The dispute over “the fatherhood of Palestine”

The Iranian regime is not the first to seek to exploit the Palestine issue for its regional interests, to settle its scores, and to enhance its influence in the region, and it will not be the last. This just cause has always been a victim of those who seek to exploit it in every field and for every expense. Arab regimes that described themselves as “nationalist,” and parties and organizations that considered themselves “progressive,” all of them had the slogan of Palestine at the head of their programs, while their goals were seeking another direction.

It was not surprising that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard announced that the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. Despite the controversy raised by this announcement and Tehran’s efforts to “correct” it, the truth is that Tehran was looking for a way to take revenge that would satisfy its supporters at home and its supporters in the region. It was not easy to find a target for revenge equal to the man's importance in the Iranian military hierarchy until the Hamas operation came on October 7, as if it was that opportunity.

It is true that the “Revolutionary Guard” was quick to correct the “misunderstanding,” but the spokesman for the “Guard” corrected it with something worse, as he said that the “results” of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation were part of revenge for the assassination of Soleimani. However, these results, which Tehran views positively, and believes that they have damaged Israel’s prestige and struck at the core of its sense of security beyond its borders, were a human disaster for the residents of Gaza. Therefore, Hamas did well to quickly confirm its refusal to use the October 7 operation and the blood of thousands of victims who fell as a result of it in the service of Iran’s goals and project. The movement's response was extremely courageous, given the well-known close relationship it has with Tehran. I felt that Tehran’s attempt to dominate the objectives of that operation and exploit it in this way would lead to extremely negative reactions against Hamas in the Palestinian street, which would look at the victims, destruction, and state of misery that the Gaza Strip ended up in, on top of its inherited misery since the displacement of the Strip’s residents from their land and their homes since 1948, as the bill paid by Hamas to the Iranian regime, instead of for the sake of protecting Al-Aqsa Mosque and defending the rights of the Palestinians.

Since the announcement of the October 7 operation, Tehran and the movements operating under its auspices in the region have sought to disavow their connection to planning that operation. The Secretary-General of Hezbollah was quick to confirm that he was surprised by the operation and heard about it just as everyone heard on the day it occurred. Like Nasrallah, the Houthis in Yemen, the Hezbollah Brigades, and other pro-Iranian organizations in Iraq denied their prior knowledge or desire to claim responsibility for the decision of the “flood” that opened the fire of killing and destruction on the residents of Gaza.

However, the expansion of the participation of these organizations in the war under the slogan of “unity of the battlefields,” and Israel’s announcement that it is fighting on 7 fronts enumerated by Defense Minister Yoav Galant (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran) put Iran in a position of confrontation through intermediary with Israel, without a declared war between both sides. A confrontation is taking place with Iranian arming and financing, while its consequences fall on the people of the land and its victims, that is, on the Palestinians, while Tehran seeks to confirm its keenness for “stability” and calm and prevent sliding into a large-scale regional war.

However, as I said previously, Iran is not the only country in the region that has sought to invest in the Palestinian issue. The cause is just and investing in it ensures winning populism and mobilizing the masses. Since the Arab countries declared that the Palestine issue is their “first issue,” they have opened the door to the bidding market and competition over its “fatherhood,” despite the large number of Palestinian “fathers” among the leaders of the resistance when it began. From the time of Nasserist up to the Baathist rule in Syria and Iraq, the Palestine issue was the marketing slogan in all adventures. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait under the pretext of defending Palestine, and Hafez al-Assad's forces take control of Lebanon to protect the Palestinian resistance. The Palestinians were not always innocent of this trade-off. They were paying the price for bad relations with Arab governments, and drowning in internal conflicts that took them away from Palestine, as happened in Jordan in 1970 and was repeated in Lebanon in its civil war, during which the Palestine issue turned into a card suitable for use and exploitation in the internal Lebanese conflict.

In calculating the results, the Arab regimes’ trade in the Palestine issue did not achieve impressive results for the benefit of the Palestinians. From the participation of the Arab countries in their first war against the establishment of Israel in 1948 to the resounding defeat in the 1967 war, the impact of which the Arabic language sought to mitigate and considered merely a “setback,” the Palestinians were the victims and the occupied areas of their land expanded in war after war.

The truth is that the difficult Palestinian circumstances that surrounded the emergence of the Palestinian resistance, without a land on which to stand or material or political support to turn its back on, did not leave it many options, which turned it into a card suitable for exploitation, and opened the appetite of the “steadfastness and confrontation” regimes to benefit from it. When Yasser Arafat realized the importance of the “independent Palestinian decision” and went towards Madrid and Oslo in search of exits and a foothold on the land of Palestine, he had some Arab regimes on the lookout for “treason,” and Netanyahu, on the other hand, was planning his major strike that eliminated Yitzhak Rabin and returned the conflict to the arena of bloody confrontation, the chapters of which continue on the scene of brutal massacres committed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.

Source: Alsharq Alawsat