custodian held control of the BLF funds and assets until the state finally relinquished them in 2002. Not one charge was ever laid over the original accusations.
Despite all this, amid a dramatic decline in Victorian labourers’ jobs, from 21,000 to 12,000, the remaining hope for a comeback was dashed when deregistration was extended for another five years. From 1991, the only choice left was amalgamation.
In the end, the BLF’s industrial militancy wasn’t enough. Most inside the union acknowledged the federation needed a more politically based response to the Accord and more organised opposition. After deregistration, there were attempts to build such opposition with groups such as “Defend the Unions, Defend the BLF” and a Fightback Conference pulling together activists and several unions and left-wing groups. But in the lead-up to the Accord, the BLF didn’t develop and cohere a more political opposition to counter the class-collaborationist politics of unions such as the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), one of the key backers of the Accord. 
The federation was seldom able to go beyond the limits of trade union struggle and, up against the power of the state, Kyran Nicholls pointed out, no union on its own could have won. Nonetheless, it was more prepared than most to take that struggle to the edge. As John Cummins said: “If we hadn’t fought, hadn’t run the distance, it [the sacrifices of rank-and-file BLs], it would have all been lost”.
Organised building workers prepared to fight not just for themselves but also for the rights of other workers and many oppressed groups—that is what brought the BLF up against the forces of capitalism and led to the campaign to smash it. This is why we remember the union to this day.
All quotes are from Liz Ross’ book Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win! The 1986 deregistration of the BLF, available from Red Flag Books.

Liz Ross

The last time Labor deregistered a construction union

Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Palestine has now brought the Middle East to the brink of regional catastrophe. But if you open up a newspaper in the West, you’ll read that the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East is the victim of aggression from its neighbours, including one it has just invaded for the fourth time. And while Israel is doing nothing but “defending itself”, its regional rival Iran is being painted as enemy number one. 
The irony is that Iran was once a vital US ally in the Middle East. The post-WW2 period was a golden age of US influence in Iran, during which control over the spigot of Iranian oil was transferred from the British to the US empire. 
In 1953, the US sponsored a coup against progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oilfields. In the following decade, Iran became increasingly authoritarian. The anti-communist and pro-Western king, or shah, was a welcome friend to the US in an era when pan-Arab nationalism was threatening US interests in the Arab states. 
In 1979, a revolution swept aside the hated shah. The revolution, which had opened up the possibility of liberation for workers, women and oppressed minorities, was ultimately hijacked by the clerics, who implemented a new authoritarian state, the Islamic Republic. Unlike the previous autocracy, this regime did not ally with US imperialism, instead presenting itself as intractably hostile to US influence in the Middle East. 
Iran’s anti-Western posture has given a measure of popularity to an otherwise despised regime. And no wonder, given the US has long been the greatest purveyor of violence and instability in the Middle East. 
As a rival capitalist power, Iran has benefited from anti-US feeling and from the US’s strategic failures in the region, particularly during the “War on Terror”. Iran’s major rival, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was removed from power by the US in 2003, and Iran was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created when the US proved unable to establish a pro-Western government. 
Iran’s regional influence was also boosted by the defeat of Israel in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an independent militia strategically allied to Iran, following Israel’s invasion in 2006. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Iran also carried out military interventions to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with the support of Hezbollah, and sponsored the Houthis in Yemen against local forces and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states. 
Renewed Iranian influence has presented a strategic dilemma for US imperialism. In the last 15 years, there has been debate in the US ruling class about whether confrontation or containment is the best approach. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 represented a pragmatic response to the failure of US occupations in the Middle East. The deal sought to balance overwhelming US military superiority and deterrence with a partial loosening of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The motivation for the deal was hardly peacenik: Obama was attempting to tie up loose ends in the Middle East the better to carry out a “pivot to Asia” and prepare for war with China. 
In the intervening years, Trump tore up the nuclear deal and carried out the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Aside from plying their ally Israel with weapons and levelling ever greater sanctions on Iran’s economy, the US has not had a coherent strategy for confronting or containing Iran. 
There is no shortage of anti-Iranian hawks in the US today. When asked in an interview with 60 Minutes what country represents the “greatest adversary” to the US, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed that Iran was the “obvious” answer. At a campaign event in North Carolina, Donald Trump encouraged Israel to strike Iranian territory to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.
And while there are no doubt differences of opinion in the US elite about Israeli strikes on Iran—whether to avoid hitting oil infrastructure, which would risk destabilising oil prices, and whether to avoid attacks on nuclear facilities, for example—if Israel decides to strike, the US will back it. 
It is absurd to suggest today, as so many in Israel and the West do, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. Israel has never been more secure. The Gulf states have all but normalised relations, Egypt maintains the barbaric blockade on the Rafah crossing into Gaza, and Jordan shoots down Iranian rockets to defend Israel. Israel, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to any neighbour that finds itself at odds with US imperialism. 
A comparison of their military capacities and security alliances shows a stark gulf between them. Israel is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the backing of US imperialism and spends nearly three times Iran’s annual military budget. Iran is a relatively weak power, strained under the weight of crippling US sanctions. This is not the clashing of two comparable powers but an attempt to assert full spectrum US and Israeli dominance in the Middle East, which should be resolutely opposed. If war emerges between Israel, backed by the US, and Iran, socialists should be for Israel’s defeat.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Animosity from the US and Israel does not make it progressive. The anti-government protests and strikes that accompanied the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 were a positive development that required solidarity. Opposition to an attack on Iran, and the desire to see Israel roundly defeated, does not reflect political support for the Iranian regime, just as opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not imply support for Saddam Hussein. 
Now as then, anti-war activists in the West have a responsibility to reject the lies and expose the hypocrisy of Israel and the West’s wars—current and threatened—in the Middle East.

Chloe Rafferty

How Iran became Western enemy number one

The children of the stones 
have scattered our papers 
spilled ink on our clothes 
mocked the banality of old texts ... 
What matters about 
the children of the stones 
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst 
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness, 
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat ... 
The most important 
thing about them is that they have rebelled 
against the authority of their fathers.
Nizar Qabbani—Syrian poet
The First Intifada was one of the deepest and longest-lasting rebellions of Palestinians against Israeli oppression in history. It was known as the “uprising of stones”. 
The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the youth, hurling rocks, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against Israeli tanks. This figure represented a break from the militarised forms of Palestinian resistance that had dominated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Intifada involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and even inside Israel, and represented a broad and deep radicalisation of the Palestinian population. It involved resistance, civil disobedience, strikes and protests. 
Stories from journalists at the time reveal the breadth of popular involvement. American Ramallah-based journalist Joe Stork described how a middle-aged working-class woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joined a group of young boys building a roadblock. 
Another article described a toothless 100-year-old woman admitted to a Gaza hospital after having her hand broken by Israeli soldiers. As she entered the ward, she sat up on the bed and gave a speech of defiance to the applause of other victims in surrounding beds.
Over the course of the six years, there were times when the Intifada managed to achieve something like dual power. Palestinian popular committees took over significant elements of civil society and social infrastructure. This was all in response to increased Israeli control and brutalisation of Palestinians in the preceding decades.
After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank following the 1967 war, the intensification of military rule became unbearable. These conditions provoked extreme resentment amongst the Palestinians, and, throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, there was an increase in organisation. Students played a leading role, with universities starting community programs and organising protests. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency as all Palestinian factions turned toward organising workers. 
The immediate event that sparked the Intifada occurred in Gaza on 9 December 1987. An Israeli army tank drove into a line of cars of Arab workers who had just passed one of the military checkpoints at the northern entrance to the Gaza Strip. Four were crushed to death and seven were seriously injured. The crime was witnessed by hundreds of labourers returning from jobs in Israel. 
Three of the dead men were from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp. Their funerals turned into a huge demonstration of 10,000 camp residents. From this moment onwards, the residents of the camp referred to it as the “camp of the revolution”. 
The killings sparked waves of similar actions across the refugee camps, home to the poorest and most oppressed Palestinians. One young resident in Gaza said: “We were waiting to do such an uprising. Everyone here has a demonstration inside their heart”. 
The insurgence of the early demonstrations provoked a violent reaction from the Israeli military. Hundreds of young people were arbitrarily arrested. The military picked them up and imprisoned them. Eventually, the Israelis converted an army camp on the edge of Gaza city into a new place to hold young men. Palestinians dubbed it “Ansar II” after the notorious POW camp Israel set up in southern Lebanon. Ansar II became infamous for its sadistic treatment of Palestinians, which included clubbing prisoners while they were shackled to the ground. 
Curfews were introduced; telephone lines, water and electricity were cut. Administrative detention was introduced, and activists were deported. 
By 1988, Israel was sending 10,000 troops every day into the West Bank and Gaza, using more soldiers than in their conquest in 1967. By the end of 1988, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been detained and hundreds killed.
This initial phase of the uprising was primarily a war of the camps versus the army, but by mid-January 1988, the villages also became centres of resistance. Women and the young were at the centre of the rebellion. There were stories about boys, so young that they had to stand on their tiptoes to look through car windows, staffing the Palestinian checkpoints established by the uprising. Women routinely attacked Israeli patrols with pots and pans to release detained youths. Outside one Ramallah prison in late 1988, three women claimed an arrested youth, explaining: “They are all our sons”. This phrase became a refrain throughout the whole of the Intifada. Women even talked about protecting their “sons” as their profession. 
All this resistance would have been significant enough, but the rebellion deepened and expanded in a variety of ways. Tax strikes were organised and Israeli goods boycotted.
Importantly, workers began to mobilise. Over the decades, the numbers of Palestinian workers working low-wage jobs in the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Wage workers became a larger part of the Palestinian population overall, and unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that, out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were members of a union. 
Strikes became a regular feature of the Intifada. In late December 1987, a general strike of Palestinian workers occurred across all the Occupied Territories. Israeli profits collapsed in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming. 
The organisation of workers was not, however, unified. There were several union federations and blocs organised along political lines—many of whom were competing for members. 
Other committees were also established: youth committees, medical committees, popular and neighbourhood committees, and local defence committees.
The neighbourhood and popular committees became responsible for the running of basic infrastructure, including health, education and rubbish collection. When schools were shut down by military order, the committees established alternative schools with a whole new curriculum. 
These committees did more than help organise different elements of society. They started to give political and social confidence in new ways. Many of the generational and class relations were shifting. The class forces that had dominated society, like intellectuals and professionals, began to seem marginal. There were open challenges to old leaders and old hierarchies. 
The idea behind many of these committees was to disengage from existing Israeli structures and lay the basis for Palestinian statehood. Or, according to Salim Tamari, “To prepare the Occupied Territories to receive the national authority.” 
While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This was called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions: Islamic Jihad and Hamas. 
The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. They were distributed at night, on the ground or tucked under car windshields or doors. The directives were assiduously followed. 
The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and also the leadership amongst the diaspora. The diasporic leadership developed a broader strategic orientation. The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The UNLU was mainly run by the organisations affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This included the increasingly dominant Fateh, led by Yasser Arafat. Fateh was a compromised and conservative nationalist organisation. Its horizons were shaped simultaneously by its cosy relationships with despotic regional powers and a desire for a Palestinian mini-state. The other main factions were the Maoist-influenced leftist organisations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Later, the Communist Party joined. 
All these factions organised their own committees and trade unions. While there were often sharp disagreements between the factions on a range of questions, all held to a generally nationalist framework. In the unions, this meant that the class struggle should be frozen in the interests of a “nationalist alliance” between workers and bosses in the Occupied Territories. An independent Palestinian state needed to be established before the class struggle could begin. Such a political approach meant that, although the unions were a vital element of the Intifada, the workers movement did not fundamentally shape the political contours of the popular committees. This was a missed opportunity. By the end of the first year of the Intifada, there was such a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state that there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power, workers power, was necessary. 
But even if such a view was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working class. Indeed, twentieth century postcolonial states have often become hell-scapes for workers. Workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.
The Intifada inspired other regional uprisings in Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf States. These rebellions weren’t just in solidarity with Palestine: they challenged the regional order. This was something that the Fateh leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.
The resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fateh leadership. While Fateh understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. Fateh saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays. 
In the wake of the Intifada, the Israeli and US ruling classes felt that they were unable to continue ruling in the old way. Much better to find a collaborationist Palestinian leadership. Fateh happily obliged, thus beginning the disastrous Oslo Accords that ended in the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. 
Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory, while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state, and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals. 
At the same time, between 1991 and 1993, the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many leading activists. This repression occurred while Fateh was deliberately fragmenting the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada.
Tragically, the promise of the Intifada was lost. It was crushed by an Israeli state that was determined to continue its rule over the Palestinians in whatever way it could, by violence and
negotiation. 
The Intifada was also betrayed by a Palestinian leadership that preferred to chase the dream of a Palestinian capitalist state in which its own power and prestige would be safeguarded. Finally, all that brilliant defiant energy was squandered by a left that refused to try to carve out a different, more radical path: a path that was certainly more difficult, but that centred working-class resistance in the Occupied Territories, that argued for regional revolution and looked to the power of the masses rather than the power of states.

Vashti Fox

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

Israel’s latest murderous assault on Lebanon is part of a recurring pattern of imperialist aggression. Israel has invaded Lebanon three times previously—in 1978, 1982 and 2006. On each occasion, Israel inflicted horrific death and misery as well as destroying vital infrastructure and forcing thousands of people from their homes. 
The three previous invasions are, however, only part of the story of Israel’s concerted aggression against the Lebanese people. For well over 50 years, there have been repeated Israeli air raids, sabotage operations, naval attacks, border raids and the funding of the military operations of Lebanese fascist forces. And for many years, Israel maintained an occupation of south Lebanon.
After the defeat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan in 1971, Lebanon became the main centre of the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation. To counter the Palestinian forces, Israel attacked Lebanon more than 6,200 times between 1968 and 1975.
As a consequence of the Israeli aerial attacks, some of the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon were totally levelled. By October 1977, about 300,000 refugees—mainly Lebanese Shia Muslims—had fled southern Lebanon.
These attacks provoked mass popular opposition amongst workers and the poor in Lebanon. After the Israelis assassinated three Palestinian leaders in Beirut in 1973, 250,000 demonstrators, roughly a tenth of the population of Lebanon, marched in protest. The Lebanese army, however, refused to lift a finger to fight Israel and instead tried to crush the resistance.
The ongoing raids into south Lebanon radicalised the predominantly Shiite population of the south and led to the rapid growth of the Lebanese Communist Party, the Organization of Communist Action and other socialist groups. These groups organised armed militias to repel Israeli attacks.
Israel in turn armed and trained fascist militias in Lebanon. The largest militia, the Kataeb or Phalange, had been directly inspired by General Franco’s Spanish fascists of the 1930s.
In March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in an attempt to crush the PLO’s guerrilla forces. The Israel Defence Force unleashed cluster bombs provided by the United States against the civilian population, killing between 1,100 and 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and forcing 100,000 to 250,000 to flee as refugees.
Israel installed their far-right ally, the South Lebanon Army militia, to preside over Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. During its long years of military rule, the South Lebanon Army, which was cohered, armed and trained by Israel, became notorious for its sheer brutality. In 1985, it set up the Khiam detention centre, where torture was carried out on a large scale against its popular opponents.
In 1982, Israel invaded again. This time, Israeli troops advanced all the way to the Lebanese capital Beirut. They laid siege to the city for nearly two months to starve the population into submission. They then unleashed their fascist Lebanese allies to carry out a horrific massacre of the population of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
In some areas of southern Lebanon, the Islamist organisation Amal was able to mobilise sections of the Shiite population against the Palestinians and the left, who they blamed for the devastation wreaked by Israel. Amal aped the fascist Phalange with its own massacres of Palestinians. Nonetheless, over the next few years a concerted struggle by left-wing and Arab nationalist forces managed to drive the Israelis out of all but a small strip of southern Lebanon.
By 2006, Hezbollah had established itself as a powerful force in Lebanon, both politically and militarily. So Israel again invaded, determined to take out Hezbollah and thus severely weaken the strategic position of Hezbollah’s ally Iran.
As is invariably the case, Israel was backed by the US, which vetoed a UN ceasefire resolution. Initially, most of the surrounding Sunni Arab states were happy to see Israel take on their regional rival.
But this time the Israeli steamroller was stopped in its tracks as Hezbollah was able to galvanise widespread popular support from outside its core Shia communal base. After 33 days of intense fighting, the Israel Defence Force was forced to retreat with its tail between its legs.
Israel has long held plans for another assault on Hezbollah to make amends for its defeat in 2006. Israel’s public justification this time is that it is simply responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah, a listed terrorist organisation.
But the Israeli state and, notoriously, its security apparatus Mossad have long been among the most proficient and blatant exponents of terrorism—car bombings, individual assassinations, poisonings and sabotage operations—all around the world. The recent coordinated Israeli attack on pagers and walkie-talkies is just their latest terrorist atrocity.
Yet again Israel’s war drive is backed by the US and other Western powers such as Australia. The US administration doesn’t relish the prospect of a war with Iran, which Israel’s assault on Hezbollah opens up. Nonetheless, the US continues to pour in the weaponry that Israel vitally depends on to carry out its assault on Lebanon and is sending more warships and troops to the Middle East to back Israel. Why?
Because whatever its “excesses”, Israel is a key strategic force defending the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East. With its enormous oil wealth and its strategic location, including the vital international trade route the Suez Canal, the region is of vital importance to world capitalism.
Consequently, the US establishment, including both major political parties, continues to provide the political support and the enormous military hardware necessary for Israel to wage its repeated wars and to carry out its genocide in Gaza.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the relation of Israel to Western imperialism as early as September 1951: “Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog ... Should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes it can rely on Israel punishing severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits”.
Indeed, most of Israel’s innumerable wars have been waged, not against the Palestinians, but against the neighbouring Arab states. As far back as 1956, Israel made clear its role as a protector of Western imperialist interests by joining the old imperial powers of France and Britain in a war on Egypt. The war was in response to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s new nationalist government led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. 
Since then, Israel has waged war after war against the surrounding Arab states. It was Israel’s lightning military victory in 1967 over Egypt, Syria and Jordan that really demonstrated Israel’s worth to the US as a power in the region.
In the wake of the 1967 war, the US began to throw its full weight behind Israel with much greater political, financial and military support. It became the key defender of Western imperialist interests in a volatile region. Israel’s latest war is no exception to this pattern. 
There has been much hypocritical hand-wringing in the West, including by the Albanese government, over the devastation being inflicted on Lebanon. But the Western leaders’ calls for a ceasefire and “restraint” by Israel are nothing more than a show.
The rich and powerful in the US, Britain and Australia know on which side their bread is buttered. A victory for Israel very much serves their rapacious capitalist interests. We must stridently oppose this war.

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

September marked the 25th anniversary of Australia’s military intervention in East Timor (Timor-Leste). Official commemorations tell a story of Australian sacrifice in the service of peace and humanitarianism. The grubby details of how Australia deprived one of the world’s poorest countries of billions of dollars in revenue from oil and gas royalties are missing from this narrative. 
In 2002, East Timorese Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri sat down with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer to renegotiate revenue-sharing arrangements previously agreed with Indonesia when it occupied East Timor. Keeping those prior agreements in place would leave the world’s newest nation with, as Alkatiri put it, “scrapings off a plate”. Securing a decent new deal was vital to the financial future of the world’s newest nation. However, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/how-they-fooled-us-on-east-timor-20030311-gdvctw.html">as reported in the Age</a>, decency was not on Downer’s agenda. 
“We are not going to negotiate the Timor Sea Treaty—understand that”, he told Alkatiri. “It doesn’t matter what your Western advisers say ... There will be no new joint development area for [oil and gas field] Greater Sunrise ... We are very tough. We will not care if you give information to the media. Let me give you a tutorial in politics—not a chance.” 
Downer’s arrogance and bullying are typical of how Australian imperialism has treated East Timor over many years.
When Indonesia’s General Suharto established his dictatorship in 1965, up to a million Indonesian citizens were murdered due to their actual or alleged involvement in left-wing politics. Suharto also invaded East Timor in 1975, as it was on the brink of gaining independence from Portuguese colonial rule. An estimated 200,000 East Timorese were killed as a result of the invasion, around a third of the population. 
In 1998, Suharto was forced from power by a mass democracy movement. In East Timor, the liberation struggle gathered renewed strength, with strikes and demonstrations challenging Indonesian rule. With his government near bankruptcy following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and dependent on international aid, new Indonesian president B.J. Habibie viewed East Timor as a financial and political liability. So he agreed to hold a referendum in August 1999, offering a choice between regional autonomy within Indonesia and complete independence.
The vote was overwhelmingly for independence, despite a campaign of violent intimidation waged by armed militias organised by the Indonesian military. When their defeat was confirmed, the Indonesian forces went on a rampage as they withdrew from the territory. They killed as many as 1,200 East Timorese, looted whatever they could carry away and burned anything they could not. As many as 400,000 civilians, half the population, were displaced. Up to 250,000 were transported into West Timor, most forcibly. It was both brutal retribution and a warning to those favouring independence in other Indonesian provinces, such as Aceh and West Papua.
At this point, the Australian government sent in its military to restore order. This was not due to a deeply held concern for human rights. Despite its genocidal crimes, or rather because of them, the Suharto regime had no better friend internationally than Australia. Successive governments, both Liberal and Labor, had been happy to have the threat of communism or a “South-East Asian Cuba” removed from Australia’s doorstep. But East Timorese independence was now an unavoidable reality. The transition needed to be managed so that it went as smoothly as possible, preventing the “regional instability” that Australian governments have obsessed over for decades.
Naturally, the military intervention was spearheaded by elite soldiers of the Special Air Service (SAS). These units have since gained infamy due to alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan. But ABC investigative journalist Mark Willacy argues that the pattern of SAS brutality and lawlessness actually began in East Timor.
Reporting for Four Corners in 2022, Willacy <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-04/ghosts-of-timor:-the-dark-stain-on-australias/13826106">uncovered allegations</a> from New Zealand SAS troops that their Australian counterparts had illegally killed members of a pro-Indonesian militia or, at the very least, desecrated the bodies of combatants after they were killed. This occurred after two Australian soldiers were wounded near the town of Suai in October 1999, the SAS reportedly keen on delivering payback.
The SAS is also alleged to have <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-11/ghosts-of-timor/13836288">operated a clandestine interrogation facility</a> at Dili’s heliport. Here, detainees were tortured, including by beatings, the use of stress positions and food and water deprivation. Even the military’s own legal advisers were denied access to the facility. In one incident, Australian soldiers thought they had captured an Indonesian special forces operative—because he would not answer questions despite being tortured. In reality, he was an East Timorese civilian who suffered from hearing impairment. No Australian personnel were ever punished over these incidents, despite lengthy investigations by military police.
Beyond the actions of frontline soldiers, Australia’s whole approach was to treat East Timor as primarily a security problem, not a humanitarian crisis. Of the $3.9 billion Australia spent on the East Timor intervention between 1999 and 2004, only $225 million was spent on aid. Most of the remaining funds went towards Australia’s military and police deployment. 
Even aid spending was geared towards strengthening the East Timorese state, training for the local army and police force being prioritised above providing health services, clean water or education. East Timorese NGOs that questioned these priorities risked Australia cutting their funding. At least one organisation suffered this fate in 2004 after signing a statement criticising Australia’s stance on border negotiations.
It is, above all, the oil and gas revenues that have fuelled East Timorese anger towards Australia since its independence. In 2016, thousands of East Timorese <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/big-protest-confronts-australian-embassy-dili">protested outside the Australian embassy in Dili</a>, chanting: “Long Live East Timor! Down with Australia!” Two years earlier, activists graffitied the embassy walls with an image of a kangaroo and an emu greedily sucking up a pot full of East Timor’s oil. It is a far cry from Australia’s self-image as liberators.
The border issue originated in a 1972 treaty in which Australia secured highly advantageous terms from Indonesia. Rather than drawing the border midway between the two countries’ land masses, it was placed at the edge of Australia’s sea-floor continental shelf, which extends far closer to the Indonesian side of the Timor Sea. This agreement left what was known as the “Timor Gap” along the stretch of coastline then controlled by Portugal.
After Indonesia’s invasion, the substantial oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea were up for grabs. Australia and Indonesia agreed to divide these spoils without finalising a formal international border. Labor’s Gareth Evans and Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alitas famously signed the Timor Gap Treaty in 1989 while sipping champagne on a jet flying over the Timor Sea. Far below, out of sight and out of mind, the East Timorese continued to suffer under occupation.
This was the treaty Alkatiri wanted to renegotiate in 2002, based on the basic principle that the border, and hence division of revenues, should follow the median line between the two countries. This would put most, if not all, of the oil and gas on East Timor’s side of the border. It was a position backed up by international maritime law. So Australia simply withdrew from the international court that arbitrates maritime border disputes.
That left East Timor in a weak negotiating position, given its desperate need for finances to rebuild the country. Its government accepted treaties in 2002 and 2006 that, although granting some concessions, allowed Australia to continue extracting billions of dollars in revenue that rightfully belonged to East Timor. In particular, Australia kept hold of the bulk of future royalties expected from the unexploited Greater Sunrise gas field. 
But there was a further twist to come. In 2012, a former Australian spy, known only as “Witness K”, publicly revealed that he had been part of an operation to plant listening devices in offices of the East Timorese government during the negotiations, using the cover of an aid project. He was prompted to speak out when Alexander Downer was appointed to a lucrative position as adviser to Woodside Petroleum, which has a major stake in oil and gas developments in the Timor Sea. 
For revealing Australia’s crime, Witness K faced years of legal persecution and eventually pleaded guilty to national security offences. Even his lawyer, former ACT Attorney-General Bernard Collaery, was pursued through the courts for years before charges against him were eventually dropped. 
The spy operation gave Australia detailed information about East Timor’s negotiating position on the border dispute. It was clearly illegal and violated East Timor’s sovereignty. Yet Labor’s Julia Gillard, who was prime minister when the spying was revealed, refused to renegotiate the revenue-sharing agreement. When East Timor referred the matter to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, Australia prevented Witness K or Collaery from travelling overseas to give evidence.
The ongoing court cases and international attention were deeply embarrassing for Australia, which likes to lecture other countries about the importance of the “rule of law”, not least in relation to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The legal uncertainties were also delaying the development of the Greater Sunrise field. So eventually, in 2018, a new border was agreed upon, which mostly follows the line of median distance between Australia and East Timor.
The catch? The oil and gas fields were already mostly exhausted. Only Greater Sunrise still contains major unexploited deposits, and Australia will continue to take a sizeable chunk of those royalties. Australia will not repay the billions of dollars in extra revenue that would have gone to East Timor had a fair border been established in 2002. And so the grotesque situation continues of one of the richest countries on earth draining resources from one of the poorest.
The East Timor intervention was Australia’s largest deployment of troops since the Vietnam War, heralding a new era of “regional interventionism”. Over the next decade, Australia sent military, police and government administrators to the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Tonga, Nauru and once again East Timor. These neo-colonial adventures were used to justify major increases in Australia’s military budget. But they have done nothing to solve the underlying poverty and underdevelopment in Pacific island nations.
Today, Australia competes intensely with China for influence within the south-west Pacific region. Australian diplomacy makes much of China’s supposed threat to the sovereignty of smaller countries and its desire to exploit the region’s natural resources. Australia, in contrast, boasts of belonging to the “Pacific family” and is motivated only by a desire to help its neighbours. It’s hard to reconcile this rosy self-image with Australia’s history of bullying, espionage and greed in East Timor.

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How Iran became Western enemy number one

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

Guns, espionage and oil: the Australian intervention in East Timor 25 years on

Socialists and the US civil rights movement: an interview with Joel Geier

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