Does Iran really 'care' about Palestine?
Support for the Axis of Resistance was not about selfishness or selflessness, but about a convergence of interests around opposing the U.S.-led order.
The apparent battlefield defeat of the Axis of Resistance, the array of Iranian allies in the Arab world, is an event that requires explanation. One explanation gaining currency is that Iran was never really serious about fighting Israel or standing up for Palestine, and that its commitments to the struggle were always paper-thin.
“It wasn't designed, this so-called Axis of Resistance, to liberate Palestine, or to help the Lebanese liberate the bits of south Lebanon that Israel controls,” renowned Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi said in an interview with the Bad Hasbara podcast. “It was intended to protect Iran, and it disappeared, and Iran is more vulnerable, and that may be a good or bad thing. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians. I honestly never believed that there was such a thing as an Axis of Resistance. There was an axis of protection for Iran.”
The famous Lebanese-American academic As’ad Abu Khalil responded with a social media thread arguing that “Iran has been under savage Western sanctions and facing Israeli conspiracies for decades all because of its support for Palestinian and Arab resistance to Israel.” In a strange overlap with Iranian supporters of Israel, he claimed that this Iranian support is a purely ideological money pit and Iran would be economically better off for dropping the Palestinian cause. For Abu Khalil, this kind of support in the face of adversity is a sign of Iranian selflessness.
Whether Iranian leaders were acting selflessly or selfishly is the wrong question. As the saying — paraphrased from Lord Palmerston, falsely attributed to Henry Kissinger — goes, nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Iranian revolutionaries shared with many Arab societies a strong, even existential interest in confronting the U.S.-led order. And Iran has been the only state actor in the region willing to seriously commit to such a confrontation. What comes next, then?
Although Iran’s enmity with the United States and Israel is tied to domestic politics, the policy is not as ideological as it seems, as Trita Parsi argues in the excellent history, Treacherous Alliance. When the Soviet Union and Iraq’s Arab nationalist regime were major threats in the 1980s, the revolutionary government of Iran was willing to continue under-the-table cooperation with Washington and Tel Aviv. It was a continuation of the policy of the old Iranian monarchy, which had also funded Shi’a Lebanese movements and made a public fuss about Palestine while cooperating with the United States and Israel on security.
After 1991, with communism and secular Arab nationalism defeated, the victorious United States tried to cement a permanent regional order built around Israel and the Arab monarchies. To riff on the old saying about NATO, the goal was to keep the Israelis in, the Iranians out, and the Arabs down. The Bush administration invading Iraq and suggesting that Iran would be next only confirmed the sense of danger. (The term “Axis of Resistance” is a play on former U.S. President George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech.) Fear of being encircled, Parsi argues, led Iran to put up much more serious and militant opposition to the U.S.-led order than before. Because Israel is so central to both U.S. strategy and American domestic politics around the Middle East, challenging that order inevitably meant championing the Palestinian cause.
For all the claims that Iran “exploits” Palestinians’ plight, it has had a less exploitative relationship to Palestine than many other supposed champions of the cause. Arab monarchies pay lip service to Palestinian rights while underwriting the cost of Israeli occupation and buying Israeli military technology tested on Palestinians first. Turkey profits from Palestinian suffering twice over, first by selling Israel the means to keep its military machine going, then by building soft power abroad through loud denunciations of Israeli crimes. Iran, on the other hand, is the only state willing to arm Palestinian factions directly, with few strings attached. In other words, Iran is a source of the independent hard power that every other state is determined to deny Palestinians.
However, there were also serious conflicts of interest between Iran and the Arab downtrodden. In order to keep its supply lines, the Axis of Resistance backed a repressive Syrian regime known not only for mass torture and waging war on its own people, but also for backstabbing everyone it could, including Palestinians, on multiple occasions. By 2019, the Iranian-backed factions in Iraq and Lebanon had also become symbols of a rickety, unpopular sectarian status quo rather than any kind of liberation. Another rift was revealed by the October 7 attacks; while Iran wanted to sit tight and consolidate its counter-order, Palestinians’ situation was continually getting worse, and Hamas believed that only a violent regional shakeup could save the Palestinian nation.
That last divergence allowed Israel to “stagger the resistance by partitioning the experience of war,” as one anonymous Twitter user put it. Hamas had only shared the proposal for the October 7 offensive with its allies a few months beforehand — likely in vague terms that left them unprepared — and Iran seems to have given a noncommittal response. Once the war had started, Iran believed that it could carefully manage any escalation. Even after Israel directly attacked Iranian soil in July this year, Iran held back on its retaliation because of U.S. promises to broker a ceasefire, Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian more or less admitted.
Israel, a small country with no strategic depth, was thus able to cut down the Axis of Resistance into smaller pieces and confront each one individually. It completed its ground invasion of Gaza, then escalated in Lebanon, then smashed Syrian air defenses. Iranian hesitancy left its Arab allies in the worst of all positions, unchaining them enough to provoke Israel but not enough to constrain Israeli action. As I wrote in September, Israel was well suited to fight a war of lightening victories, and Iran was well suited to fight a war of attrition. Israel got what it wanted, and Iran did not.
To argue that Palestinians should be grateful for Iran’s “sacrifices” adds insult to injury, by demanding a participation trophy for failing to stop a genocide. To say that “Israel's victims rightfully wish to hold Iran accountable” is misdirected to the point of self parody, by trying to punish Iran for what its enemies did once Iranian strength was sapped. Iran has lost the battle, and thus its ability to influence events in the Levant. Israel is now the relevant party. What remains to be seen is how Tel Aviv will manage its newfound position of strength, and what could constrain it.
Those two questions are linked. Israel and the United States could very well overplay their hand and create new threats to their own power. Pushing the Palestinian Authority into an self-destructive confrontation in the West Bank, testing the limits of Lebanon’s fragile ceasefire, attempting to aggressively reshape Lebanese internal politics, attacking Syria despite its new government not wanting war, and threatening direct war with Iran do not suggest that they are looking to carefully consolidate their gains. Israeli society does not seem to know when or even how to stop.
Too much is unclear at this juncture: Will Iran build a nuclear bomb? How stable is the Iranian state internally? What will the stance of the new Syrian government, after consolidating power, towards Iran and Israel be? Where do Lebanese politics go from here? Will incoming President Donald Trump force a ceasefire in Gaza? It’s safe to say, at least, that the ascendant Axis of Misery is an unstable order. There will continue to be resistance — not because of some cosmic justice, but because the victors literally do not have a way to deal with the vanquished — whether or not Iran backs it.
“Indeed, Pharaoh elevated himself in the land, and made its people into factions, persecuting a sect, slaughtering its sons and sparing its women. Indeed, he was one of the corrupters. But We willed that We would favor those who were downtrodden in the land, making them leaders and heirs.” - Qur’an 28:4-5