Iran, Backer of Palestinian Rights

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian cause has taken severe blows that have negatively affected its standing at every level, diminishing the importance of Palestinian national rights in the eyes of the world. The national rights of the Palestinian people have largely faded from minds, and the presence of these rights in international, Arab, and Islamic forums is no longer as strong as it was twenty years ago. It is noticeable that many international conferences now concern themselves with issues other than the Palestinian cause, such as the Iranian nuclear file and the Arab upheaval. Many international conferences now end without even mentioning the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people. There are several reasons for this decline; I note the following:

1. The Oslo Accord, which crossed every Palestinian red line, under which Palestinians recognized Israel and its right to freedom and security, and Palestinians were used as a security arm serving it. The Liberation Organization cast the Palestinian National Charter aside, moving toward normalization with Israel and wasting long years negotiating with it to no result. The Organization also neglected Palestinian national rights in every agreement it concluded with Israel, deferring them all to final-status negotiations. Even the establishment of a Palestinian state went unmentioned in the agreements. Worst of all, the Palestinian has come to pursue the Palestinian who might act, or even think of acting, against Israel. Experience has shown that the Palestinian Authority’s torture of Palestinian prisoners is harsher and more brutal than the torture Israel itself practices.

2. The Arab regimes have become allied with Israel, no longer neutral states in the ongoing conflict. The Arab states maintained covert relations with Israel over past years, but now provide military and security aid to Israel, even at the expense of Arab security. Arab armies, such as the Jordanian and Egyptian armies, stand guard along Israel’s borders to prevent the resistance from exercising its right to confront Israel. Naturally, the Arab regimes found justification for their actions in the conduct of Palestinians toward their own people, and because of their own privileged relations with Israel, preferring not to be more royalist than the king.

3. The international arena is no longer concerned with the Palestinian cause, its attention now focused on the negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, given how these entrench Israel’s existence and its dominance over national rights. Even Russia and China no longer care about the rights of oppressed peoples, their revolutionary theories having transformed into theories of the global market and foreign trade.

Who Remains for the Palestinians?

Only a small few among Arabs and Muslims remain willing to support the Palestinians with any real strength. Some financial and humanitarian support may still come from certain states, such as Qatar and Turkey, but this support does not rise to the level required for liberation. Egypt has taken to tightening the siege on Gaza, denying the people of Gaza even the most basic humanitarian necessities, and foreign states have begun pressuring Egypt to ease the siege on the Strip. What remains for the Palestinians, among the Arabs, is only some of themselves, not all of themselves. Some Palestinians have become allies of Israel, like most Arab countries, but others continue preparing and readying themselves to confront Israel. Palestinians have stood firm through three successive wars, foiling Israeli plans, and managed, in the 2014 war, to inflict defeat on the Israeli army, which could not hold out for a single full day against the attacks of Palestinian fedayeen operating with unparalleled courage behind its lines. Some Palestinian capabilities have developed militarily at an escalating pace, and fighters have benefited from their combat experience, developing their military tactics and neutralizing a large part of Israel’s military machinery of destruction. And since Israel could not inflict defeat on Palestinian resistance, it resorted to destroying civilian homes and killing ordinary people not taking part in the fighting.

Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah

Palestinian resistance could not have developed at this steady pace that astonished the world were it not for Iranian and Lebanese military support, the latter carried out by Hezbollah. Iran, and Hezbollah alongside it, provided various appropriate facilities for advancing the resistance and raising the level of its combat performance. Iran provided money, weapons, training, organization, and some of the technical secrets of missile and explosives manufacturing, while Hezbollah provided all its military knowledge, particularly tactical knowledge, to the resistance, specifically tunnel digging and building fortified underground networks, and Hezbollah members entered Gaza through the tunnels to offer their training and armament expertise to Palestinian resistance. Hezbollah never once hesitated to carry out weapons-smuggling operations into Gaza via the Red Sea, Sudan, and Sinai, and Hezbollah lost a number of martyrs in these smuggling operations. Syria, for its part, provided what it could of armament and training, and sent some of its military commanders to Gaza to train Palestinian forces in conventional combat methods.

These three parties are the ones providing Gaza’s military needs, insofar as they exist. The Arab and Muslim states do not dare send a single bullet to Gaza, while these parties always stand ready to send missiles and whatever they have available and can be smuggled. And if Gaza does not obtain enough weapons, it is because the Arab regimes besiege Gaza and block weapons from reaching it, and, more recently, block medicine as well. Only these parties stand ready for challenge and confrontation, unconcerned with private interests as long as the Palestinian cause remains the banner.

Since Iran and Hezbollah are steadfast in their principles and convictions, it is better for Palestinians to hold fast to them as friends, allies, and partners, however much this angers the Arab regimes. We are searching for whoever will carry us, not for whoever we must carry. The Arab regimes hold no good for their own peoples, and clinging to them is a waste of time and effort. We now have no true supporter but Iran and Hezbollah, and the Palestinian cause requires us to search for strong, faithful friends who do not fear Israel, do not ally with it, and do not normalize with it. Only Iranians and Hezbollah view the cause of Palestine through a doctrinal lens rooted in Islamic belief. For Iran and Hezbollah, the cause of Palestine is not merely a political cause but a purely Islamic one, drawing its religious depth from Al-Aqsa Mosque and the noble Dome of the Rock.

Palestinians clung to the Arab regimes for a long stretch of time, at the expense of clinging to the Arab peoples, and reaped nothing but disappointments and defeats — yet despite this, these regimes constantly try to encourage Palestinians to offer further concessions to the Zionist entity. And instead of the regimes standing firmly and forcefully with the Arab-Islamic right, they constantly search for avenues of surrender. Accordingly, the Palestinians’ dealings with the Arab regimes have been a losing trade, producing nothing but the treacherous Arab Peace Initiative the Arab summit approved in 2002. The Arab regimes have also tried to drag Palestinians into Sunni-Shiite strife, to the point that some Palestinians have come to embrace that strife. We have no interest in sectarian strife, no stake in internal Islamic or Arab conflicts, and anyone who tries to draw us into such strife is acting with premeditated intent to drain Arab and Islamic energies in favor of Western colonialism and the Zionist entity.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “إيران ظهير الحقوق الفلسطينية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.