Opinion: On Being Jewish, Nationalism and Loyalty.

 On Being Jewish, Nationalism and Loyalty.

Mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street. Source

The mural depicts the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 where 100,000 anti-fascists, Jews and their allies, blocked members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists from marching through London's East End which had a large Jewish community at the time. 

Note: the mural and the title is not with the original commentary. R. Mellor

 

Michael Rosen

London UK

 

Michael Rosen is a writer of children’s books. You can find out more here.

 

 

One of the Labour Party's missions (in the Labour Party's present form) is to try to combat the Tories and Reform by using the banner of national pride. The roots of this Labour patriotism shtick go back decades but they tend to surface most when the challenge from the Right is at its strongest. Some of this is also an attack on the Left on the grounds that the Labour Party , they claim, loses votes because it's known that in its ranks there are republicans and/or people who are so keen to not sound jingoistic they are deemed to be nigh on guilty of treason. 

 

One reason I'm thinking about this at the moment may sound obtuse but bear with me. Because I'm Jewish, I'm appealed to by Israel itself and by those who call themselves 'non-apologetic supporters of Israel' to rally to Israel's cause. What underpins this is another form of nationalism. I should see myself as being loyal to Jews - whether that's Jews where I live (UK), and eg US, France and, of course, Israel. A memorable example of this was when the Chief Rabbi spoke to a synagogue congregation in January 2024 and talked proudly of 'our heroic soldiers'. (He was referring to Israel's soldiers.) 

 

More or less since (but not including) the time when the Zionist terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, killing a range of people including British and Jewish people), the Chief Rabbi's position of having two national loyalties, British and Jewish-Israeli, has not been a problem. Britain has backed Israel. Israel has backed Britain. No situation here, we might say, even faintly akin to, say, the split loyalties felt by people with a German background leading up to and including the First and Second World Wars. 

 

But right now, there are problems. Leave aside non- or anti-zionist Jews like me. There are beginning to be problems for people who feel the loyalty-tug to the Jewish entity, whether they see it as a nation, a people, a community or an 'us'. The problem is this. On paper - and thanks to the example in the IHRA code - Jews can keep two potentially conflicting ideas in their heads. One idea is that we Jews outside of Israel cannot be held responsible for the actions of Israel. To say that we are responsible is, the code says, antisemitic. End of. However, sometimes in conflict with this - some would say in contradiction with it - is a loyalty to Israel precisely on account of the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. The people who are right now killing people in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are either Jews or people acting on the orders of Jews in the military and/or government. 

 

And that last sentence is where the problems are arising. So long as we here look at those planes and armies over there as 'Israeli' there's a bit of distancing going on. But If I say, those planes and soldiers are Jewish (or under orders from a Jewish high command), it starts to feel a bit worrying (not for me, I hasten to add) and 'we' can scurry off to the IHRA code and say, 'Isn't that holding us responsible for the actions of Israel?' 

 

But that's the problem. If the claim is that 'we' are a Jewish nation (inside and outside of Israel) and that we owe this Jewish nation a loyalty at least as equivalent and as strong as the loyalty that I should show to Britain, then these are worrying times. Are liberal Jews really supposed to be loyal to the killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, to the daily acts of violence, thuggery and dispossession in the West Bank and to the 'clearances' and killing in Lebanon? Or put another way, when we listen to the speeches of Ben Gvir and Smotrich are we supposed to say, 'He's one of ours' (in the way that my father used to do when he saw a Jewish actor in a play on the TV!). 

 

Maybe it helps to flip this and think of, say, Tommy Robinson, Farage, Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Richard Tice, and with my British hat on, ask myself, do I owe that group of people any loyalty on account of them being, like me, British? I don't think so. And that's the problem (or at least one of the problems) with nationalism. It leaves us with utterly untrustworthy allies, who act against our interests. 

 

Anecdote: Oswald Mosley, antisemite and fascist thought he had a trump card back in the 1930s: warn working class people about 'Jew landlords'. In other words, the Mosleyite problem wasn't landlordism - no matter who the landlords were - it was 'Jew landlords'. The appeal here was (incredibly) that non-Jewish tenants would much prefer to have a bad landlord if they were non-Jews than if they were Jews! What was the response from the Jewish left in the East End to this? To organise community-wide rent strikes. This brought together non-Jewish and Jewish tenants in opposition to landlords no matter what their background was. It cut through two 'national' appeals at the same time - the appeal to 'patriotic non-Jews' to fight against Jewish landlords, and a possible or potential appeal to Jews to defend Jewish landlords purely on account of them being Jewish! The issue was slum landlordism no matter who was the landlord and who was the tenant. 

 

In an ideal world, this is where we could be or should be in relation to Israel (and its protector and backer, the US). What we oppose is the mass killing, the land grabbing, the clearances being carried out to further one (or is two, now) forms of imperialism - US and the local imperialism of Israel. I know and see that many of the people in Israel enacting this have a similar cultural and national background to me (Jews who formerly lived in Eastern Europe (so-called Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews) but, I ask myself, I can't owe them loyalty purely because my great-grandparents came from the same place as their great-grandparents and that those great-grandparents said the same prayers, observed the same holidays and festivals, went to the same places of worship. What's going on right now (no matter how we interpret the past) is state-run criminality. That surely supersedes and overcomes any cultural or allegedly national loyalty.

Trump Threatens to Erase Iran. That's Negotiations Rogue State Style. And Remember, it's an illegal war.

Richard Mellor'

Afscme local 444, retired

Heo/GED

 

The felon and serial sexual abuser in the White House continues to threaten the Iranian people and make their country uninhabitable if they don't agree with what he wants. This is negotiations. But what can we expect, the US bombed Iran while they were at the negotiating table before. 

 

The US and its proxy murdered the head of state and numerous Iranian officials, considered by just about every country in the world to be a war crime. Professor John Mearsheimer said recently that if there were Nuremberg trials that occurred after the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, were held today in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, "Trump and his lieutenants and Biden and his lieutenants would be hanged." 

 

But we are in a new era of capitalist decay on a world scale and until the working class in the US and internationally enters the stage in a major way, we will see more violence as the US, the hegemonic power, loses its influence and the empire begins to crumble. No empire leaves the stage quietly, look at the British.  

 

If the working class fails to take up the task history has set for us and builds a global federation of democratic socialist states and I am convinced it will be forced by events to attempt this, but nothing in this world is guaranteed, ....capitalism will destroy human life on this planet, make it uninhabitable for our species. It will do it through the looming climate catastrophe or nuclear war. 

Interesting AI Movie About the History of Manhattan and New York City

Richard Mellor

An interesting look at Manhattan since its purchase from the Native Americans by the Dutch to the present. It's the door I first walked through when I came to the US. It is a great City. I worked in a factory in Spring Street just one stop from West 4th. I would take the F train down from Queens.

The stifling humidity in the summer was more than I could bare especially working in a factory because as anyone knows, that damn conveyor belt never stops unless it breaks down or the workers stop it. The chances are your body will break down before the belt. There is a reason the UAW had control of the belt speed or the belt speed as an issue in its demands of GM.

New Yorkers are interesting people I thought. I have not lived there in a while. I also worked as a phone salesman selling land in the Pocono's. The boss though with my accent it would be easy but unfortunately not, it was a horrible job trying to get people to purchase land that didn't really want to. I had a great time chatting with mostly older New Yorkers from all different nationalities though. 

I remember going to the Italian festival there and people who had lived there for decades only spoke Italian. They shopped in their neighborhoods and had no reason to leave them. Same with Irish and other ethnic groups. I knew a bunch of Irish from the Bronx and had Puerto Rican and some Jamaicans as co-workers. 

New Yorkers are blunt, forthright people I found. I recall in Woody Allen's Annie Hall when the only benefits of living in California compared to NYC was said to be that you can turn right on a red light. A bit harsh. I might say in defense of California that it makes sense but I get what New Yorkers mean. 

Piracy, Poverty and Oil in the Niger Delta

Richard Mellor

This is a free documentary. about oil and the people of the Niger Delta.  It's staggering when you think of the amount of profit the oil companies make and yet that wealth does not benefit the communities that live around it. The ecological and human catastrophe that is the product of this industry is staggering.  As you will see, the pirates have no means of subsistence other than to piracy. This is capitalism working is it? The so-called free market at work 

Humanity has the means to produce energy in a different way and use human labor power in a different way, but what drives production in the capitalist system is profit. No profit, no sewer system, no profits, no health care system, no profit, no investment in a safe drinking water system. Africa, and the world in general doesn't lack the means to change all this, but capitalism and those that propagate it will not leave the stage of history without being forced. We either change the system or it will drive us in to the abyss.

Ken Klippenstein: Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say

Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say

Does that mean gas prices will go down now?

Ken Klippenstein April 15, 2026

Fire engulfs the Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California

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A 29-year-old California man has been arrested for allegedly causing $500 million in damage when he set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse to protest the cost of living and the Iran War.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the Justice Department’s indictment alleges he said in video posted to Instagram. “[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days … stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off … fucking wars.”

In a press conference, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli went out of his way to stress that the defendant had “compared himself to Luigi Mangione” in a comment to a witness.

No one was injured in the early morning fire, but Justice wants to make a point: Chamel Abdulkarim’s target was the system of capitalism itself.

Arson, and admittedly a serious case (if the government is correct); and politically motivated, given the remarks Abdulkarim made. 

But Mangione? The FBI and the national security machine is going to jump on this, affirming for them that a “copycat” terrorist points to a bigger trend lurking in society.

That fact is at the very center of NSPM-7 — national security presidential memorandum 7 — signed by President Trump last September, that identifies “anti-capitalism” as a so-called indicator of domestic terrorism. The directive opens with a section that mentions “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive” — i.e. Luigi Mangione — as indicative of a growing threat.

Take a look at what the federal indictment focuses on, alleging Abdulkarim said:

• “[S]hould have paid us enough to fucking live.”

• “1% is a fucking joke.”

• “If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this shit.”

• “Billionaires profiting off of war ...”

• [Y]ou know, we may not get paid enough to fucking live, but these bitches dirt cheap”

• “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the share holders picking up a shift.”

• “[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days, [unintelligible] stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off [unintelligible] fucking wars.”

	Federal indictment 898KB ∙ PDF file
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US Attorney Essayli goes on to cast the arson attack as a sign of anti-capitalist sentiment, promising to “aggressively” pursue anyone who attacks capitalism — or “our way of life,” as he put it: 

“Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.”

Get used to stuff like this. As I reported in January, a leaked draft copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s upcoming annual Homeland Threat Assessment introduced a new “extremism” threat category: “class-based or economic grievances.”

Screenshot of leaked Homeland Threat Assessment

By contrast, state authorities did not portray the crime as some sort of threat to capitalism. In fact, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson seemed to not understand it at all.

“Arson, to me, is a real head scratcher; I do not understand that somebody who is suspected of arson does something where they get no value out of it,” Anderson said at the press conference.

They still don’t get it.

While reporting on this, when I tried to figure out what exactly the suspect’s job entailed while working for Kimberly-Clark — the company whose 1.2 million square foot facility he allegedly set on fire — I realized that he didn’t actually work for them, but for a third-party contractor, something called “NFI Industries.”

The dreary name reminds me of reporting on Amazon warehouses and hearing one worker after another bitterly refer to its much-hyped $15 minimum wage as not applying to them because they worked for similar subcontractors. This two-step is also how Amazon can claim it’s not them but rather the contractors responsible for the infamous practice of workers having to pee in bottles to meet their punishing quotas.

NFI has been accused of similar practices and was sued in 2015 by New Jersey port and warehouse truckers who said the company systematically misclassified them as “independent contractors” while exercising full employer‑style control. In 2022, a federal judge ruled in the driver’s favor, ordering NFI to pay them over $5 million in a class action settlement.

The obscene price of gasoline as a result of the Iran war (part of our hallowed “way of life,” which allows oil companies to price gouge even in emergencies) has once again thrust the cost of living into the spotlight. Millions of Americans resonate with Mangione and Abdulkarim. 

Isn’t anyone in power curious why that is? 

As a friend told me today when I brought up the Kimberly-Clark fire: Who that’s worked a shitty job hasn’t fantasized about burning it all down? (This is literally the plot of the cult classic movie Office Space!)

Democrats and Republican politicians alike mouth “affordability” but do nothing. Civil government is also starved, bled of resources by our national security colossus that devises more and more ways to spy on anyone opposed, or drowns out their voices by flooding the media with security-speak. 

There are basically two ways the government can respond to things like the Kimberly-Clark fire: (1) treat them as national security threats to be monitored and preempted forever; or (2) address the underlying grievances causing them.

Sounds like a real “head-scratcher.”

Subscribe if you would’ve left Milton’s stapler alone 

Trump's Madness is not the Cause of Capitalism's Rot. He is a Product of It

Source

By John Clarke

Former organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). 

Member of 230 Fightback

I see a group of psychiatrists arguing that Trump shows signs of being a 'malignant narcissist' and the calls for him to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment are coming in thick and fast.

 

I don't do mental health diagnoses but I fully accept that Trump is an exceptionally cruel and selfish man who seems devoid of decent human feelings. He also appears to be increasingly unstable and dangerous.

 

The problem with treating Trump as utterly exceptional and focusing on his personal characteristics, however, is that it serves to conceal the bigger and far more important issues.

 

Two questions leap out at us. What kind of an economic, social and political system would elevate a person like Trump to power? What has happened within that system that generates the basis for the Trump administration at this time?

 

In general, we may view US imperialism as a global system of violent exploitation. The people who play the directing role in this operation have copious quantities of blood on their hands. 

 

Most of them appear more rational and personable than Trump but they all have to come to terms with the unspeakable crimes they are implicated in. They are drawn from a ruling stratum that has received the training and ideological preparation necessary for them to justify and accept the death and suffering they inflict and to do so with a sense of moral superiority. They are shaped primarily by social forces rather than personal psychology.

 

If Trump is an 'extreme' representative of this layer, he is very much the product of a particular stage of development. His administration represents an attempt to reverse the relative decline in US power by throwing the rulebook out the window and taking a path of reckless predation. Trump's crude and brutal inhumanity makes him the candidate of choice to head up such an exercise in gangsterism. 

 

Psychological factors are by no means irrelevant but the social foundations out of which they arise are decisive. Trump and the collection of thoroughly warped human beings he has gathered around himself have to be understood in such terms if they are to be properly understood. 

Michael Roberts: Inflation and the central banks

 

Inflation and the central banks

by Michael Roberts

The era of disinflation is over.  By disinflation, I mean a rise in overall prices of goods and services, but at a slowing rate.  Deflation means an actual fall in prices.  That has not been the case for many decades, not really since the end of money as a physical commodity, namely gold and the arrival of what are called fiat currencies, ie money as coined, or ‘printed’, or digitally created by national states to replace gold.  Only in rare occasions have states so restricted the supply of fiat money that it has caused deflation and really only happened when there was already a slump in capitalist production.

For the last 70 years or more, governments have controlled the issuance of currency and so the direct relationship between production of value in an economy and its representation by the supply and turnover of money has become separated.  Inflation of prices has become the norm, but the pace of that inflation is now the issue.

In our (forthcoming) paper on inflation, Guglielmo Carchedi and I identified two separate periods of US price inflation in the post-1945 period to now. The first was from 1948-81 and the second was from 1981-2019. In the first period, the rate of inflation rose, constituting an inflationary period. In the second period, the rate of inflation fell, constituting a disinflationary period.

Between 1948 and 1981, the average annual rate of inflation was 4.3%; from 1981 to 2019 it slowed to 3.0%.

If we look at the annual average rate by decade, we can see the change even more clearly.

From the 1980s onwards, the US (and other major economies) entered a period of progressive disinflation, culminating in the Long Depression of the 2010s , a decade with an average rate of just 1.8% (and a rise of just 0.1% in 2015).  But now in the 2020s, starting with the post-COVID pandemic inflationary spike in 2022, the major economies appear to have entered a new period of inflation ie. a rising rate of price change. 

In various posts, I have argued, contrary to the mainstream theories that inflation is supply, not demand driven.  What determines the rate of inflation in a modern capitalist economy with fiat currencies, is the rate of growth in the production of value relative to the rate of growth in the supply of money. The latter excludes the supply of money that is hoarded in banks or used for speculation in financial assets (fictitious capital, to use Marx’s term).  The supply of money rose sharply in the 2010s as central banks tried to keep interest rates low and provide liquidity for the financial sector after the Global Financial Crash.  This monetary injection was called ‘quantitative easing’. Mainstream monetarist theory argued that this would lead to a big rise in inflation.  No such thing happened – on the contrary, price inflation slowed almost to zero, because a large portion of central bank monetary injection never left the banking system.

As unemployment fell to lows not seen since the 1960s, Keynesian monetary theory also argued that high government spending (large budget deficits) and ’tight’ labour markets would create ‘demand-led’ inflation.  However, the empirical evidence for this theory – the famous Phillips curve that supposedly revealed the inverse trade-off between falling unemployment and rising inflation rates – was missing.  The Phillips curve was flat.  Low unemployment did not lead to high inflation. That’s because the differential between the rate of growth in money supply created by the banking system into the economy and the growth in value production had narrowed. 

The post-COVID inflation spike was clearly supply-driven as the closing down of production and trade that produced the pandemic slump of 2020 was accompanied by a lingering breakdown of global supply chains and the squeezing up of prices in energy and key commodities by multi-national companies. A new Fed paper confirms that “underlying inflation dynamics have shifted since COVID.” The share of the consumption basket experiencing inflation above 3 percent remains well above the 2014–2019 average in the major economies, more than doubling in the euro area and the UK.  The Fed still wants to blame this on ‘excessive wage increases’, but this is not born out by the evidence.  Real hourly earnings roughly doubled between 1940 and 1970, but have barely risen since 1980.

Central banks have been at sixes and sevens in trying to control inflation.  In the 2010s, they lowered interest rates to zero and raised money supply to new heights, but inflation slowed. Then in the post-pandemic period they hiked interest rates and introduced ‘quantitative tightening’ of the money supply. But that failed to stop inflation heading above 10% a year, a rate not seen since the supply-driven oil crisis of the 1970s. The story then was that 1970s US inflation subsided because the US Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker hiked its policy interest rate to an unprecedented high. The reality was that Inflation only dropped because the US economy went into a major slump in 1980-2 that decimated its manufacturing industry. The Fed’s high interest policy just added to that investment and production collapse. Stagflation turned into slumpflation.  Indeed, the annual inflation rate stayed above the average of the 1960s until at least the 1990s.

Now with the Iran conflict and the reduction in oil and other commodity exports, inflation is back on the agenda.  Global supply chain pressure was building even before the Iran conflict. 

Supply disruptions in metals, grains, and livestock markets can generate macroeconomic effects comparable to oil shocks. When adverse supply disturbances hit these non-oil commodities, inflation rises persistently while industrial production falls, closely resembling the stagflationary dynamics typically associated with oil price spikes. 

The signs of a return to inflation are already there in the rise in inflation rates so far in 2026.  The latest March CPI data for the US show that another inflation spike is underway.  Consumer price inflation rose to 3.3% in March, a near 1% pt leap from February.  And there will be a further rise ahead towards 4% or more this year as the lasting impact of the energy and trade blockage feeds through.

Trump’s tariff tantrums are only adding to the inflationary pressure. Based on 2025–2026 data, the US Federal Reserve reckons that tariffs have resulted in a “near-complete pass-through to consumer prices, contributing roughly 0.8 percentage points to core PCE inflation and explaining the excess inflation in core goods.”  

Goods inflation was +0.84%, a huge month-over-month increase (10.6% annualized) and the largest since Jan 2022.

And the Euro area is experiencing a similar spike.

Again, the major central banks are in confusion. Federal Reserve policymakers sparred during the central bank’s March meeting over how to respond if the Iran war triggers a prolonged period of high energy prices. Minutes of the March meeting showed “most” members of the Federal Open Market Committee fretted that a lengthy war could warrant cutting rates to support the jobs market, while “many” suggested it might require raising them to counter higher prices.

Before the war, the ECB had been expected to keep rates steady in 2026. However, the war-driven surge in energy prices revived inflation concerns. ECB governing council member Olaf Sleijpen warned that sustained energy disruptions could still feed into broader price pressures. “Persistently high oil prices will ultimately feed through to the prices of other products, and thus also to wage formation, which could amplify inflationary effects,” he said. “In that case, the ECB will naturally intervene to keep inflation around 2% in the medium term”. 

Divisions within the Bank of England have emerged. Andrew Bailey, the bank’s governor, indicated that he expects depressed UK demand and labour markets to make “second round” effects from surging energy and food prices less dangerous than in 2021-22, reducing the risk of another wage-price spiral. But other Monetary Policy Committee members including chief economist Huw Pill and deputy governor Clare Lombardelli sounded less sanguine.

This confusion could be resolved if central banks recognised that monetary policy has little influence over price inflation, which depends first and foremost on the pace of value creation. If economies’ output slows and the monetary authorities react by increasing money supply and lower the ‘price’ of money (interest rates), then inflation will accelerate. If money supply growth stays close to value growth, inflation subsides.

Having seen monetarism and Keynesian monetary policies fail, central banks economists have diverted to a psychological theory of ‘consumer expectations’ of inflation, namely that inflation rises because consumers expect it and act accordingly by buying more to beat price rises. But as Federal Reserve economist Rudd concluded in 2021: “Economists and economic policymakers believe that households’ and firms’ expectations of future inflation are a key determinant of actual inflation. A review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests that this belief rests on extremely shaky foundations, and a case can be made that adhering to it uncritically could easily lead to serious policy errors.” But central banks are not going to admit this because it would remove their perceived role in the macro-management of the capitalist economy and reduce it to just acting as a ‘lender of last resort’ for the banking system. 

In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF reckons that economic growth will not slow much if the Iran conflct is shortlived. But it sees global inflation rising significantly.  Moreover, this time the ‘supply shock’ won’t be easy to contain. IMF: “the 2022 surge reflected an unusually steep aggregate supply curve, with strong demand running into supply bottlenecks, allowing central banks to achieve disinflation with limited output losses. Evidence now suggests a return to a flatter supply curve, making disinflation more costly.” Nevertheless, the IMF advocates that central banks must be prepared to hike interest rates because “if medium- or long-term inflation expectations drift up as prices and wages pick up, restoring price stability must take precedence over near-term growth, with a swift tightening.”

The Iran war and ensuing oil and commodity price rises are clearly a supply-side problem.  Falling supply will raise prices but it will also lower growth, as it will cut into the wages and savings of households and raise costs for companies. High energy prices are a regressive tax,falling heavily on middle- and lower-income consumers. Weaker non-energy consumption and rising costs beget pressure on corporate margins which beget lay-offs, and the job market cracks. US fourth-quarter real GDP growth was just 0.5% (quarter-over-quarter annualised) and the consumer sentiment index just hit an all-time low.

The major economies are not in ‘slumpflation’ yet.  In the US, corporate profit margins remain at record highs. And corporate earnings for the first quarter of 2026 are expected to be very strong. Trump’s planned fiscal handouts to US companies are substantial with tax incentives for businesses investing in machinery and factory equipment. And a weaker dollar in the latter half of 2025 will help boost dollar earnings from foreign investment revenues.

But the bulk of these earnings gains are concentrated in the US silicon valley tech giants. The rest of the corporate sector is struggling.  Profits for the whole of the non-financial corporate sector fell in 2025.

And the impact of the Middle East conflict on profits has yet to be fully felt.