Why would Iran support a terroristic assault on helpless Israeli civilians?

As an Iranian American political scientist and author of books on Iran, Islam and the Middle East, I am horrified by the cold-blooded slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli citizens by the Iran-backed Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

No enlightened Muslim should conflate the legitimate grievance of Palestinians vis-a-vis the state of Israel with the utterly abhorrent and, fully unlawful from the prism of international humanitarian laws, massacre of Israeli civilians, deserving the strongest unequivocal condemnation.

What Hamas did with its massacre of innocent civilians was to rob the Palestinian movement of its moral rightness.

Those who praise these acts of terror have no conscience.

Iran must use its influence to gain the freedom of Israeli hostages. I also fully support the United Nations secretary-general’s call for an immediate end of Gaza’s siege.

Contrary to the misguided celebration of some people in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world, the moral standard of any decent Muslim can only guide us to nothing but strong denunciation of the abominable atrocities visited on innocent Israelis in the hands of Palestinian militants openly supported by Iran’s hard-liners.

The latter have now exposed Iran to potential retaliatory strike by Israel, which has done absolutely nothing to Iran except helping Iran fight its Iraqi invaders during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, without which Saddam Hussein might have prevailed and wrested away a large chunk of Iranian territory.

Indeed, the last time I looked at the Middle East map, Iran and Israel are distant from each other and there is no direct Iranian national security interest at stake in the long-standing Israel-Palestinian conflict except the zealous religious ideology, resulting in Iran’s hard-liners’ overcommitment to an issue not germane to Iran’s national interests at all.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who nowadays boasts about Iran’s full support for Hamas, needs to explain to the Iranian nation, what is the connection between the Palestinian issue and Iran’s national interests?

And has he a short memory and forgotten that when the Iran-Iraq war ended, there were upward of 15,000 Palestinian prisoners of war in Iran’s camps, as many Palestinians volunteered in Hussein’s army invading Iran.

To open a caveat, this author once taught at Tufts University and had a conversation with a great Palestinian writer, the late Edward Said, who never criticized Hussein and even questioned, in a piece in the Sunday London Times, the accuracy of reports that Hussein had killed hundred of Kurds by using chemical weapons, asking him why he never condemned Hussein’s invasion of Iran, since the UN had found him guilty of starting the war in 1980? Said’s answer shocked me.

“I am an Arab nationalist, what do you think?” Until that moment, I had thought that Said was beyond such petty nationalisms and was a cosmopolitan intellectual.

Apparently not.

So, the question remains: Why should Iran overcommit itself to a cause directly unrelated to Iran’s national interests, to the point of Tehran’s leaders jeopardizing the nation’s peace and security by providing full support for a brutal terroristic assault on Israeli civilians, irrespective of how badly the current Israeli government has been mistreating the Palestinians?

The Iranian government has not been installed in power to represent the Palestinians or any other nation, only the Iranian nation, which has a proud historical legacy related to Cyrus the Great’s liberation of Jews and allowing them to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple.

That enduring legacy of Iran’s proud history ought to militate, theoretically speaking, against any religious-inspired tendency to succumb to the logic of exterminism vis-a-vis Israel put on full display by the Hamas militants terrorizing the civilians in southern Israel.

So, should in the next days or weeks, Israeli bombs begin to fall on Iran’s nuclear facilities in retaliation, Iran’s ruling clergy have only themselves to blame.

Kaveh Afrasiabi has taught political science at Tehran University, Boston University and Bentley College. Afrasiabi has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Binghamton University, Center For Strategic Research, Tehran and Institute For Strategic Studies in Paris. He is the author of several books – on Iran, Islam, ecology, Middle East, UN reform, as well as poetry and fiction.