-OpEd-
Amid the ongoing crisis in Gaza, why are leftists around the world backing the Palestinians without considering the situation on the ground? The Iranian regime this week marked the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, while its proxy forces play a key role in prolonging crises in Gaza, and beyond. The militant left everywhere, with its high-profile campus protests and trademark keffiyehs, blame only Israel and the United States. What is behind this recognizable knee-jerk ideology?
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The roots of the phenomenon can be found in the Cold War and the policies of the communist Soviet Union, which are now being pursued by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Contrary to what the left and its sympathizers claim, the Soviet Union never intended to free Palestine; rather, it used the Palestinian conflict to weaken the United States and its Western allies.
From the 1950s, the Soviets began training Palestinian guerrillas, turning them into Soviet proxies to play a disruptive role in the Middle East. The Soviets had no desire to resolve the Palestinian question; they used it as part of a bigger strategy to block the West in the region. Putin has resumed this policy. And Iran is pursuing it on a smaller scale and with its own proxies, as Moscow’s geopolitical tool in the region.
Tehran has used proxy forces like Hezbollah, the Hashd al-Shaabi and Hamas, the way the Soviets used communist parties: as a means of winning indirect control of countries, without the need for occupation. Iran also has propaganda tools — like the Iranian state-owned news media Press TV, the Hezbollah channel Al-Manar and social media run by the Revolutionary Guards — to win over hearts and minds in the regions it wants to run. Its bombastic discourse is not dissimilar to the crassest kind of Soviet propaganda.
Sound calculation
In the Cold War, the Soviet Union aided leftist, secular and ostensibly “nativist” movements across the Islamic world, like the Baathists of Iraq and Syria, Nasserism or Arab nationalism in Egypt or the communists in Afghanistan. In 1979, it decided to back revolutionary Islamism in Iran as another means of curbing the West in the region.
It was an odd choice yet a sound calculation, as Iran’s Islamic Republic has in time — even after the Soviet demise — become the chief disruptor of Western influence and conservatism in the region. It is today a “monstrous” amalgamation of all the regional forces that loathed the West in the 20th century.
The left has always sought a victim it could wave at the capitalist West. The Palestinians were just the ticket here, though it wasn’t so much about sympathizing with as it was recruiting this downtrodden population in a bigger fight with different goals. Groups like the French Socialists and Communists or Britain’s Labour Party practically turned them into party militants, as anti-Americanism reached frenzied heights in the 1960s and ’70s.
Third World leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez likewise used strident hostility to Israel and the United States to boost their position in the Arab world and among the left worldwide.
Classic example
One key tactic used by Russia and its stooges is to “drum up” dead numbers, or the deliberate production of deaths for political exploitation. How does that work?
Oct. 7 was a classic example. The proxies launch an attack or fire missiles to provoke Israel, which reacts with counter-operations targeting civilian buildings the militiamen have deliberately chosen as hideouts. Inevitably this provokes horrors and civilian deaths, which the anti-Israeli media gleefully report, fueling protests worldwide.
The left accuses Israel of perpetrating war crimes and the United States of backing genocide, with scant regard for the prelude before the flattening of schools and hospitals. Political pressures pile up — but to whose benefit, as the Roman prosecutor Cassius Longinus asked? In this case, certainly not the Palestinians or Israelis, but a Russia who seeks to strengthen itself at the West’s expense, by hook or by crook.
Perhaps the only beneficiary here is Russia.
The project to pile up useful deaths is not restricted to the Palestinians. Iran used the strategy to survive the Iraqi invasion of 1980 and subsequent eight-year war. It sent thousands of ill-trained volunteers and youngsters, if not at times children, to the front, ensuring near-certain deaths that were then hailed and endlessly promoted as martyrdoms and evidence of selfless devotion to the Shia revolutionary cause. Today, it is playing with fire and risking the lives of Iranians, by refusing to end its meddling in spite of the threat of a bigger war with Israel.
Contrary to the left’s claims, the fighting that followed the Hamas attack on Israel has not been fruitful to Israel, which has had to spend vast sums on war and pay an enormous diplomatic cost. The war acted as a break on its burgeoning diplomatic ties with the Arab world.
People’s lives have been disrupted and money that might have been invested is being spent on security. Perhaps the only beneficiary here is Russia, which has quietly exploited months of conflict to buttress its position against the West.
Propoganda purposes
Tehran also uses the left for propaganda purposes. Somehow it gatecrashed the anti-imperialist party, and brazenly uses the narrative of ‘resistance’ in spite of its reactionary policies at home and fierce suppression of all resistance to its own rule among Iranians.
Iran’s transition to democracy would ensure a more permanent solution
Outlets like the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera and the UK daily The Guardian among others are often closer to mouthing the Iranian official discourse — and the anti-imperialist verbiage — than covering its hangman practices inside Iran. The left and Islamists, the alliance of the extreme and not so extreme, may seem implausible but is based on an age-old principle of seeing a friend in your enemy’s enemy.
Will the left continue to back policies that ostensibly support Palestine but lead to more Palestinian deaths? Can it see how the Palestinians have been exploited in a bigger confrontation, unrelated to their plight? Will it ever stop pedaling the Russian worldview, the way it used to hide or justify Soviet barbarity? For the Palestinians’ sake, it might be time to extricate them from a conflict rooted in Western politics, and a first, tentative step to that end could come with the end of the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s transition to democracy would ensure a more permanent solution to the Middle East’s longstanding and entrenched, political and ideological conflicts.
