The case for opposing the war on Iran without defending the Iranian regime

If the US and Israel win their war on Iran, the situation of the Palestinians will not improve. It will get worse. Yet the link that looks weakest in the case against sending South Korean troops is precisely this claim of cause and effect: that a weakened Iran means intensified oppression of the Palestinians. Such objection comes not only from supporters of the deployment but from within the Palestine solidarity movement itself: “The Iranian regime has only ever taken advantage of the Palestinians. Its backing of proxy forces has brought Palestinians not liberation but longer suffering. Why should the Palestinians be any worse off if such an Iran is broken?”

This objection deserves to be taken seriously, because there is a partial truth in it. But its conclusion is wrong. However harsh one’s judgement of the Iranian regime, that judgement alone does not tell us what the effects of the war will be. We need to work out where the partial truth ends and where the error begins.

The objections

Put in their strongest form, the objections come down to the following four:

First, for the Iranian regime, Palestine is not a cause but a tool. A regime that crushes workers’ strikes and kills women protesting against the compulsory hijab at home, while calling itself the “Axis of Resistance” abroad, is borrowing its legitimacy from the Palestinian tragedy.

Second, Iran’s support for armed groups turned the Palestinian struggle into a subordinate variable in a contest for regional hegemony. After 7 October 2023, Israel was able to package the genocide in Gaza as a “war with Iran”, and the US and other Western governments gladly accepted that packaging. The link to Iran eroded the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle.

Third, when Gaza burned, Iran did not step in. The “Axis of Resistance” treated Hezbollah as expendable, and in Syria it used its military might to crush a popular uprising. What have the Palestinians gained thanks to Iran?

Fourth, the Arab regimes used “the Iranian threat” as a pretext for joining hands with Israel. Remove the Iran variable, and those regimes lose their excuse for siding with Israel.

Of these four, the first three point to facts which are true. We must acknowledge that the Iranian regime is cynical and hypocritical, and that it is no true friend of the Palestinians. But the problem lies elsewhere.

The first error: conflating two different claims

The first objection refutes the claim that “Iran is a good ally of the Palestinians”. But that is not what Workers’ Solidarity’s case against the deployment argues. Our argument is that “if the US and Israel win their war on Iran, the Palestinians will be worse off”. These are two different propositions.

That Iran is no friend of the Palestinians, and that a war to subjugate Iran strengthens the Palestinians’ enemies, can both be true at the same time. And in fact they are. The objection tries to predict the effects of the war from the moral failings of the Iranian regime. But the effects of a war is decided not by a regime’s morality but by the balance of forces.

One should ask a different question: Who gets stronger if the US and Israel win this war? Not the Iranian people. Not the Palestinians. The ones who get stronger are Israel and the US. Faced with this simple fact, the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime carries no logical weight whatsoever.

The second error: blaming oppression on resistance

The claim that “Iran’s support for proxy forces has prolonged the Palestinians’ suffering” contains a hidden premise: that without armed resistance, or without Iranian support, Israeli oppression would have eased. This premise is refuted by the historical record.

In the 1990s and 2000s, after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority carried out “security cooperation” with Israel and suppressed armed resistance. In that same period, the number of settlers in the West Bank more than doubled and Israel bombed Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014. Israel seeks to eliminate and expel the Palestinians not because Iran exists, but because the Palestinians exist on that land. The logic of Zionist settler colonialism operates whether there is resistance or not. Without resistance, it simply operates more quietly.

It is true that Israel packaged the genocide in Gaza as a “war with Iran”. But we must not become so preoccupied with the wrapping that we forget what is inside. Had there been no Iran, Israel would have found another wrapper. Indeed, before this it was the “war on terror”, and before that it was “security”. To think that oppression will disappear once its pretext is removed is to put far too much faith in the oppressor’s own words.

The third error: overlooking a result already demonstrated

This debate is not purely hypothetical. The past two years have shown us in real time what happens when Iran’s regional influence is weakened.

In the autumn of 2024 Israel wiped out Hezbollah’s leadership and laid waste to southern Lebanon. That winter the Assad regime in Syria collapsed, cutting the supply line between Iran and Hezbollah. By the logic of the objection, the Palestinians’ situation should have improved in this period. In reality the opposite happened. Israel pushed deeper into Syrian territory; in the West Bank, moves towards annexation accelerated; in Gaza, starvation was used as a weapon. Israeli politicians spoke openly of “redrawing the Middle East”. Once the constraints were gone, Israel was free — and it turned that freedom against the Palestinians.

This is not a prediction but an observation. To expect the Palestinians to be better off once Iran is completely broken is to ignore the experience of the past two years.

The fourth error: the illusion that the Arab regimes will switch sides once “the Iranian threat” is gone

It is true that the Arab regimes cited Iran as their reason for joining hands with Israel. But the idea that these regimes will take the Palestinians’ side once that reason (which was only ever a pretext) disappears is wrong. The real reason the Gulf monarchies joined hands with Israel is not Iran but the US. Their security guarantees depend on the US, and the US demands that they normalise relations with Israel. If Iran is removed, that demand does not shrink; it grows, because one more excuse for holding out has disappeared.

The regional order that an Iranian defeat would bring is one in which the triangular alliance of the US, Israel and the Gulf monarchies is firmly consolidated. There is no place for Palestine in that order. Its blueprint already includes treating Gaza as a real-estate development site and plans to “relocate” the Palestinians to other countries.

So does this mean defending the Iranian regime?

No. And here lies the heart of this debate. The objection tries to corner opponents of the deployment as “apologists for Iran”. Some such people do exist, but this labelling must be rejected.

The Iranian regime is the enemy of the Iranian people. Nor is it a friend of the Palestinians. But if what brings the Iranian regime to its knees, or brings it down, is US and Israeli bombing and war, the result will not be democracy in Iran but an Iraq-style catastrophe. Those who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 also started from the fact that “Saddam Hussein is a dictator”. That fact was true; the error was to draw from it the conclusion that “the invasion is good for the Iraqi people”. Today’s objection repeats the same logical structure. From the fact that “the Iranian regime takes advantage of the Palestinians”, it draws the conclusion that “a war to break Iran is not bad for the Palestinians”.

The Palestinians’ true allies are not the Iranian regime. They are the Egyptian youth and working-class masses who filled the squares in 2011; the young people of Iraq and Lebanon who filled the streets in 2019; and the Iranian women who cried out for freedom from the compulsory hijab. All of this mass resistance the Iranian regime feared and repressed. And the US and Israel feared and repressed it just the same. In this region, repressive regimes and imperialist powers stand on the same side when confronted with mass resistance. To oppose the Iranian regime while also opposing the war on Iran is not a contradiction. It is the only consistent position that opposes both of these forces.

Conclusion

The proposition that “a weakened Iran means intensified oppression of the Palestinians” is contested. But contested does not mean wrong. Those who doubt it point to the Iranian regime’s hypocrisy, but the regime’s hypocrisy cannot change the effects of the war. The past two years have already shown what an Israel freed from constraints does. That result, demonstrated in Lebanon and Syria, does not change however one judges Iran.

The Palestine solidarity movement has no need to become a advocate for the Iranian regime. But if, out of contempt for that regime, it turns a blind eye to an imperialist war that bombs it, that serves not the Palestinians but their oppressors. The reason we must oppose the deployment of South Korean troops is no different here.