Pro-Palestine Activists Fell for Iran's Propaganda

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Israel's attack on Iran has elicited a predictable response from groups that identify as 'pro-Palestine.' At protests in several Western cities—some merely anti-war or anti-interventionist, others explicitly anti-Zionist or pro-Iranian—people rushed to criticize the Israeli military action to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In so doing, they offer succor to a ruthless theocratic regime that has ground its heel upon its own people and brought misery to the entire region for nearly half a century.
By backing various regimes and militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Muslim people in the conflicts it has fomented. Iranian meddling in the region has provided Arab dictators such as Syria's Bashar al-Assad with both the moral and material means to suppress dissent, crush reform, and extend their autocratic rule. The pro-Palestine messaging ignores the fact that a nuclear-armed Iran would be far more belligerent and dangerous than the regime already has been for the past three decades.
For the pro-Palestine lobby to take at face value Tehran's claim to lead an 'Axis of Resistance' against Israel is at best naive, and at worst malignant in a way that can only be described as anti-Semitic. It means accepting that the Islamic Republic's eliminationist rhetoric about Israel has made it a legitimate advocate for the Palestinian cause. These pro-Palestine voices seem oblivious of the fact that the Palestinian national project for independence and statehood is in ruins, thanks in large part to Iranian influence.
[Uri Friedman: How Israel could be changing Iran's nuclear calculus]
Back in the 1990s, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and political leadership worked to undermine the Oslo peace process by inciting Hamas's opposition to any settlement that would have led to a two-state solution. Later, they encouraged Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas to carry out suicide bombings inside Israel. Beginning in 2005, Iran increased its arms shipments to Hamas, enabling the group to seize control of Gaza in 2007 and turn it into a one-party Islamist statelet. Iran also financed Hamas's construction of tunnels in Gaza and provided the group with missile technology, funneled via the smuggling networks that Iran effectively sponsored in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
Iranian support for terrorism also benefited from Hamas's Qatari financing, which propped up the group's tenure as the government of Gaza. This arrangement also had the tacit assent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because the Islamist-controlled enclave helped keep the Palestinian national movement divided and block any progress toward a two-state solution. In this respect, the backing that Hamas received from the mullahs of Tehran aligned with Netanyahu's security policy—a fact that the pro-Palestine voices expressing solidarity with Iran might do well to reflect on.
Iran's pro-Palestine posture was entirely instrumental. It never cared about any of the Middle East's Muslim or Arab peoples as such. Instead, it used their causes solely as a means to exert influence and build a network of proxy forces in the region. Tehran's realpolitik surfaced memorably in 2011 when Hamas sided with Syrian protesters against Assad; Iran was furious at this affront to its Syrian asset, and cut off Hamas's funding until after it reestablished relations with the Damascus dictatorship.
I realize that many people in the West are furious about what Israel has been doing in Gaza since Hamas's abhorrent attack on October 7, 2023. Israel had a right to self-defense against that incursion and the atrocities perpetrated against its citizens. Yet, in the nearly two years since then, the brutality and intensity of Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip have mobilized opposition around the world. I, too, feel sadness and anger about the remorseless violence: Israel's war in Gaza has killed members of both my immediate and my extended family.
Too often, however, I see that harsh criticism of Israel fails to pin blame on the current Netanyahu-led government, which is loathed by a large number of Israelis, and devolves into delegitimization of the Jewish state itself. This inability to distinguish between Netanyahu's far-right coalition and other trends in Israeli politics does a profound disservice to the pro-Palestine cause because it gives credence to Tehran's cynical posture as a Palestinian champion.
The Islamic Republic of Iran will never cease its meddling in the Palestinian issue, because Tehran needs the conflict to feed its propaganda machine. The reality is that a secure, stable, independent Palestine will remain a remote possibility as long as the Islamic Republic exists in its current form and is allowed to maintain its pro-Palestine pose. Only by calling out this evil regime and distancing from it can the pro-Palestine movement hope to be effective.
[Read: The case for Palestinian pragmatism]
The pro-Palestine lobby would do better to take its cues from the regime's internal opponents, the brave Iranian people who have, in successive waves of a popular movement for reform and freedom, protested their violent, repressive government. The partisans of the Palestinian cause should stop to ask themselves how else Israel's intelligence agencies would have been able to gather the kind of information that has led to its stunning military success in the opening hours of the war. Many Iranians inside Iran today view Israel as their only hope of overthrowing the mullahs. Unfortunately, but understandably, many Iranians have come to resent the Palestinian cause—precisely because the regime has used it as a pretext to squander the country's precious resources on its militia proxies in the name of fighting Israel.
Ultimately, the Iranian people should be the ones to decide their nation's future. This war, which may not be truly over despite the current cease-fire, must avoid the error of mission creep by keeping its focus solely on eliminating Tehran's nuclear program and military capacity to destabilize the region. Confronting the Iranian regime need not repeat Iraq in 2003; at present, the United States seems mindful of that risk.
What onlookers in the West should know is that the Islamic Republic is no true friend of Palestine. The misguided slogans of anti-Israel leftists and overzealous social-justice activists that echo the Iranian regime's anti-Zionist talking points do nothing but harm the Palestinian cause. They are a form of sabotage, not solidarity. Cheering Iranian missiles as they cause death and harm in Israel is no way to advance the Palestinian people's just aspirations for freedom, dignity, and self-determination.
Article originally published at The Atlantic