Whether pro-Israel or anti-Israel, some of you seem confused.
There is absolutely nothing wrong or contradictory about caring for the human rights of both Iranians and Palestinians. But here’s the thing: without the Islamic Republic, the pro-Palestine narrative as it exists today entirely collapses.
TIED FROM THE START
The Palestinian movement was foundational to the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the formation and development of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is currently carrying out the unspeakable atrocities coming out of Iran.
As early as 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under the leadership of the face of the Palestinian cause, Yasser Arafat, began training Iranian Marxist forces in their PLO training camps in Jordan and Yemen.
By 1969, virtually every single guerrilla force that would go on to join the Islamic Revolution, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s own followers, were receiving weapons, tactical, intelligence, and sabotage training from different Palestinian terror groups, from Fatah to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Lebanon. These forces included a coalition of Marxist and Islamist groups.
EVOLUTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Yasser Arafat supported not just the Islamist ideologues and guerrillas loyal to Ruhollah Khomeini, but also a number of Iranian Marxist forces, including Mojahedin-e-Khalq, better known as MEK. Though MEK fought with the Islamist groups to overthrow the Shah, relations between the two factions deteriorated shortly after the Islamic Revolution, resulting in clashes.
Khomeini resented Arafat’s ongoing relationship with MEK, and soon, the PLO-Khomeini alliance soured. Additionally, Arafat’s neutrality on the Iran-Iraq war infuriated the Supreme Leader.
By the 1990s, as Arafat participated in the Oslo Peace Process, essentially agreeing to pursue a Two State Solution (at least publicly), the new Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urged Palestinians to reject Oslo and continue the path of “resistance” and openly accused Arafat of “treason.” This attitude is reflected in the complete and total rejection of any compromise with Israel that predominates the pro-Palestine movement to this day.
ANTI-ISRAEL PROPAGANDA
Every year, the Islamic Republic, which sees the State of Israel as a blight on what it deems rightfully Islamic land, invests hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-Israel propaganda, both to disseminate within Iran and abroad. Thus, anti-Israel, anti-Islamic Republic Iranians often regurgitate anti-Israel rhetoric that stems directly from the Ayatollah. They may oppose that sadistic regime, but they have still been heavily propagandized.
That’s not to say that anti-regime Iranians must agree with everything — or really, anything — Israel does. Rather, what I am arguing is that many of the things that they’ve come to believe about Israel, Zionism, and the war in Gaza come directly from Islamic Republic or Islamic Republic-funded propaganda channels, such as PressTV. Meanwhile, virtually every non-Jewish and Jewish anti-Israel group in the West has forged some sort of relationship with the Islamic Republic, from Code Pink to Jewish Voice for Peace to the Neturei Karta. The Islamic Republic was even involved in the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla (is Greta Thunberg’s silence on Iran, then, any surprise whatsoever?). The Islamic Republic reportedly bribed South Africa to bring the genocide case against Israel forth at the International Court of Justice.
"For more than forty years now, in the town squares and on the streets of Iran, demonstrators have been photographed burning Israeli and American flags. Ask yourselves: Where are the flags coming from? How did they get so many of our flags?
The answer is: they are manufacturing them especially. Just so they can burn them. This is what an industry of hate looks like. This is a regime that systematically deals with hatred."
YAIR LAPID, 2022 UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY SPEECH
"The three ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic are compulsory hijab, death to America, and death to Israel."
IRANIAN-AMERICAN POLICY ANALYST KARIM SADJADPOUR
THE TERROR NETWORK
As the relationship with Arafat and the PLO collapsed, the Islamic Republic shifted its attention to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the late 1980s. In 1990s, after Israel expelled prominent Hamas and PIJ members to Lebanon, the Islamic Republic was quick to jump to their support, and the relationship deepened. Meanwhile, Hamas and PIJ exponentially increased their acts of terror in Israel throughout the Oslo negotiations, eventually succeeding in foiling the peace process.
Today a long list of Palestinian and non-Palestinian terror groups operate as Islamic Republic proxies, with the aim of spreading Islamism and destroying the State of Israel.
IT ALL ADDS UP
Nothing about this is surprising. The Islamic Republic would not exist today without the Palestinian cause, and the pro-Palestine movement wouldn’t exist today as it does without the Islamic Republic. The pro-Palestine crowd is largely silent (at best) or actively supportive of the Islamic Republic (at worst) because if they were not, the entire worldview that they have formulated over the past two and a half years collapses.
There is also no nuance, as some are now claiming, in both opposing the Islamic Republic and also opposing Israel based on decades upon decades of Islamic Republic propaganda. That is cognitive dissonance.
As for those who joined the Woman, Life, Freedom bandwagon in 2022 only to become Hamas’s biggest supporters post-October 7, that’s not so surprising, either, when their moral compass is guided by nothing more than trending topics.
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