TEHRAN-TABNAK, Dec 25: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London, tells the TABNAK that from a historical and analytical perspective, it is simply wrong to say that Iran supports the Palestinian cause for the interest of the state or society without establishing how that interest is defined in the first place.
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam says, “HAMAS is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Diminishing their role to being mere Iranian proxies is simply false.”
Following is the text of the interview with Professor Adib-Moghaddam:
Q: Palestinian-American scholar and author Rashid Khalidi recently stated that the “axis of resistance” only serves Iranian interests and not the Palestinian cause. What is your assessment of his words?
A: I would like to start by saying that Prof. Khalidi is the single most important historian of modern Palestine, whose works have functioned as a major reference point for my generation. He is an esteemed colleague who continued the legacy of the late Edward Said at Columbia University in New York under political and cultural circumstances that have been incredibly adversarial to anything, and anyone connected to Palestine.
It is with this stature of him in mind, that I was surprised about the timing and content of his assessment of Iran and Palestine. His argument that the Iranian state follows its national interest is an obvious one. Every state pursues its interests. However, we must know how that interest is defined to be able to interpret its content. Now when it comes to supporting the Palestinian quest for statehood, there can’t be any real doubt that since the revolution of 1979, Iran supported that cause and paid for it dearly.
One can dispute the tactics, the alliance patterns, and the strategy, even whether the Iranian role has been detrimental to Palestine. However, I don’t think that anyone would doubt that the Iranian revolutionaries supported the cause of Palestinian self-determination, also because of long standing links at least since the 1950s between leftist guerilla movements, student organisations, nationalist anti-imperialists and so on. For decades, even before the revolution, Iranians fought and died alongside Palestinians, as Yasir Arafat himself correctly declared when he visited Iran, when he declared Iran to be his “home” after the revolution as the first foreign dignitary invited to the country and when he was handed over the keys to the Israeli embassy in Tehran. Since then, Iranians have paid dearly for the country’s support to Palestine not at all in line with a conventional understanding of “interests”. Certainly, the Shah’s Iran was on a more convenient side of history with his clandestine and at time overt support to Israel.
In fact, the outright sacrifice of Iranian material resources for the support of Palestine is one of the reasons why the Iranian state is criticised by many Iranians. From their perspective, the state is depleting Iran’s national interest for the Palestinians and their allies. Wouldn’t it be in the national interest of Iran to act like other Arab and Muslim countries and to drop Palestine from the agenda? IR theory and any rational choice model upon which the concept of “national interest” is premised would affirm that question: It is not at all in the national interest of Iran, defined in those terms as both power maximisation and/or material gain, to support Palestinians.
Therefore, from a historical and analytical perspective, it is simply wrong to say that Iran supports the Palestinian cause for the interest of the state or society without establishing how that interest is defined in the first place. Conversely, from a strict analytical perspective, supporting Palestine is a major source of insecurity for the Iranian state and society. Zooming into the ideology of the revolution, Islamic tenets, anti-imperialism etc., give a better understanding of Iran’s counterintuitive definition of “interests”, as colleagues and I have established for decades. In fact, my SOAS colleague Dr. Seyed Ali Alavi wrote a whole book on Iranian-Palestinian connections before and after the revolution based on extensive interviews of Palestinian officials. And then there is also the human and civil society component that is clearly discernible to anyone who did fieldwork in Iran: The scholarships exclusively reserved for Palestinians, free health-care for Palestinians in Iranian-financed hospitals in southern Beirut and before the drastic sanctions against the country in Iran itself, the donations by Iranian families etc.
Moreover, the timing of the statement of Prof. Khalidi makes it even more problematic, as he clearly identified Iran’s allies such as Hezbollah and HAMAS as enablers of Iran’s national interest at a time when the so-called “axis of resistance” appears bruised and battered. Prof. Khalidi is a meticulous historian. Of course, he knows that Hezbollah emerged out of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon after 1982 and as a response to the marginalisation of the Shia downtrodden in Lebanese society. HAMAS is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Diminishing their role to being mere Iranian proxies is simply false.
Q: Khalidi argues that “the limited responses of Iran and Hezbollah to the Gaza war show that the axis of resistance of Iran was designed by Iran to protect itself, not to protect Palestine.” In refuting this claim, it can be said that one of the main reasons for Iran’s direct conflict with Israel was the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau in Tehran. Hezbollah also entered into a comprehensive conflict with Israel (In supporting the Gaza war), which led to a ceasefire based on UNSCR 1701, which has serious consequences for the movement. What is your opinion?
A: Again, I was baffled that a respected historian such as Prof. Khalidi would not consider the wider context. He must know that for decades it has been Benjamin Netanyahu’s primary aim to have an all-out war with Iran and to drag the United States into such a conflict. In the face of the military might of the whole “West”, why would Iran, Hezbollah or any other state or non-state actor invite such a pre-determined defeat by escalating the situation?
The tactic and strategy of a militarily inferior actor can never be premised on military escalation. This is why the strategy has always been a discursive one and one of deterring the catastrophic might of Israel’s garrison state. It can only be that. In fact, HAMAS’s strategic blunder to escalate the situation by an egregious act of terrorism is the best example that escalation doesn’t work. By definition, the axis of resistance faces an axis of power – hence the naming of the former. By definition, then, the military response has to be limited. The security doctrine of Hezbollah and Iran reflects this stance. A section of HAMAS chose to escalate in October 2023 by choosing to attack Israel. The result has been catastrophic for the Palestinians. Against a military hegemon, you don’t use violence as a strategy.
So the response of Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Iran was limited, as it has been measured in accordance with a wider long-term strategy to engage Israel without igniting an all-out war, to increase the costs of occupation. By costs I don’t mean the economic repercussions which are offset by the bottomless financial support that Israel receives. The costs that the Israeli state is paying is exactly reputational. Therefore, it feeds into that discursive battle that I indicated.
However, this discursive strategy is flawed too, as it has been based on the miscalculation by all stakeholders in support of Palestine that the regional and global response would lead to a pro-Palestinian Tsunami, i.e. demonstrations in all major Arab and Muslim cities which would have given the axis an immense ideological momentum. This was a miscalculation, another mistake in the thinking of the decision-makers. But it does not question the intention to support Palestinians. It is simply that the strategies and tactics are outdated. There was no discursive consensus in support of Palestine that was decisive. In fact, raising the Palestinian flag in many Arab capitals was criminalised and no one dared to flood the streets.
The final miscalculation, one that brings us closer to the reasons why the axis of resistance is so weakened, brings me to the wider intellectual and ideational context of Prof. Khalidi’s criticism of Iran. Iranians simply under-estimate how unnatural an ally they are in the Arab and Muslim world. A self-designated role as the champions of Palestine requires the affirmation of that role to function and to be enacted by Iran. Legitimacy is a social construction.
The role of champion of Palestine is dependent on external approval. The country never had this external legitimacy beyond a set of actors such as Hezbollah, which are alienated from mainstream Arab politics also because they are seen to be tainted by that Iranian coleure. That legitimacy dilemma is particularly acute for movements that do not carry a decisive democratic mandate and that are seen to be particularly authoritarian towards their own population.
It is not only that the Islamic Republic’s model of governance is rejected for obvious reasons. In the final analysis Iran is seen as Persian, Shia, non-Arab; a bit of an annoying “other” with all of those Zoroastrian traditions, historic support to the Jews, and a sense of imperial entitlement before and after the revolution. Arab nationalist narratives are full of references to the backstabbing Persians and the Sunni-Shia conundrum has been a factor, too. That is why Iran never had natural allies in the region. Again, the scholarship about the modern history of Iranian foreign affairs and its chequered alliance patterns is clear about that. Ideology-driven censorship can’t supersede the facts, the realities.
Ultimately, the fact that even after all the material and human sacrifices, Iran and Hezbollah are not seen as “pro-Palestinian” by a major scholar such as Prof. Khalidi mirrors the assessment of Palestinian factions themselves, when Yasir Arafat supported Saddam Hussein after Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, HAMAS turned away from Iran after the Arab Spring and both HAMAS and Islamic Jihad welcomed the fall of Damascus reaching out to their Sunni-Arab brothers, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham –
Iran a champion of Palestine? Many Palestinians beg to differ. If this reality does not sink in among the decision-makers embroiled in the current conflict, all strategies premised on the notion that Iran can champion the Palestinian cause are doomed to fail, as indeed they have been.
