How Iran took centre stage in Palestinian movement

Vappala Balachandran

Former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

According to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), Washington DC, residents of the West Bank and Gaza are almost totally of Palestinian-Arab origin: 92 per cent West Bankers and 99 per cent Gazans are Sunni Muslims and the rest are Christians. These are 2002 figures. The PRB says that 2,14,000 Jewish settlers also live in these areas. The demographics might have changed due to the presence of large-scale ‘illegal’ Jewish settlers, as the US calls them, since February 2024, reversing former US President Trump’s policy.

However, the religious composition of the Palestinians remains almost the same, according to the CIA’s ‘World Fact Book’ (2024). The question is how Iran, with almost 95 per cent Shia population, assumed leadership of the Palestinian struggle against Israel.

The Iran-Israel relations were friendly in 1948, when Israel was born. A 2019 Brookings paper says that historically, Persian-Judaic interactions were friendly as Iran was the only country which did not join the Muslim-majority states in opposing its creation. Also, Iran fitted into Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s ‘Periphery Doctrine’, which aimed at “a political-security goal of countering Arab hostility through relations with alternative regional powers and potential allies,” according to Israeli author Yossi Alpher.

Ben-Gurion forged relationships with non-Arab countries, like Turkey and Iran, whose rulers, like Ismet Inonu and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (The Shah), had pro-Western orientations. During the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, the Iran-Israel relations assumed strategic depth, with joint projects like Trans-Atlantic Oil, set up in Panama and Switzerland, and a secret Eilat-Ashkelon Oil Pipeline, at a time when Arab oil producers had imposed embargoes on Israel.

Apart from ‘Savak’-Mossad intelligence cooperation, a secret Israel-Iran project named ‘Project Flower’ on advanced missile systems was also reportedly going on, according to The New Arab of October 23, 2023, quoting The New York Times (April 1, 1986).

Around this time, Iranian leftist guerrillas led by the Tudeh Party, and ‘Fedaian guerrillas’, who were persecuted by Savak, joined the Palestinian pro-left Fatah movement’s camps in Jordan and Lebanon for training in guerrilla warfare. They also participated with al-Fatah during the armed combat with the Israeli army. However, this leftist revolution petered out.

On the other hand, religious groups led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini started agitating after the failure of Pahlavi’s ‘White Revolution’, which was meant to modernise the Iranian society. The Shah had to leave Iran on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini entered Iran on February 1 to lead a theocratic nation.

The first foreign leader to visit Iran was Yasser Arafat, al-Fatah leader, on February 17, 1979. Arafat, who had suffered a crushing defeat in 1970 while attempting to take over Jordan (‘Black September’), was looking for a country to support him, although Lebanon had allowed him to operate from its soil. This was based on the November 2, 1969, Cairo agreement, supported by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, through which Lebanon permitted Arafat’s PLO to administer 16 official refugees’ camps under the United Nations Relief & Works Agency, where three lakh Palestinian refugees lived.

Gradually, these camps became the training ground of revolutionaries of all hues, including Iranian religious revolutionaries like the Liberation Movement of Iran, also called the Islamic modernists, Islamic-Marxist Mujahidin-e-Khalk and Islamist followers of Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran specialists of that era say that the creation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was a result of Arafat’s suggestions through Lebanese PLO leader Anis Naccache, who had led the 1975 Vienna kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers through Carlos the Jackal.

Naccache worked with Jalaleddin Farsi, who was then close to Khomeini, to prevent a coup against the latter in the unsettled conditions in Iran. Naccache later recruited Imad Mughniyeh, who rose to become Hezbollah’s top man and organised the Argentinian bombings in 1992 and 1994.

The IRGC is Iran’s leading fighting force now, numbering nearly two lakh, with overseas responsibilities through the Quds Force. A Council on Foreign Relations paper, updated on April 17, 2024, says that it has regional allies in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestinian territories (Hamas and Islamic Jihad), Syria and Yemen. The paper quotes a 2020 assessment by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies that “the IRGC has become the most powerful controller of all important economic sectors across Iran” for funding covert activities.

A December 2023 paper by the Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC) at US West Point Military Academy says that the IRGC does the crafting of its overseas activities through umbrella groups and joint operations centres. It enlists al-Fatah splinter groups and leftist and Islamist groups into a more loyal, militarily cohesive and politically responsive network under the IRGC control. The first experiment was in 1991, when it created the Ten Resistance Organisation at the Tehran-sponsored “World Conference in Support of the Islamic Revolution in Palestine”.

In September 2023, Hamas and Palestinian Jihad started a joint operations room (JOR) in Beirut. Another joint operational centre of the Hezbollah and Hamas had been functioning since 2021. As per the CTC, this JOR utilises Lebanese Hezbollah as a coordinator between Iran, other Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen and Palestinian groups.

The CTC paper also quotes Yahya al-Sinwar, Hamas’ Gaza lead military commander, proclaiming in November 2018 that the JOR would form the ‘nucleus of the Army of Liberation’. Consequently, the JOR undertook joint operations by firing rockets at Israel in November 2018 and in 2019.

Surprisingly, the CTC also reproduces impressive propaganda papers circulated through JOR Telegram Channels communications, dated December 29, 2020, on the types of exercises, including launching rockets, simulating taking IDF hostage from a tank, raiding small structures, deploying an Iranian-made Misagh MANPADS and using Iranian-made AM 50 rifles. The paper refers to videos from the drill on simulated combat divers raiding coastal targets and JOR fighters interdicting mock Israeli sea-borne forces. It also quotes Joe Truzman writing in Long Wars Journal on December 27, 2020, about these exercises.

All these were found utilised by the Hamas during the October 7, 2023, attacks. What, then, was Israeli intelligence doing when such information was publicly available since 2020?

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