Palestinians gather to protest a deal between the UAE and Israel to normalize ties, in Gaza City, Gaza, August 2020 [Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency]
Compliant Arab regimes spent decades spreading anti-Iran propaganda, but the current assault on Iran is shattering those lies.
.This article is part of a two-part series of interviews with experts on the politics of the Arab-Iranian region. The previous interview with Max Ajl dealt with the perspectives coming from the citizenry of the NATO countries, who – due to the myth of civic peace in their own countries – have a confused analysis regarding the imperialism of their own governments. This article features quotes from an interview conducted with Tara Alami. Tara is a Jordanian-born, Palestinian writer and researcher living in Canada. Her work can be found on Substack, The Maple, and The New Arab. Our conversation spanned many topics, but we primarily discussed and focused on the response of the peoples and governments of the Arab-Iranian region to the current aggression and how imperialism is viewed there.
What is shared between the populace of the NATO countries and the populace of the Arab states is that at the current juncture, and for at least three to four decades in the past, the left perspective on imperialism has not been the prevailing way of seeing and analyzing. So while the nature of US imperialism and zionism has been obscured in the NATO countries through legacy media, government policy, social sanction, and the myth of the zionist colony as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, the situation in the Arab states has been quite different despite some similar outcomes. When we consider the violence against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Yemen by the zionist colony, it would seem logical that there would be a consensus against zionism from the street to the halls of government. Yet, the fundamental class nature of power in West Asia, which is shaped by imperialist capital and commodity flows, has meant a fragmented response to zionist colonialism and its US imperial sponsor. An elaborate network of media channels, religious sectarianism, U.S. military bases, and economic incentives had – until recently – successfully constructed a series of myths about Iran and resistance to zionism in the region.
The question which now remains, is how the current phase of the US/‘Israeli’ war on Iran has shattered these myths present in the Arab-Iranian world regarding Iran, imperialism, and resistance. Due to the fracturing of the region by US imperialism and zionism, the war with Iran has polarized some areas further, according to Tara:
“The discourse that is happening about Iran in those places (Jordan, Kuwait) has been so much more sectarian and divided than what I am witnessing here (Canada), for many reasons including years and years of propaganda from reactionary regimes about Iran. For example, Iran wanting to dominate the region, Iran being an actor that is equal to a colonizer, Iran not being a ‘neighbor’, but rather an aggressor that is trying to expand its power over the region through “proxies” like Hezbollah. But even though that discourse is popular and people are engaging in it, if you mention Iran’s support for Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions, there’s this sort of dissonance that happens, where “its different” like Iran’s support for the Palestinian resistance is different than, ostensibly, Iran setting up “proxies” or Iran wanting to expand its hegemony regionally.”
The discussion of so-called ‘Iranian proxies’ ignores the dozens of US-zionist proxies set up in the region to destabilize and control certain flows and economic processes, such as the Kurdish contras in Syria and Iran, or ISIS in Iraq. While the Gulf monarchies and certain other vassalized Arab regimes have been content to normalize with the zionist colony, their own people suffer from the effects of imperialism and zionist encroachment. The UAE has been in the spotlight recently as it came to light that they conducted attacks against Iran themselves over the last few months, Yet, the propaganda still spreads through Gulf funded media networks that “Iran advancing its interests at the expense of the Arab world”:
“For example, ‘Iran is putting Jordanians in danger because it wants to attack “Israel”’, or ‘Iran is putting people in the Gulf in danger because it values its political and regional interests over safety and security in those places’...Okay, sure it [Iran] is, and that's fine because its political and regional interest is eliminating and resisting US imperialism and its zionist proxy’. So that's first, and if our political interests are aligned then we agree that the presence of the zionist state and the expansion of U.S. empire in our region is in fact what we want to destroy, then we should be aligned in terms of ‘interests’.”
Stemming from here, the conversation turned to another particular piece of propaganda pushed by zionist and Gulf-owned media, which is that Iran is ‘firing missiles indiscriminately’. While it has been confirmed by satellite imagery, independent reporting, and photo/video evidence that Iran has only been targeting U.S. and “Israeli” military sites, it is important to press the issue because many Americans have also adopted this mistaken view of things alongside their Arab counterparts:
“On this point of putting regular citizens in Jordan or in the Gulf at risk by attacking “Israel”, there is a necessary reframing which must be done, because Iran is targeting U.S. military bases. With relation to Jordan, to my knowledge Iran has not attacked any U.S. military bases there, the only missiles that have fallen on Jordan are because U.S. military bases have intercepted them, and because the Jordanian government has allowed the U.S. to use its land to intercept them…So, the dangerous outcome of Iran’s attack on Israel, on places like Jordan or the Gulf, on regular people living their life in their homes is directly because that State is allowing the interception of Iranian missiles to protect Israel from said Iranian missiles.”
This war has changed the entire equation in the Arab-Iranian world, with the U.S. and “Israeli” security doctrine being challenged and exposed as a paper tiger. In that sense, it is important to see this phase of kinetic war, from the Arab and Iranian resistance perspective, as an extension of Al Aqsa Flood and the irreversible trend towards exposing the imperialist order of things and ridding the region of it. From this perspective of resistance, it is also important to note how much the U.S. and zionist state underestimated Iran:
“Its ability to maintain resistance regionally, to maintain its relationships with different political factions, to create this dynamic between different armed resistance groups, which may have diverging geopolitical interests, but to unify the region around the fact that ‘the enemy is the US empire’ and the Zionist state, and this is the fight that we are waging right now. This is what the US and Israel were unable to correctly diagnose.”
In conclusion, Tara put forward a rhetorical question to the peoples of the Arab-Iranian world, which strikes at the heart of the national question among the Arab states:
“Is it safety and security through normalizing and peace-making with a state that most of the population agrees is an enemy state and a colonial state? Is it this fraught and risky not-guaranteed safety and security that we want to prioritize or is it the elimination of US hegemony and its zionist proxy that we want to prioritize?”
These are important questions to consider as the zionists make it clear that the ‘Gaza doctrine’ is what they have in store for Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and any other geographies of resistance. What is also important in these times is to speak clearly, and to speak from one’s principles, as Tara has done here. The question of US imperialism is the primary contradiction of our time, and this war is a decisive one. Thus it is critical to understand that having a correct analysis is what distinguishes genuine anti-imperialists from those who tend towards mealymouthed statements when it comes to a state such as Iran. Only time will tell the outcome, and there is no such thing as ‘predictive history’, so therefore standing firm in our principles and winning over broad masses of people to an anti-imperialist position is the path forward.
Hanna Eid is a Palestinian American writer, researcher, and a Union electrical worker. His writing concerns mainly imperialism and anti-imperialism in West Asia and West Africa.
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