Bahrain. Palestine, engine of popular discontent

“Palestine is our cry, Bahrain is our pain” can be read on the walls. Here, the graffiti are evidence of the dissidence, but also of the repression, as the authorities spray them over with black paint, often in the middle of the night. Which doesn’t prevent their reappearing by the hundreds. In August 2025, the return of the Israeli ambassador to Manama, the capital of Bahrain, after an absence of eighteen months, brought the Bahrainis out onto the streets. According to the website Al-Bahrain al-Youm, twelve people were arrested.

For security reasons, but above all at the behest of a monarchy bent on preserving its stability, Israel withdrew its diplomatic representation from the archipelago the day after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023: its embassy had been opened just a few weeks earlier, three years after the conclusion of the Abraham Accords.

For many Bahrainis, the appointment of a new ambassador, Shmuel Revel, amounted to a provocation. As if Israel’s war on Gaza, its raids and its impunity had made no difference, as if the normalisation of relations with Tel Aviv could proceed as before. The village of Diraz, historic bastion of protests on the north-west coast, as well as the Manama suburbs of Sanabis and Abu Saiba, were seething with anger.

Palestinian flags and anti-regime banners

For the opposition, the Palestinian issue closely resembles its own struggle against the authoritarian nature of the reigning Al Khalifa dynasty, a family which belongs to the Sunni minority of Bahrain, where the majority of the population is Shi’ite. Since the uprising that occurred in the context of the 2011 “Arab Springs”, the regime has systematically crushed every urge for change, mainly driven by the Shi’ite young, and developed new surveillance techniques.

The power structure’s repressive arsenal is well-honed: arbitrary arrests, night raids into neighbourhoods considered hostile to the Khalifas, and increasingly sophisticated digital censorship. In 2023, according to Human Rights Watch, at least 57 individuals, including some minors, were arrested for having attended gatherings in support of Gaza or having posted pictures on the internet.

Young people organise flash hook-ups on digital channels to share videos of the repression in Gaza, and issue calls to boycott Israeli products. As elsewhere in the Gulf monarchies, the retail chains accused of supporting Israeli settlement activity are especially targeted. Faced with popular pressure, Majid Al Furraim, the Emirati group which holds the Carrefour franchise in several countries, has chosen to rename its stores HyperMax in order to ease tensions and safeguard its position in the Middle East market. In spite of the risks, hashtags in Arabic like #BahrainisAgainstNormalisation or #PalestineScreamsInUs are posted on social networks.

Far from being an isolated phenomenon, this dissidence is part of a long tradition of struggle. From the uprisings of the 1960s, when peasants and workers defied the Al Khalifas’ feudal order, to the strikes and street protests of the 1990s, when the people as a whole demanded justice and political rights, each generation has written its own page, and fuelled the excitement of February 2011 when thousands of Bahrainis converged on the Pearl roundabout at the centre of Manama in the wake of the “Arab Springs”. The brutal repression of that movement, a violence orchestrated by the Gulf Cooperation Council, resulted in 60 dead and a wave of arrests, plunging whole families into mourning or exile.

Between 1950 and 1954, the years of its birth and death, the magazine Sawt al-Bahrain, founded by a group of Arab nationalist intellectuals including trades union activist Abdulrahman Mohammed al-Bakr and journalist Ali Sayyar, played a key role in backing the Palestinian cause and the formation of a regional political awareness. This periodical, with its anti-colonial and progressive outlook, also published contributions from famous Arab writers such as the Palestinian poetess Fadwa Tuqan whose work speaks of justice and resistance. Such writings are widely circulated in Bahraini educational and intellectual circles, helping to awaken younger generations to the ideals of Arab solidarity. At the same time, in schools, in cultural associations and in the ma’tam (Shi’ite mourning halls), the Palestine question became a vehicle for political and moral education, linking the collective memory with the struggle against oppression.

In the Shi’ite villages and neighbourhoods, the systematic repression has given rise to an identity based on protest. Children who have grown up in the shadow of mass arrests have developed a political consciousness in prison visiting rooms turned political education hubs, or during rituals of mourning or commemoration, organised in villages by the families, and which are also occasions for voicing demands. This inter-generational transmission rests upon what the university scholar Luke G.G. Bhatia has identified in his research on Bahrain as a “militant family capital”, which enables young people to perpetuate militant commitment in spite of the repression.

Deprived of their imprisoned or exiled leaders, the Bahrainis have shifted their battleground to the social networks. In 2025, personalities like the prisoners’ rights activist, Ahmed Dawood, and his wife Iman Shaker al-Mahouzi, both arrested and gaoled, may be said to embody this evolution towards an activism which stands apart from any organisation¹. The diaspora, represented by voices such as those of Mar-yam and Zainab al-Khawaja, well-known for their defence of human rights², or Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the London-based director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), are trying to transform their exile into a weapon for transnational mobilisation .

Technological arsenal

The regime, which has already invested heavily in control of the digital area, has further strengthened it with the appointment of key figures to run it. The first of these is the King’s favourite son, Shaikh Nasser Ben Hamad Al Khalifa, who has commanded the Royal Guard since 2011; the other is his half-brother Crown Prince Salman, who presides over digital intelligence. This activity involves, in particular, the surveillance of online messaging, the infiltration of militant groups, and the condemnation of any critical utterances on the grounds of “breaching national security”.

Bahrain has endowed its security apparatus with a technological arsenal combining two approaches. Firstly, there is deep packet inspection (DPI), the in-depth analysis of internet traffic, enabling the authorities to filter, block or monitor communications on a large scale. Contrary to the usual spyware, this does not target individuals but whole data-flows, intercepting exchanges and detecting suspicious key-words, links, or applications. According to Citizen Lab, Privacy International and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Bahrain adopted these systems in the years after 2010 in order to suppress its Arab Spring.

Secondly, spyware and malware are used for purposes of espionage. They infiltrate smartphones, computers and tablets to take control of them, read their messages, ac-tivate cameras and mikes, and geolocate their owners in real time. Their power re-sides in their stealth. The best known of these is Pegasus, developed by an Israeli company, NSO Group, and used by Bahrain to spy on several exiled opponents. In 2021 an investigation by the consortium Forbidden Stories revealed that the regime had spied on at least thirteen individuals belonging to Bahraini civil society, among them lawyers, journalists and physicians³.

Accords that open the floodgates of cyber control

Since the Abraham Accords were signed in September 2020, this surveillance has also been grounded in technologies imported from Israeli companies specialising in cyber-security and digital espionage. In this cutting-edge field, Israeli know-how is a world leader. Normalisation with Israel is part of a broader dynamic of technological rapprochement with the Zionist entity which has reinforced the regime’s capacity to track down dissident voices. Its security apparatus depends today on very specialised tools such as those provided by Verint Systems and NSO Group, but also by XM Cyber, set up by former Mossad officers; or by Cellebrite, specialised in the retrieval and analysis of digital data.

In this hi-tech market, the monarchy is not content simply to acquire tools; it seeks to increase its expertise by taking inspiration from Israel’s tchnological know-how. Villages identified as hotbeds of opposition, telecom networks and public institutions are all under constant surveillance. The authorities no longer confine themselves to repressing, they anticipate, infiltrate, and stifle protests before they can be organised, thus reducing the space for freedom to a handful of closely monitored gestures.

The Al Khalifas have long striven to curry favour with the US. Thus the Kingdom plays host to the general command of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The alliance with Israel has placed Bahrain in Donald Trump’s good books as did last summer’s announcement of Bahraini investments in the US to the tune of $17 billion. The Al Khalifas’ excellent relations with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia offer further insurance. Thus the monarchy sacrifices its popular legitimacy, already eroded by decades of economic decline and repression.

Both on the Palestinian question and on issues of human rights, two Bahrains confront one another. On the one hand, a regime which is banking on its foreign alliances to stay in power. On the other, a civil society dominated by Shi’ite youth who refuse to see their collective memory erased. Those August demonstrations, which went on for several weeks, were not just a passing outburst. As long as the walls of Diraz continue to sport the colours of Palestine despite the coats of black paint, the regime will know that normalisation is still an unfinished process, deeply contested.

Translated from French by Noël Burch