Cartoon by Yaakov Kirschen

Iran, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad: A marriage of convenience

By Erik Skare

European Council on Foreign Relations: Since their inception, Iranian-Palestinian relations have functioned as a marriage of convenience based on Iran’s pursuit of security and the Palestinian need for state sponsorship. Today, Iran provides support to a number of Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) most notably. Yet these groups are not puppets and their relationship with Tehran is constantly evolving.

The Hamas-led attacks against Israel on 7 October reflected their own independent calculations. Although they could not have happened without the provision of long-term Iranian support, the attacks likely came as an unwelcome surprise for Tehran, which over the last two months has avoided giving Palestinian groups full-throated support. Whether Hamas and PIJ remain tightly aligned with Iran, however, will depend on the outcome of the war in Gaza and wider dynamics in the Middle East’s fluctuating geopolitics.

Iran’s support for the Palestinian cause has always been in part ideological, given Jerusalem’s religious significance for Muslims. Iran’s 1979 constitution affirmed its duty to export the Iranian revolution to assist “the dispossessed” around the world. But realpolitik interests have largely taken over since the late 1980s. Iran gradually came to support Palestinian armed groups as an integral part of its regional security policy to contain and preoccupy Israel which, along with the United States, it has long perceived as the greatest threat to its security and domestic stability. From this viewpoint, a group’s Islamic credentials (or lack thereof) mattered less than its willingness to confront Israel. As a result, for many decades Iran, a self-styled Islamic Shia republic, has supported a plethora of secular, leftist, and Sunni Islamist groups.

Iran’s entry into Palestine initially came through the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) headed by Yasser Arafat. The secular-nationalist movement supported Iranian revolutionaries prior to their overthrow of the shah in 1979, even providing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with bodyguards while he lived in exile in Paris. Many of the central personalities in the early Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps also received training in PLO camps in Lebanon. In a highly symbolic move, Arafat became the first foreign leader to visit Iran following the Islamic revolution.

The gradual moderation of PLO positions during the 1980s – opening back-channel negotiations with Israel, accepting territorial partition of historical Palestine, and renouncing armed violence – was one factor contributing to a rupture in relations. Iran has continued to provide some support to PLO members such as the Marxist-Leninist PFLP. However, in order to maintain its regional security paradigm it shifted the bulk of its support towards Palestinian Islamist groups given the political and military irrelevance of the far smaller Marxist-Leninist groups in the occupied territories.

From the PLO to Palestinian Islamism

Iran’s early cooperation with Hamas and PIJ was inadvertently facilitated by Israel’s own actions. Iranian officials first made contact with PIJ leaders in Beirut in 1987 after Israel expelled them to Lebanon as part of its efforts to suppress the Palestinian national leadership in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. Iranian-Palestinian relations were further strengthened when Israel exiled hundreds more Hamas and PIJ members to Marj al-Zuhur in Lebanon in 1992.

By this time Palestinian Islamist groups had concluded, like the PLO before them, that they needed a strong state sponsor to succeed in their struggle against Israel. This soon translated into financial and military support from Iran, with Palestinian militants receiving training in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, in camps run by the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hizbullah.[4] By 1993, Fathi al-Shiqaqi, co-founder and the first leader of PIJ, told Newsday: “Iran gives us money and supports us, then we supply the money and arms to the occupied territories and support the families of our people.”

It is unlikely that the 7 October attacks could have happened without Iran’s decades-long support

Since then, these Palestinian groups have grown stronger thanks to Iranian weaponry smuggled via Yemen and Sudan, through the Egyptian desert with the help of Bedouin smugglers, and finally into Gaza via cross-border tunnels built by Hamas. Iran has also trained Palestinian engineers to manufacture weapons locally, which accounts for a large part of Hamas’s total arsenal today. Other Iranian-backed groups in Gaza have likely also benefited from these arrangements. It is unlikely that the 7 October attacks could have happened without this decades-long support.

The Iranian-Palestinian marriage of convenience

The relationship between Sunni Hamas and PIJ and Shia Iran has always been a marriage of convenience produced by shared interests on the ground rather than ideological affinity with Tehran’s political interpretation of Islam. As a result, the groups are constantly adjusting their external relations according to their own strategic calculations. This was most evident in the wake of the Arab uprisings >>>