Our Wednesday News Analysis | Iran and Palestine: From Yasser Arafat to Hamas—Is the Balancing Act Over?

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat meets Iranian revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The relationship between Palestinian resistance movements and Iran has long been shaped by a complex mixture of ideology, geopolitics, and necessity. While Iran remains one of the most consistent backers of Palestinian armed resistance, the political meaning of this alliance has evolved significantly over the decades.

For Palestinian movements, the issue has never been purely ideological. Instead, it has reflected difficult strategic choices in a political landscape largely defined by Western pressure, regional rivalries, and the realities of Israeli military dominance.

Understanding this relationship requires revisiting its historical roots.

From Revolutionary Solidarity to Political Distance

The relationship between Iran and the Palestinian national movement began shortly after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

That same year, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat became the first foreign leader to visit Tehran following the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. During the visit, Iran symbolically handed the Israeli embassy building in Tehran to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), transforming it into the Palestinian embassy.

At the time, the relationship appeared promising. The revolutionary Iranian leadership saw the Palestinian cause as central to its regional vision, framing Israel as a colonial project and Palestine as a symbol of global anti-imperial struggle.

However, this alignment gradually weakened.

As the PLO pursued diplomatic engagement with Western governments and Arab states throughout the 1980s and 1990s, its relationship with Iran became increasingly strained. The shift was particularly evident following the 1993 Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel, which established the Palestinian Authority and inaugurated a US-backed peace process.

Iran openly opposed Oslo, viewing it as a concession that legitimized Israeli occupation without guaranteeing Palestinian rights.

From that point onward, Iran’s strongest relationships shifted away from the Palestinian Authority and toward Palestinian resistance movements operating outside the Oslo framework...

Read more: Iran and Palestine: From Yasser Arafat to Hamas—Is the Balancing Act Over?

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ISRAEL DELETES PALESTINE

Source: Ghada’s Substack
https://ghadakarmi.substack.com/p/israel-deletes-palestine

By Ghada Karmi
Published March 3, 2026

generated with AI

At this moment, Israel must imagine it is at the pinnacle of its power. An artificially created state in 1948 from people of disparate origins, it is now a powerful figure on the world stage. To all intents and purposes, it has control of the US political system, a loyal US partner in its military adventures against its enemies, and limitless US arms, funding and political protection. The Middle East region is subjugated to its will, and its critics are bludgeoned into impotence.

As it fights with the US to destroy the last of its regional enemies, Iran, Israel estimates it will have succeeded in dispatching all that stands in the way of its total domination of the Middle East – having attacked Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, with Egypt and Jordan disabled by peace treaties with Israel.

But spoiling this triumphalism is Israel’s one unvanquished, and arguably its most important, foe: the Palestinian people and their cause. For Israel, Palestinians are a living reminder of everything it has tried to conceal: its fraudulent origins, pretend history and shaky legitimacy. While Israel bamboozled the western Christian world into accepting its claim to the Holy Land on the basis of a fake connection between modern European settlers and the ancient Israelites in Palestine, the story would never have washed with indigenous Palestinians.

Israel could have ignored that and been satisfied with its physical takeover of the Palestinians’ country, their wealth and resources. The western powers which helped create and sustain Israel would never have opposed its theft of Palestine. They never defended Palestinian rights or helped the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. On the contrary, the west wholeheartedly supported the new Jewish state from its inception to this day.

By 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, even the Palestinian leadership gave way to Israel, ceding 78% of Palestine to Israeli control.

But that Palestinian surrender was not enough. From its beginnings, Israel has been on a quest for legitimacy and needed to disguise its origins as an artificially created, violently-imposed entity. At pains to pretend it was a natural part of the Middle East, it produced a fake version of history to support the claim. According to this, Jews are Palestine’s indigenous people, not Palestinian Arabs, who are said to be wandering Bedouin tribes drifting into the country at various times.

If Israel could erase the Palestinian presence, their history and culture, then it could pretend it had never been. In this endeavour, every aspect of Palestinian history is called into question, contradicted, or denied. Most glaringly in this disinformation campaign, Palestinians are said not to have been expelled from their towns and villages by Zionist militias in the Nakba of 1948; but rather that they ran away in response to their leaders’ orders to leave.

The Zionists have now turned their attention towards deleting the very name, Palestine, from the historical record. Last December, the Open University was pressured into removing ‘Ancient Palestine’ from its humanities teaching module. The Zionist group called UK Lawyers for Israel, which forced the amendment, claimed that using the name, ‘ancient Palestine’, created a ‘hostile or offensive’ learning environment for Jewish and Israeli students...

Read more: ISRAEL DELETES PALESTINE

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ISRAEL'S WAR WITH IRAN IS TURNING THE COUNTRY INTO A NATION OF BOMB SHELTERS

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-03-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israels-war-with-iran-is-turning-the-country-into-a-nation-of-bomb-shelters/0000019c-cece-d7ea-abdd-dfff4f020000

By Odeh Bisharat
Published March 9, 2026

Across the Middle East, graveyards are crowded with leaders killed by the United States and Israel, who have since been replaced by the next generation of dictators. Meanwhile, Israel's own fascist government drills its citizens to enter the shelters in perfect, complacent order

Michael comforts his dog, Louis, as they shelter in an underground car park that functions as a bomb shelter, as sirens sound amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 4, 2026. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun Credit: Ronen Zvulun/ REUTERS

We'll begin with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee's commendation to Israelis for their discipline and organization on the way to the bomb shelters. His remarks were stirring, but it's important to explain to him that this accomplishment is the result of years of hard work.

Every few years – every few months, lately – the government of total victory drills its citizens in entering the shelters in perfect order and without complaint. Inside the large, public shelters, tent cities are already going up; the residents sleep, study, and even cook inside the shelter.

At this rate, in the future Israelis will build bomb shelters instead of homes, with, for the sake of nostalgia, an adjacent, well-ventilated room with windows.

The entrance of the bomb shelter in Beit Shemesh that was struck on Sunday. Credit: Itai Cohen

As for the rest: Israel has placed the United States in a trap. By intervening in the war, America gave legitimacy for Iran to attack Arab states in the Persian Gulf, because they host U.S. military bases. In the past, Israel attacked and America played mediator, supplying weapons to Israel while simultaneously calling for calm. "Let me die with America," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to himself, and now America is in a deep hole.

Meanwhile, residents of the Persian Gulf's Arab states are starting to ask why they lack adequate air defenses while Israel has three layers of them. Discounting the Arab population, especially that of the Negev, Israel is the best protected country in the world. It seems that the situation of the Gulf states is no different from that of their citizens' Arab brethren in Israel: Let them hide under the staircase in their palaces.

The problem is that Israel and the United States aimed very high: the destruction not only of Iran's nuclear project and ballistic missiles, but also of the regime itself. In one fell swoop...

Read more: Israel's War With Iran Is Turning the Country Into a Nation of Bomb Shelters