All Ideological and Political Roads Lead to Iran

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

It is overly simplistic to refer to “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Hamas belongs to the Islamist “resistance” camp, whose ideology began to leave its stamp on the Islamic world in general, and Palestinian society in particular, during the first half of the 20th century.

Hamas’ attack on Israel Oct. 7 was more than an opening salvo in a war between Israel and the organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Hamas is a self-declared member of the “Islamist resistance” camp, which reasserted one of its main principles with clarity, namely, the refusal to ever make peace with Israel. 

“Islamism” refers to a revolutionary interpretation of Islam whose roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century, as propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

Hamas, which is a member, notes its link to the Islamist camp in its 1988 Charter. According to this document, the war against Israel was launched nine years before the founding of the state in 1948: 

Hamas, it states, “is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Muslim Brotherhood.”

Things took a further turn in 1979, when Iran, though it practices Shia Islam, unlike the Brotherhood’s Sunni version, was captured by Islamist ideologues who are happy to play the global game of states when it’s convenient, but who exploit other states and their resources, in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza, in order to promote their revolutionary political designs.

Iran’s provision of support to Hamas has continued to grow over time, especially after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force from fellow Palestinians in 2007. Iran assists Hamas in various ways, mainly financially, but also in frequent meetings with the organization's external leadership – and it is an active partner in the rocket launches Hezbollah carries out against Israel from Lebanon.

The revolutionaries ruling Iran are plotting to transform their dreams into practical schemes of destruction of existing Middle Eastern regimes. All the while, the post-colonial left runs interference for the Islamists around the globe under the ambiguous banner of “resistance.”

Israelis blame Iran for Hamas’s impressive arsenal and the innovative methods of its fighters. They fear that Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will also attack Israel, using its exponentially larger rocket arsenal and far more skilled fighters to launch a much more devastating attack.

Today, as Israel seeks out Hamas fighters hiding in Gaza’s labyrinth underworld, Islamist forces remain in their positions. Hezbollah exploits Lebanon like Hamas exploits Gaza, nesting within civilian populations and aiming more than 150,000 missiles at Israel.

To the south, the Houthis use Yemen to disrupt shipping along the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and fire missiles at the Red Sea resort town of Eilat. On Israel’s east side, Hamas is deeply integrated into the West Bank.

Hamas embodies an ideology that will be hard to eliminate. The idea behind muqawama, or resistance, is that the way to defeat Israel is through persistent military force, a credo also embraced by Hezbollah and Iran.

Iranian military leaders view current Hamas operations in the Gaza Strip as the prelude to a long-term war to destroy Israel.  The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is the ideological custodian of Iran’s 1979 revolution. Its former commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, in an interview on Oct. 15, framed the attack as a “warmup” to prepare and train for future operations against Israel.

The IRGC’s current leader, Hossein Salami, on the same day described Hamas’ operation as the “first stage” of Israel’s “hasty collapse.” He had prior to Oct. 7 argued that Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian militias needed to conduct more ground operations and urban combat inside Israel that would destabilize and generate internal displacement leading to Israel’s collapse. Since Oct. 7, over 200,000 Israelis have fled areas near Gaza and Lebanon.

Iranian Defence and Armed Forces Logistics Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Gharaei Ashtiani said on Nov. 18 that Israel’s military and intelligence failures since Oct. 7 provide lessons for future action against it.

Ashtiani asserted that the “al-Aqsa Flood” attack has reduced Jewish migration to Israel by creating economic, political, and security crises. He also claimed that the war has driven anti-Israel sentiment throughout the world and undermined the credibility of the Israeli government.

Ashtiani previously served as deputy chief of the Armed Forces General Staff from 2019 to 2021 before becoming defence minister, which is often a stepping stone into increasingly influential positions in Iran. Numerous Iranian defence ministers have later served as personal advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The latter a day later said “the defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza is a fact.”

In airstrikes near Damascus Dec. 25, Israel reportedly killed IRGC Brigadier General Sayyed Razi Mousavi. Israel has decided to step up its struggle, not only against Iran’s proxies, but against Iran itself.

Iran until now has waged a multi-front proxy war without paying any price. Will Israel strike Iran openly on its territory? This is a complex decision, but it may cause Tehran to deal more with defence and less with offence. Either way, a wider war would be the result.