The Quds Force is the most important Khomeinist Iranian arm holding the threads of chaos and running the puppet theater in the Middle East. The Iranian regime has a solemn annual holiday called “Quds Day”. A Palestinian keffiyeh around the neck is among the “accessories” of the leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), indeed of the Supreme Leader himself.
These offensive signs of Palestine’s appropriation go back to the emergence of Iran’s fundamentalist revolutionary regime. Palestine was not, for most of the Iranian people, and has perhaps never become, a central cause.
How did this interest begin?! We will not say why it began, because the reason is clear and the objective obvious.
In an intriguing review of previous interviews by Ghassan Charbel, republished here in a new form, on this point, we find some striking insights. One of them is with the young Lebanese revolutionary Anis Naccache: a non-Shiite and comrade-in-arms of Wadie Haddad and the Venezuelan Carlos in the 1970s and 1980s.
He told my colleague Ghassan that, when demonstrations broke out in Iran in 1978, Naccache obtained permission from the historic Palestinian leader “Abu Jihad” to train Iranians opposed to the Shah’s regime in centers established by Fatah in Lebanon. Naccache said in his interview with Ghassan Charbel that the idea of creating the IRGC emerged in a meeting he had taken part in with a handful of others in an apartment in Beirut. The idea was conveyed to the leaders of the revolution, who adopted it on the basis of “not trusting regular armies.”
On July 18, 1980, Naccache and his team set out to assassinate Iran’s last prime minister on behalf of the Iranian regime. Shapour Bakhtiar was in Paris, the operation failed, and Naccache was arrested. Later, a group affiliated with Iran abducted French hostages in Lebanon to ransom Naccache.
The Lebanese-Iranian icon Imad Mughniyeh was a guard of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before joining Hezbollah. Naccache says he personally trained Mughniyeh.
The Palestinian-Iranian icon Fathi Shaqaqi was the dutiful son of Khomeinism. In fact, Khomeini himself received him in 1988 and pledged to support Islamic Jihad with weapons and funding.
Shaqaqi’s successor, Ramadan Shallah, told colleague Ghassan that Shaqaqi admired Hassan Nasrallah. He recalled that at the end of 1989, Shaqaqi told a number of comrades that “if this man is destined to live, he will be the Khomeini of the Arabs.”
Yahya al-Sinwar, and all the Sinwar-like figures in Hamas, became the most precious and most coveted piece in the necklace of Iranian adornment and influence on the altar of the Palestinian house.
The only one who refused to place Palestine under the Khomeinist cloak, even though he was the first to visit Khomeini and congratulate him, was Arafat, as our colleague Ghassan explained.
All of this to say that Iran’s grasp of the Palestine card, and the Palestinian military movement leaders’ use of the Iranian revolution card from the beginning, was an “accidental” relationship. The students, the Iranian revolutionary elements, became the teachers, the guides of the leaders of the Palestinian revolution. Each sang his own song, but the tune was the same!
