Last Updated on May 17, 2021, 7:43 AM AST by Anthony Morris
Palestine: “Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine.” Thus, the crowd in Tehran cheered in February 1979 during the visit of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a few days after the success of the Iranian revolution. Arafat was the first foreign high-ranking official to visit Iran after the fall of the shah. For him, Khomeini’s success was a victory for the Palestinian cause: his guerrilla fighters helped train Iranian revolutionaries in Lebanon, and he was hopeful that with Khomeini’s help he would soon be on his way to establishing a Palestinian state.
This fascinating and relatively little-known episode in the history of the Middle East has changed the region’s political landscape, and still informs the context in which current events take place in the Palestinian territories and Israel. Although the personal relationship between Arafat and Khomeini has soured within a year, their meeting indicates the moment when revolutionary Iran’s involvement with the Palestinians began, and when the Palestinian issue found itself in a then still emerging local rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Forty years later, Iran continues the Palestinian cause to expand its anti-imperial credentials and power in the region, pretending to be the only true defender of the Palestinians. According to Tehran, it provides a contrast to Arab countries that have either signed peace agreements with Israel, such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, or colluded with them, such as Saudi Arabia. This is why the Biden government should view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a piece of the broad mystery, as it wants to revive the nuclear deal with Iran: because that’s how Tehran sees it. Read More
This is not to dismiss the seven-decade-long distress of the Palestinians, expropriated and repeatedly expelled from their homes. Nor does it take away the horror of the violence between Israeli Jews and Arabs, from Haifa to Lod, and the alarming rise of Jewish extremism.
But that meeting decades ago remains essential to understanding how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being used by those not directly affected to advance their own agendas, and how different it is today in the Middle East compared to even two decades ago.
Anthony Morris covers stories related to politics and regional developments. His in-depth reporting about governance and reforms makes him stand out in regional journalism, with a deep analysis of political trends and their impact on Caribbean communities.
