In Tehran’s Palestine Square the far mural on the tall building displays slogans on a map pointing at Israeli cities that read in Hebrew: “All targets are within reach, we choose” (top) and in Farsi: “All the targets are available, we will choose” on December 4, 2024. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images
Before the 1979 revolution, it hosted Israel’s embassy and went by a different name: Kakh (Palace) Square. In February of 1979, days after the revolution’s victory, the new government hosted a friendly reception of Yasser Arafat and his team. The building was handed over to the PLO as the Palestinian embassy, and the square was renamed.
Today, a large billboard stands on the perimeter of the square, with a built-in electronic counter projecting giant red numbers that count down the days until the demise of “the Zionist Regime”—the official term used by Iran to refer to Israel as it does not recognize the state.
The billboard was erected by the Basij office of Tehran City in 2015, following the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. At the time, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, claimed on his Twitter account that Israeli officials had announced they “have no more concern about Iran for the next 25 years.” Khamenei reacted by announcing “God willing, there will be nothing as Zionist Regime by next 25 years.”[1] The counter, which started at about 9,125 days (or 25 years) is embedded within the words, “only [X] days remaining to the annihilation of Israel” in Persian, English and Arabic iterations. There is no time-sensitive action planned in parallel to the counting, which is itself faulty. Every so often, the screen malfunctions and pauses.
The messaging of the billboard clock reflects the nature of Iran’s support for Palestinian liberation, even before the events of October 7, 2023 and the recent series of blows to the Axis of Resistance. Since the 1979 Revolution, despite exaggerated discursive aggression, Iran has hesitated to engage with Israel directly. Palestine has rarely been a central agenda item of Iran’s foreign policy due to both a steadfast Iran-first policy and to the country’s lack of conventional political and military capacity to resolve the conflict in the way it promises in its propaganda.
Iran’s support for its non-state allies in the region, including Hizballah, Hamas and the Houthis, justified in terms of pro-Palestinian resistance, works in large part to expand its own political and military influence in the region within the Islamic Republic’s ideological boundaries. Iran’s policies around Palestine must align with its geostrategic interests—an approach that has raised problems for the state amid the latest regional war.
Propaganda and Practice
From the first post-revolutionary days, Iran’s religious leaders have faced a dilemma when it comes to supporting Palestine. All strands of Iranian revolutionaries wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with the globally prominent plight of Palestinians. But while Muslim-Marxist groups boasted their ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Islamist clerics were uneasy endorsing the secular, left-leaning flag bearers of the Palestinian liberation movement. Conservative newspapers at the time, for instance, adopted the language of being anti-Israel, rather than pro-Palestinian, in order to avoid any mention of the PLO.[2]
In general, the dominant post-revolutionary agenda among clerics close to Ayatollah Khomeini was focused more on establishing Iran’s Islamist, anti-imperial identity, while support for Palestine was limited in practice. The Liberation Movements branch of the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was involved in anti-Israeli military activism in collaboration with international groups including the PLO. Activists in charge of this branch had cooperated with the PLO in Syria and Lebanon before the 1979 revolution and trained a few Iranian guerrillas for the fight against the Shah. After the revolution, they insisted on continuing their cooperation with liberation fighters outside of Iran, most prominently the PLO. But the branch was marginalized from the beginning and disbanded by mainstream proponents of an Iran-focused IRGC by 1982.
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a group of Iranian military and political elite sent forces to Lebanon to fight against the invasion. Exact numbers are unclear, but as many as two battalions of infantry forces were transported to Syria for this purpose along with a few young IRGC commanders who had already become prominent figures in Iran’s ongoing fight against Iraq. Another strata of the political elite, however, including Ayatollah Khomeini, disagreed with the move, emphasizing the need to keep Iranian forces engaged with Iraq instead. The IRGC Commander in Chief at the time, Mohsen Rezaei, said in a speech: “As long as the Ba’ath Regime is in power in Iraq, there is nothing we can do with Israel.”[3] This stance was a precedent to the slogan that dominated Iran’s campaign in later years of the Iran-Iraq war, “the road to Jerusalem goes through Karbala.”
Iranian statesmen found a key ally in Hamas since the group advocated for political Islam and was not content with a two-state solution that could potentially—albeit unjustly and temporarily—end the conflict. Indeed, the failures of Oslo served Iranian interests in so far as Oslo undermined any real prospects for peace and shifted the framework for resistance, especially with the rise of Hizballah both as a vanguard of anti-Israeli resistance and a staunch Iranian ally. When the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Iran’s geostrategic priorities took precedence over its relationship with its Palestinian non-state allies: While Hamas sided with the opposition to bring down Asad’s dictatorship, Iran joined forces with Hizballah and Russia to make sure its oldest state ally remained in power.
From the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Iranian government has been vocal against Israeli aggression, while remaining restrained when it comes to action. Shortly after Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, for instance, Iranian governmental agencies created a portal for citizens to register to be dispatched to Gaza to fight alongside Palestinians. The campaign—advertised with the slogan “I am your match [harifat manam]”—was directed at the Israeli state and army. In January 2024, the counter on the portal claimed that more than 10 million Iranians had signed up. Even if the number were to be trusted, officials did not have an actual program for sending fighters to Gaza. The campaign was a symbolic one. In fact, while pro-Palestine marches erupted across the world bringing hundreds of thousands to the streets week after week, the Iranian government, experienced in mobilizing supporters and mercenaries for pro-government demonstrations, produced nothing of the sort.
Iran’s two direct attacks on Israel during 2024—on April 13 and October 1—represented an escalation compared to previous indirect encounters between the two countries. Both were in response to Israeli attacks: the first to Israel’s strike on Iran’s consulate in Syria and the second to the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah (in Lebanon) and Ismail Haniyeh (in Iran). The attacks were carefully calculated so as not to risk a full-blown confrontation with Israel. While the depth of the damage caused by the attacks is unclear due to a lack of transparent reporting from within Israel, they did not slow down the onslaught in Gaza.
After Israel’s latest aerial offensive on Iran in October 2024, which reportedly targeted military bases and killed at least one civilian and four soldiers, in conjunction with Hizballah’s weakening and Bashar al-Asad’s demise, it is unclear what the next level of escalation between Iran and Israel might be. Significantly clearer, however, is that even the hardliners in the Iranian government are aware how dire a full-scale confrontation with Israel would be in practice, despite 45 years of threatening propaganda. Asad’s fall and, with it, the severance of Iran’s main supply route for Hizballah, has thus widened the gap between Iran’s propaganda and the probability of its action.
The Axis and Palestine
Members of the Axis of Resistance, like Hizballah, Hamas, Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’bi (Popular Mobilization Forces) and Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis), rely heavily on Iranian political, financial and military support. Their activities against Israel, however, are not necessarily planned and conducted in coordination with Iran. Indeed, what is neglected when evaluating these entities as anti-Israeli “Iran proxies” is both their independence of action from Iran and their general geostrategic significance for Iran aside from the issue of Palestine.
First, not all these proxies have similarly close ties to Iran. Hizballah has had the most consistent relationship with Iran and has been the most congruent in terms of sectarian identity and ideological goals. The group was created with significant help from Iran, in the image of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and in the context of a variety of active Iran-backed groups in Lebanon. These entanglements have enabled Hizballah and Iran to maintain close ties over the past four decades. Even with this level of affinity, however, Hizballah’s resistance to Israel, including the occasional rockets fired into northern Israel after October 7, were likely decided independently from Tehran. Likewise, while groups like Hamas and Ansar Allah have conducted operations in support of the Palestinian cause, which were—at least partially—enabled by the financial, strategic and military assistance provided by Iran over the years, these actions were not necessarily initiated by Iran.
Second, the relationship between Iran and the militias it sponsors is not always stable. Hamas’s history with Iran, for instance, has been tumultuous at times. In addition to the group distancing itself from Iran when Iran and Hizballah backed Asad’s repressive campaign in Syria after the 2011 uprising, the attack of October 7 was itself a prominent example of Hamas acting independently of Iran. Iran was caught by surprise, according to US intelligence. Moreover, the October 7 attack has not served Iran’s interests: Not only has it increased the threat of conflict escalation between Iran and Israel, but the timing was detrimental for Iran as the state was approaching mild normalization with both the United States and Saudi Arabia in search of some relief from suffocating economic sanctions. Iran nonetheless tried to claim an indirect part in the attacks: On December 27, 2023, an IRGC spokesperson claimed that Operation Tufan Al-Aqsa was in part a retaliation for the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020—a claim Hamas swiftly denied.
Third, even when allegiances are solid, these militias still act independently of Iran. For example, the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’bi receives generous aid from Iran, to which it is generally loyal. But researchers have shown that their everyday conduct is fairly independent: It is mainly Iraq’s internal dynamics, and not Iranian interests, that preoccupy Iran-affiliated militias in their day-to-day business.
Of course, it is not the case that Iran has held no influence over the events that transpired around Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza: Hizballah’s exchange of fire with Israel in Southern Lebanon and the Houthi’s targeting of cargo ships have been enabled by Iranian support. Given Iran’s general calculus in favor of keeping military confrontation minimal and the militias’ history of independent strategizing in the past, however, it is likely they were not coordinated with Iran.
The damage inflicted upon Hamas and Hizballah by Israel, followed by the fall of Bashar al-Asad in December 2024, has severely undermined Iran’s unconventional alliance network in the Middle East. Not only was Asad Iran’s oldest and strongest ally in the region, but his government also guaranteed a sustained supply route to Hizballah. As a result, Iran has limited foreign policy choices to pick from today.
For decades, Iran has facilitated the material conditions for armed resistance to Israel in line with its own ideological and geopolitical ends, while the United States and Israel have used Iran’s exaggerated propaganda and its support of pro-Palestinian resistance to justify their aggressive, imperialist policies in the Middle East. As the terrain shifts in light of the ceasefire agreement (which may or may not hold) and the new Trump administration, Iran will continue to prioritize its own strategic interests. What this will mean for Palestine, or for the groups that rely on Iranian support, remains to be seen. Resistance, however, does not end with the Axis.
[Maryam Alemzadeh is associate professor at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) and a Middle East Centre Fellow.]
Endnotes
[1] Post by @khamenei_ir, X, September 9, 2015.
[2] Maryam Alemzadeh, “The Islamic Republic Party and the Palestinian Cause, 1979-1980: A Discursive Transformation of the Third-Worldist Agenda,” in Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbolle, eds., The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond (Oneworld Academic, 2024).
[3] Alireza Lutfullahzadegan, et al., Ruz’shumar-i jang-i Iran va ʿIraq : ʿubūr az marz, taʿqib-i mutajaviz (Tehran: Markaz-i Asnad-i Taḥqiqat-i Difaʿ Muqaddas, 2010), p. 217 (translated by the author).
[4] Diary entry from March 2, 1983 attributed to Algeria’s speaker of the parliament in: Fatemeh Rafsanjani and Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani, Hashimi Rafsanjani: karnamah va khatirat-i 1361: pas az buhran (Tehran, 2001). (Translated by the author).
