As the US enters the war against Iran, Arzu argues that we need to keep our focus on the driver for this latest violence. It has always been about Revolutionary Iran’s support for Palestine.
So, the war is on. It’s been decades in the making. The US has bombed Iran, a week after the Zionist entity launched a war on the Islamic Republic. Iran cannot, it appears, have nukes. At least this is the narrative we are being told, by the US, its European and British lackeys. The mainstream media have bent over and are imparting the talking points that justify the Zionist genocider-in-chief Nethanyahu’s over thirty year claims, that Iran is weeks away from becoming a nuclear power.
What rubbish.
There is commentary aplenty about the right of any country to develop a nuclear energy program; multiple responses on the fatwa of Ayatollah Khamenei that nuclear weapons are haram i.e. not permissible under Islamic law; there are even those who take at face value the claims made against the Islamic Republic and exonerate it from any blame. Why, the latter ask, shouldn’t Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Especially given that Israel also holds such weapons (its politicians and public intellectuals often openly demanding nuclear strikes on Iran, Gaza and elsewhere that irks their ire). These are well written, compelling and persuasive arguments. In this moment of genocide fuelled by Islamophobia and racism, they come from surprising places. Sick of genocide, it seems left, right, centre and none of the above have begun to realise that not everything they have been told is true. They distrust mainstream media. They are beginning to loathe their politicians whether Labour, Tory, MAGA or Reform, AfD or CDU etc.
Enter the nuclear narrative. All of the above responses are meaningful, I do not begrudge them. But here’s the catch. The US did not bomb Iran because of real or imagined nuclear weapons programs, any more than the Zionist entity did. They bombed them because they have been standing with the Palestinians every day since the victory of the Islamic Revolution, which in material terms has meant the building of a resistance network that operates independently and in concert across West Asia.
We must not forget that. We must not be distracted from the actual cause of this attack on Iran, just as we must not look away from Gaza as this new theatre of Israeli / US maniacal violence opens up. And we must understand that when Iran says the US has entered the war, they are right to suppose so, and to enact one of the many plans and strategies they have developed to resist.
That resistance has meant that until the fall of Bashar al-Asad’s regime in December 2024, Palestinian factions had fought one of the mightiest armed forces one earth to a standstill. But Empire recalibrates. Cutting the supply lines from Iran via Iraq then Syria to Palestine with the installation of Jolani’s regime (plus ça change it seems) was part of it. Distracting everyone – even those of us who understand this about Palestine – with talk of nuclear power and weapons is another. Incredibly – although it has been deployed heavily as per the Iraq and Afghanistan playbooks – the narratives of oppressed women and authoritarian leadership have failed to hit home. Social media is not only awash with fact based debunking of these well-worn Islamophobic tropes, those deploying them have become subject to a sliding scale of mockery through to outright hatred and justified vilification.
So, let’s refocus. We can recalibrate too. We need to know we are in this for the long run, as long as it takes the people on the ground to finish the job of liberation. Our voices, and the sacrifices we need to make to ensure they are heard may cause us to lose jobs, face fines possibly even imprisonment in our supposedly liberal, democratic Westernised settings. But this is nothing compared to those who have faced the genocide and violence first hand. Let’s learn about the links between the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the cause of Palestinian liberation. Let’s celebrate the resistance in its diversity across borders, and in its unity of purpose. And let’s learn from it.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
Photo: Mr. Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, Vice President of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, delivers his statement at the 56th Regular Session of the IAEA General Conference. IAEA, Vienna, Austria, 17 September 2012, IAEA Image Bank CC BY-SA 2.0
