Regular readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with the fact that I'm not a big fan of President Bush's democracy agenda--not because I don't want democracy in the region, but because I don't think the Bush Administration wants something that the people of the region would reasonably call democracy to develop there.

But whatever one's view, it's undeniable that we're living in a baffling time in the Middle East; particularly for people used to blaming the United States for all their problems.

However tenuous the results remain, within the space of a month we've seen the surprise announcement of multi-party elections in Egypt and mass tit-for-tat street protests in Lebanon. And these are on the heels of elections in Afghanistan, Palestine and now Iraq.

So even someone as cynical as I am has to wonder what we're to make of the United States -- intentionally or not -- shaking up an oppressive and autocratic regional system until recently it had worked diligently to sustain? What's equally as interesting to me as a historian is whether the dynamic produced by the sea-change in US foreign policy really unprecedented?

It's perhaps too early to answer the first question; but historical parallels to the situation today are already discernable. One particularly powerful example comes from the relationship between Palestinian workers and the Zionist movement in the three decades of British rule of Palestine, between 1917 and 1948.

During this period an increasingly zero-sum contest was being waged between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements at the political level. But for many Palestinian workers the situation was less black and white. While the larger Zionist policy of "Hebrew labor" sought to exclude them from the burgeoning Jewish and mixed economies, the socialist roots of the Zionist movement's leadership--along with the perception that improving Palestinian wages and work conditions would benefit Jewish workers and provide important propaganda for the movement's political wing-- led them to advocate on behalf of Palestinian workers even during times of heightened intercommunal tension.

The schizophrenic situation led one Palestinian worker-activist to ask exasperatedly, "Who's responsible for this comedy?" Similar to criticisms of American intentions today, Palestinian newspapers and nationalist politicians claimed that Jews wanted to "rule" or even "kill" the country and its economic institutions.

But however politically incorrect, it was undeniable that the same Zionist unions that tried to take Palestinian jobs were often the only force willing to fight for their rights against what another worker called "the oppression of our bosses." With a cash-strapped British government having little impetus to agree to their demands, Palestinian workers regularly sought the help of the Zionist movement, becoming at the same time "comrades and enemies" of their Jewish counterparts.

This dynamic was epitomized by a 1944 meeting between Jewish labor officials and the Palestinian Jaffa Municipality that one could imagine occurring today between President Bush and any one of a dozen Middle Eastern leaders. After grudgingly agreeing to the labor official's demands to increase wages for Palestinian municipal workers, the Deputy Mayor of Jaffa asked angrily: "Why do you bother us and meddle every day in the interests of the workers?" The Jewish representative replied, "Times change, there is democracy, there is freedom to organize, justly and honestly."

The Deputy Mayor answered, "What democracy? We don't have democracy, we scorn democracy... We only understand one thing: the worker that puts forth demands to us is a worker that wants to be lord over us and this we will not suffer." Another Palestinian official in the room agreed, declaring that the union only wanted to "upset our order" and make it harder to have a united front against the Zionist movement as a whole.

The similarities between the roles of the Zionist movement over sixty years ago and America's today, between the plight of struggling Arab working and middle classes then and now, are striking. The United States might be sitting aggressively astride the heartland of the Muslim world and cementing its hold on the region's oil supplies, but for the first time in fifty years an American President is actually doing something about democracy in the region. However mixed the results and suspicious his intentions, President Bush's forceful--if selective--promotion of democratic change is a marked improvement over the policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, who rarely bothered to fake an interest in democracy.

And so a strange but historically familiar dynamic has emerged in which most Muslims do not trust the rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration; yet many have as little (and perhaps even less) faith in their leaders to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to the region.

The leaders of the emerging Muslim "independence intifadas" are unlikely to look directly to the US for moral and political support the way Eastern Europeans did a generation ago. But few won't use the space created by President Bush's democracy rhetoric to advance their communal or national interests when possible.

But this leads to the most crucial dynamic the region yet faces: the Bush Administration's reaction to the whole dynamic unfolding before them--a situation in which the people of the region themselves could well demand the kind of full democracy and social justice that Bush & Co have worked so hard to roll back at home. What President Bush does when their interests conflict with those of his Administration will determine whether he is remembered as the godfather of Middle Eastern democracy or just another American President willing to sacrifice lofty rhetoric at the altar of realpolitik.