From Tehran to Gaza: Frontlines of Resistance
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Forty-seven years ago, after a millennium of monarchical rule, Iran reinvented its political system. The Islamic Republic was birthed by the Revolution of 1979; considered one of the most consequential historical events of modern times.
The Iranian Revolution profoundly altered the geopolitical landscape of West Asia. By removing the Shah, Iranians severed one pillar of U.S. regional hegemony. In addition, the Revolution transformed Iran from a close ally of Israel into one of its primary adversaries. It also shifted the Palestinian cause from a largely secular national liberation struggle against settler-colonialism into a more Islamist-oriented resistance; an Islamic and political imperative. The liberation of al-Quds (Jerusalem) became a central pillar of the government’s anti-imperialist Islamic identity.
In August 1979, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, initiated Al-Quds Day to solidify Palestine as a unifying principle. The international day, held annually, is commemorated on the last Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan. It features large rallies intended to express solidarity with Palestinians, and to oppose Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and all of Palestine. It has since served as a symbol of resistance.
In addition, to counter US and Israeli hegemony, Iran established a network of allies that has linked Palestinian freedom to a regional strategy. Tehran has never wavered in providing material support (estimated in the billions) to Palestinian resistance groups; support that has enabled them to continue their struggle for liberation and self-determination.
For the past 47 years, Iran, a non-Arab country, has maintained its commitment to Palestine as a core pillar of its anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist foreign policy. No Arab country or any Muslim nation can say the same. For that, Iran has been terrorized economically and militarily by Israel, the U.S. and its Western allies, and punished for a nuclear weapons program that does not exist.
Revolutionary Iran has been central in making Palestine a litmus test for freedom and justice in West Asia and beyond. In the words of Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister: “It [Palestine] is the strategic and moral compass of our region. It is a test of whether international law has meaning, whether human rights have universal value and whether global institutions exist to protect the weak or merely to rationalize the power of the strong.”
For its refusal to assent to injustice and to yield its national sovereignty, the United States, since the 1950s, has inflicted systematic suffering on Iran. For rejecting its dictates, Washington has adopted policies and measures that include:
+ overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953
+ sustaining the Shah’s brutal dictatorship for 26 years
+ sponsoring Iraq’s eight-year war and use of chemical weapon against Iranians
+ collaborating with Israel in its campaign of killing Iranian scientists
+ destroying industrial infrastructure and attacking peaceful nuclear facilities
+ maintaining devastating sanctions that have crippled the economy, contributed to environmental degradation and inflicted significant hardships on the population
Tel Aviv views the complete elimination of regional opposition as a prerequisite for regional domination and for restructuring the area in its own likeness. Iran, Palestinian Resistance, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and Ansarallah in Yemen are the remaining barriers to the U.S and Israel achieving complete subjugation.
In its pursuits, Israel has worked for decades to portray Iran as a malign actor. It has developed and seasoned a powerful propaganda network of pro-Zionist think tanks, educational institutions, media and lobbying groups to condition Americans to view Iran as an aggressor, a threat and a country whose leaders should be feared.
There are numerous, often subtle examples, of how the US-Israeli campaign to undermine and to “otherize” Iran has worked; among them:
+ Iran’s constitutional republic is inevitably referred to as a “regime”.
+ Protests receive extensive media coverage and anti-Iran punditry in the corporate media, while Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians is downplayed or explained away as defense.
+ Iranian women, among the most educated in the world (97 percent are literate and 65 percent of university students are female) and prominent in the professions, are depicted as oppressed.
+ Iran’s leaders are portrayed negatively, often as sinister, hardline and irrational, while Israel’s hardline, militaristic, right-wing conservative theocrats are represented as rational and democratic.
What has become increasingly evident is that Washington and Tel Aviv, in order to force Tehran into submission, have employed illegal economic sanctions and baseless nuclear weapons threats as political tools.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has spent more than 34 years manufacturing a nonexistent nuclear crisis, sounding the alarm that Iran is weeks or months away from a nuclear breakthrough, a recurring narrative used to build a case for military action.
Soon after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the multilateral nuclear agreement, was finalized on 14 July 2015, Netanyahu made destroying it central to his war aims.
It is important to remember that Iran, hoping for a lasting diplomatic solution, accepted the strictest restrictions ever placed on a civilian nuclear program when it agreed to the JCPOA. The nuclear deal included the following constraints on Iran’s peaceful program: uranium enrichment capped at 3.67 percent (90 percent needed for a bomb); enriched uranium stockpile reduced by 98 percent; and the program placed under the full surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Although Iran honored the conditions of the nuclear deal, Israel and its U.S. supporters applauded Trump when, in 2018, he unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and initiated a “maximum pressure”campaign.
The financial war waged by the U.S. and Israel has not produced the “regime” change desired; instead it has accelerated Iran’s integration into a strategic alliance with China and Russia.
Additionally, since the 1990s, Netanyahu and his allies in Washington have repeatedly called for military action against Iran, persistently trying to get the United States to attack. He finally realized his scheme in June 2025, when Israel launched, with U.S. military support, the 12-day war; an attack that took place under the cover of negotiations.
It is interesting to note that following the 2020 U.S. assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, Trump complained privately that Netanyahu was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.” His frustration stemmed from his belief that Netanyahu would involve Israel directly in the operation.
Iran and Palestine have always been in Washington and Tel Aviv’s crosshairs: Iran for its significant history and geopolitical location, its oil, gas and other mineral riches; Palestine for its religious force and its historical presence in the heart of the Islamic world; and both for their perseverance and principled steadfastness.
Americans have come to misunderstand the complex Iranian nation through pro-Zionist corporate and social media, and commentaries by anti-government diaspora Iranians and so-called Iran experts. Bereft of historical background, both centuries-old nations have been reduced to faux soundbites.
Members of the political, foreign policy and media establishment rarely, if ever, scrutinize the need, efficacy or clamor for war against Iran; let alone question the morality of U.S.-Israeli actions; instead their violence and aggression are tolerated and often applauded.
Unlike many in the Arab and Western world, the Islamic Republic has refused to abandon the Palestinians and to bend a knee to the dangerous bullish U.S.-Israeli regimes.
Faced with Israel’s expansionist ambitions, Arab oil families also have a decision to make regarding their future in the region. If they wish to remain sovereign, rather than vassal states of the U.S.-and Israel, they, too, must stand with Palestine.
The Arab states’ absence in the battle for Palestine is not simply moral cowardice, it is a victory for the Zionists and surrender to the imperialist U.S.-Israeli plan for the region.
Irrelevance, duplicity and continued instability are the best Israel has to offer. The choice of the Arab states is clear—collective unity or subordination.
Israel has mistakenly concluded—as Washington has led it to believe— that it can continue to live and thrive in the region despite its genocidal war on Palestinians, terrorist aggression against neighbors, and assault on the international legal system.
The Washington-Tel Aviv rogue axis has been threatening and building toward war against Iran since 1979. And what we are witnessing today is Washington’s quest to install another compliant, client monarch, like the late Shah.
For the region and global community, their contrived and long-desired war, driven by the misguided conviction that it will end Palestinian resistance and topple the Iranian government, may become a tragic reality.
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