The claim made by the hard right clique around Ahmadinejad has been that they are the most effective defenders of the nation's sovereignty, and that their opponents are either Western imperialist agents or being manipulated by Western imperialist agents. People have been arrested and tortured under this pretext. So, when Ahmadinejad has something to say about Zionism and its moral claims, he speaks with the assumed authority of the Republic, asserting it as an ally of Palestinians and an opponent of Western imperial power. His latest comments, made on Al Quds day when Iranians demonstrate on behalf of Palestine, appear to deny that the Holocaust took place and thereby claim that Israel's moral mandate is fabricated. I would be quite prepared to be sceptical of any negative claims made about the Iranian leadership in the media, since these have been wrong in the past (cf 'wiped off the map'). And, as Israel is blatantly itching to strike Iran in some fashion, one is justified in being wary of anything that could be used in the service of such an attack. However, the attempts thus far to provide a more 'balanced' interpretation of Ahmadinejad's remarks look tentative at best.

First of all, it is patently obvious that Ahmadinejad did mean to assert that the Holocaust never took place, that it is a "lie" and a "pretext" for the founding of Israel. He further asserts that no research is permitted on the topic of the judeocide by "Zionists and Westerners". There is no point in wasting time refuting Ahmadinejad's claims, but it is worth saying a few things about them. Setting aside questions of probity, Ahmadinejad's argument does not even amount to a particularly effective attack on Zionism. It concedes the wholly false idea that the legitimacy of the 'Jewish state' derives from the Nazi holocaust - the logical corollary of his point being that if the judeocide did take place, which it did, then Israel has legitimate grounds for existence. It concedes the lie that Zionism would be a natural and logical response to antisemitism, pogroms and extermination - it was and is nothing of the sort. It is as if the ideological bases for Zionism were not established well before WWII, as if the project was not already well under way under British tutelage, and as if its founders had nothing to be embarrassed about in terms of their relationship to the Third Reich (see Francis R Nicosia's The Third Reich and the Palestine Question). I would infer that the reason for Ahmadinejad's focus on the Nazi holocaust is that he thinks that Zionism is about Jews, not about colonialism or ethnic nationalism as such. He thinks that if he can undermine the claim that Jews have suffered horrendous oppression, he can undermine the moral basis for the "Jewish state". It is an antisemitic argument, precisely because it concedes so many of the intellectual underpinnings of Zionism.

The interesting thing about this is that anti-Zionism among Palestinians is far more historically sophisticated. The PLO never adopted "revisionism", as it is euphemistically called. Its official position was always that the Nazi holocaust did take place, that it was a tragedy, and that this did not remotely justify the oppression of the Palestinians. Even Hamas, who are often attacked on this question, have been increasingly distancing themselves from that idiotic 'charter' with its references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hamas leaders have been openly denouncing Holocaust-denial, because they understand that it is no alibi to their cause. So what Ahmadinejad is doing is retrograde even in the context in which he would prefer to have it understood, that of the Palestinian struggle.

There is, moreover, a critical context to Ahmadinejad's remarks. First of all, the government is proceeding rapidly with its privatization programme. It is similar in many respects to the programme visited on Russia under IMF control in the 1990s, and is generating a similar class of state-connected 'oligarchs'. In general, the Iranian hard right accentuates external threats just at the point when it is expropriating public goods far more quickly than even the 'Washington Consensus' would recommend. Secondly, as mentioned, Ahmadinejad's remarks were made on Al Quds day. The government obviously expected that some of the protests would turn into opposition rallies, because it explicitly warned the opposition not to make an appearance. The opposition, despite the risk of arrest, torture and forced 'confessions', did turn out as it happens. And Ahmadinejad's remarks were clearly a calculated intervention, an attempt to claim a particularly reactionary and nasty kind of 'anti-Zionism' (the scare quotes are necessary in this case) for the current government.

No doubt Israel's apologists would prefer to cite Ahmadinejad's nonsense as proof of some 'genocidal' intent toward Israel. This is rather cheeky given the frequency of explicit genocidal sentiments coming from authoritative sources in Israel. Consider the Israeli defence minister's threat of a 'Holocaust' in Gaza. Or the rabbis indoctrinating IDF soldiers with exterminationist doctrine and venerations of the racist murderer Baruch Goldstein during the assault on Gaza. Or the messages left by IDF troops and settlers in Gaza and the West Bank: “Arabs need 2 die”, “Die you all”, “Make war not peace”, “1 is down, 999,999 to go”, “Die Arab Sand-n****rs”, “Exterminate The Muslims” and “Arabs To The Gas Chambers”. Ahmadinejad has nothing on these guys. Moreover, his comments are not comprehensible as a geopolitical gesture, but rather as another manoeuvre in a domestic struggle - in a class struggle, to put it bluntly.

Oh, I know, this is so last week. It's over already. The twittering has stopped, the protesters have been beaten into retreat, the Youtube videos aren't being uploaded at the same frequency. This week is all about celebrities turned zombie. Still, indulge me for a moment. This image of Ahmadi the pious populist, I think, arises in part from a certain spectacle positioning. After all, the corporate media find it difficult to construe someone as an enemy without also implying that they are some kind of 'commie', one of those heretics who rejects the sacred wisdom of property rights, free markets etc. The election commentary, with its condescending subtexts about Ahmadinejad's ability to win over the ignorant poor by tossing sacks of potatoes their way, surely reflected this. And anyway, it is not within the media's repertoire to explain the underlying divisions in Iran's ruling bloc, or to give anything but a crayola account of the class politics of elections. Partly, I suspect, such crude plot devices is what drove Juan Cole to dismiss the issue of class in his own analysis. Some belated analysis worth paying attention to, then, includes this discussion of labour under Ahmadinejad; this discussion of privatization and accumulation in Iran; and this useful discussion of the elections from the Middle East Research and Information Project.

The main point that arises, I think, is that the division that has been posited between a kind of socially conservative resource populism on the one hand, and a socially liberal austerity programme on the other, is not adequate. The more that comes out about the elections, the more it is clear that they exposed a raging war in the ruling class over political ascendancy and property, with relatively minor differences on other matters exaggerated. The second point is that the right-wing bloc behind Ahmadinejad has tended to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify the most naked transfer of wealth from the public sphere to capital, particularly to more influential players in the bazaari class and state-affiliated capitalists. They shake their fists at Washington just as they're about to go further toward neoliberalism than even the IMF proposed. And they justify it by referring to the need to break the sanctions imposed by Washington. This policy is obviously designed not to enrich the poor or sustain them in the long term, or strengthen their bargaining power as workers, but specifically to reduce their long-term wealth and purchasing power by redirecting a larger portion of socially produced wealth to a specific sector of the capitalist class. Ehsani et al are far too soft on Mousavi in their discussion (Ehsani called Mousavi's programme 'social democratic' on a mailing list, which I think is about as credible as Hamid Dabashi's claim that the man was a hardline socialist). This appears to stem from their assessment that the faction backing Ahmadinejad are uniquely dangerous and authoritarian, posing far greater dangers to democracy and labour than even the crooked neoliberals supported by Rafsanjani. Their tone may be unduly alarmist, and their approach to the elections is not one I share, but it is hard to argue with the overall analysis.

Hamid Dabashi has an interesting article on the protests in Iran. He points out that, whatever the truth on the elections, the 'fix' has become a 'social fact' inasmuch as millions of Iranians are staking their lives on that very belief. He also pointedly satirises Orientalist assumptions of the Reading-Lolita-in-Tehran variety, and takes the opportunity to remind people that solidarity, not 'democracy promotion', is what is required.

Unfortunately, the excitement about the possibility of a mass civil disobedience campaign arising does lead to an astonishing final sentence - the idea that Mousavi could be a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King beggars belief. In fact, the more one learns about Mousavi, the more unsavoury he seems, and the more it bcomes clear that his candidacy is essentially an enterprise of the plutocratic Rafsanjani family. And, as the Angry Arab has pointed out, when Mousavi was prime minister the Iranian state was much more repressive than it is now. In fact, it's hard to go along with Dabashi's wholehearted support for the 'reformists' who have yet to demonstrate that they are worthy of leadership of such a movement as this.

The movement is still in its earlier stages, there is an interesting document circulating that purports to be a 'manifesto' of the Iranian opposition. I don't know how reliable this is: one has to make allowances for the possibility of it being a forgery, or e-mail spam, or some NED bureaucrat's wet dream. Still, it does seem to summarise the main thrust of the protests - put Mousavi in charge, review the constitution, free political prisoners and disband the apparatus of repression. If the main goals are to be achieved, it looks as if the movement will have to move way beyond Mousavi in ideas and practise. If the protest movement were to die down following a recount in which Mousavi won, the result would probably be a few blunted reforms coupled with a more aggressive neoliberal policy. If a dozen deaths are to mean anything, the movement must surely acquire an independent organisational backbone to sustain it when the inevitable disappointments come.

I think it's a consensus on the liberal-left in the US and UK that the Iranian elections were fixed. If they are right, we are watching a bloodless coup turn into a bloody one, as protesters have been beaten and are now being shot at and killed by cops. One of Mousavi's supporters alleges he was told that a coup was coming. If they are not right, we are still faced with a state busily beating and killing the opposition. The Iranian state is still detaining 'reformist' MPs, censoring newspapers, shutting down access to social networking sites (although people are still finding ways to Twitter), and behaving as if for all the world it had every reason to act guiltily. It is not inherently implausible that Ahmadinejad got 63% of the vote, and it has to be shown that there was a fix. The fact that Ahmadinejad used state oil revenues to fund programmes for the poor can be approved or derided, but it arguably gave large numbers of people an interest in voting for Ahmadinejad against his more explicitly neoliberal rival. It gave him a base among some of the working class and bazaaris. Still, it is hardly implausible either that some vote-rigging went on, if only to make the win decisive enough to avoid a run-off.

So, the first question that occurs is, why should the ballots be rigged? This is skated over in a lot of the commentary as if the answer were obvious - Mousavi advocated reform, duh! However, Mousavi is hardly a dangerous candidate for the Iranian ruling class: rather, he represents a powerful faction of it. True, he was once on the 'Islamic Left' back in the 1980s, and it was due to the support of the left-leaning majles that he was made prime minister against Khomeini's preferences. Today, however, he is a centrist allied to the 'Modern Right'. His solutions to Iran's problems of accumulation and development are impeccably neoliberal. This is why he got the backing of the old crook, cynic, capitalist and Iran-Contra arms dealer, Hashem Rafsanjani. He supports privatization, and wants to reform Article 44 to assist the process. He supports strong counter-inflationary policies. Of course, he would like to take a slightly less 'hard line' with respect to the US. Indeed, like other would-be 'reform' candidates, his campaign tried to channel Obama - with some success since his wife, who spearheaded some important reforms in the late 1980s, was cast as the Michelle Obama of the campaign. Still, he isn't an outsider by any means. His candidacy wasn't struck off, while those that offend the Council of Guardians usually are. He wasn't excluded from the debates, as far as I can find out. He wasn't excluded from the polls, some of which put him ahead, and some behind. Why should he have suddenly become so dangerous that the Iranian state, or powerful sectors within it, would risk a stupid fix? The answer could only be that by tapping a popular demands for reforms, the candidacy might have unleashed a movement that seriously frightened some factions in the ruling class.

The next question is, what can come of the protests? Whatever the motivations of Mousavi, we have an enormous number of people on the streets, with a clear demand for political reform. They took to those streets, reportedly ignoring warnings that the police were carrying live ammunition. This means they are brave, certainly, and also confident in their numbers. Already, Khamenei has ceded the question of investigating the elections, which it seems clear he didn't want to do. The Iranian state may kill people, but these protesters are already starting to win. They can make gains far beyond the very limited promises that Mousavi made in order to excite progressive layers. (As far as I can tell, Mousavi was mildly critical of some state repression of television channels, and promised to 'review' legislation that could be harmful to women - hardly a tribune of the oppressed). So, whatever the truth about the claims of a fix, these protests can do nothing but good. They may, in addition to getting rid of some particularly onerous forms of oppression, open up a space in which the left can operate more freely, and in which the labour movement can assert itself more forcefully.