Iran’s reactionary regime is no ally of Palestine
It’s hard not to feel helpless when watching the Israeli army unleash carnage on Gaza. In this apocalyptic situation, it’s understandable why Palestinians and their supporters are desperate for allies of any sort. So when the Iranian government launched a military attack on Israel a few weeks ago, many celebrated it as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. Was a government somewhere finally stepping in to provide practical support for the beleaguered people of Gaza?
But there are big problems with this narrative.
The first relates to the immediate facts of the situation. The Iranian government signalled very strongly that its actions had absolutely nothing to do with Gaza. Hossein Amirabdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, explained to the Financial Times that his government had informed Washington before the attack that its “operation will be limited with the goal of legitimate defence and the punishment of Israel”. Just hours after the attack, Iran’s UN mission tweeted that the “matter can be deemed concluded”. This was not a response to the annihilation of Gaza and its people, but a tactical reaction to Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
The second is both more general and more important and relates to the kind of principles and politics that our movement should be upholding. The Palestinian cause rests on the principle of national self-determination: a people should not be ruled over by a foreign or imposed entity. The right of national self-determination in turn is part of a broader democratic tradition that insists that nobody should suffer under a government not of their own choosing.
Now in a very important sense, every capitalist government is a dictatorship of the rich. But many countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Iran and China, refuse workers and the poor even the most basic input over how society is managed. This includes denying them the right to protest, strike, organise and even vote.
It is self-defeating for a movement fighting to expand democratic rights to ally ourselves with those who are blatantly hostile to these same democratic principles. It makes us hypocrites, akin to those like Joe Biden who cynically denounce human rights abuses in China while enabling and enacting them in Gaza and Yemen.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Such an institution can have no sincere interest in the liberation of Palestinians or anyone else. That’s true even when, for transient geopolitical reasons, Iranian politicians criticise—or even militarily confront—Israel or the US.
The current Iranian state is the distorted product of the 1978-79 revolution. In those glorious years the people of Iran rose up to successfully topple a US-backed dictatorship under the wealthy Shah. The movement was led by a highly organised working class and quickly spread to encompass nearly the entire population. Revolutionary councils were set up in workplaces, university campuses and in the wider community.
The revolution opened up a huge political debate regarding the future of Iran, where various parties and organisations vied to convince the majority of their vision. But the reactionary clerics were able to use their base among the mosques, small shopkeepers and parts of the urban poor to capture and co-opt the revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini elevated himself to be the most prominent spokesperson for the movement, sidelining more radical voices and instigating a dictatorship. This was made easier thanks to the terrible Stalinist politics of much of the left who championed Khomeini as part of their insistence that Iran needed a national, rather than socialist, revolution.
Just after the revolution, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in the hope of claiming territory. Any Iranian who opposed the war or criticised the government for any reason was branded a traitor and sent to jail. In prison people would be tortured within an inch of their lives. Many disappeared, never to be seen again.
Thousands of communists, Arab and Kurdish nationalists, feminists, religious minorities and others were swept up in this wave of repression. In just a few months in 1988, up to 30,000 prisoners were executed by the regime, many of whom were members of the organised left. This period saw the normalisation of severe methods of repression that have been used against the population ever since.
Yet despite this brutality, the mullahs have found it impossible to crush popular demands for change. There have been countless cycles of opposition to the government that have demanded improvements to its economic and social policies. Since 2009, these have coalesced in multiple waves of protests and strikes. These movements and demands have deepened over time, starting from fairly moderate calls to liberalise the regime, then moving towards the total rejection of the theocratic dictatorship. They have criticised the government’s social policies, but also point to the profound economic injustice of Iranian capitalism.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022 was emblematic of this dynamic. It kicked off when the despised morality police murdered Kurdish woman Jina Amini. Amini was beaten to a pulp for refusing to wear the mandated hijab. This triggered a women’s and youth movement across the country, in which some participants also took up the specific oppression of Kurds and other minorities. Importantly, revolutionary workers brought a class struggle dimension to the movement.
The mullahs tried to crush the movement, unleashing their militias on peaceful protesters, imprisoning thousands of demonstrators, and even poisoning hundreds of high school and university-aged women’s rights activists. But when this failed to crush the spirits of the inspirational women and their supporters, the regime was eventually forced to loosen the rules around hijab requirements to calm the rebellion.
In response to these growing waves of struggle, conservative hardliners in the government have attempted to cohere their supporters around a reactionary populist agenda. They have tried both economic and political tricks to galvanise support. The conservative wing of the establishment has rolled out expanded social welfare programs to buy off sections of the poor. This can be effective when the official opposition is completely committed to neoliberal market mechanisms.
But culture wars are just as important in solidifying the grip of the conservative bloc currently in power. They cynically promote their regressive version of “traditional” Islamic values, attack feminists as “Western stooges”, and denounce Iran’s many ethnic, cultural and religious minorities as traitors to the nation.
Part of this propaganda package is the assertion that the Islamic Republic is a principled and consistent opponent of US imperialism in the region. The hard right is the most committed to this seemingly radical rhetorical posture, while liberals and reformers tend to argue for rebuilding relationships and peaceful coexistence. The former position is popular given the terrible history of Western intervention in the country. The Shah himself was installed and propped up by the US following a coup against an earlier progressive nationalist leader. In exchange, the Shah granted Western companies generous access to the country’s abundant oil fields.
This is especially important to understand given that Iran is attempting to expand its sphere of influence across the region, dubbing itself the leader of an “axis of resistance”.
This is most clearly demonstrated in Hezbollah, an organisation that is now a typically corrupt fixture of the Lebanese political scene. This is a party that is pro-capitalist, hostile to workers’ struggle, and profoundly sectarian and conservative when it comes to social issues. The extent of Hezbollah’s counter-revolutionary politics were exposed during the Arab Spring, when it joined the Syrian, Iranian and Russian governments in drowning the Syrian revolution in blood. This should be no surprise given that the party was founded by clerics entirely aligned with Iran’s political and organisational perspectives, and now represents some of Lebanon’s wealthiest figures.
While Hezbollah is the most successful of Iran’s allies, it has a growing network of actors in Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. While these forces at times posture as being anti-American and pro-Palestinian, their politics are entirely regressive. In Iraq, sectarian militias backed by Iran have ravaged and looted what remained of the country following the US withdrawal in 2011. Every time Iraqi people have risen up demanding change, they’ve faced the repressive power of both the state—which also tends to be influenced by Iran—and the various militias. In this context, the latter’s occasional attacks on remaining US outposts are window dressing for a thoroughly reactionary social force.
Overall, then, the Iranian government is not serious about confronting imperialism. In fact, Iran is second only to Israel as the most powerful regional player in the Middle East. Like any other regional imperialist nation, it uses economic, military and cultural measures to expand its sphere of influence. Its only principle is self-interest, which explains why the supposedly anti-imperialist mullahs were happy to support the US-led war and sanctions against Iraq in 1991.
Which brings us back to Palestine. Iran’s rhetorical support for Palestinian liberation is one of the ways that its brutal dictatorship tries to win popular legitimacy at home and abroad. But its thin pretence of being an axis of resistance is window dressing for a counter-revolutionary domestic and international agenda. It is inexcusable for anyone on the left to lend them any support.
