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The Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip that began in late December has focused the world’s attention on the conflict between the Jewish state and the armed cadres of the Palestinian terror faction Hamas. Yet the media coverage has, for the most part, failed to provide an accurate picture of the larger geopolitical confrontation in Gaza. The conflict is viewed as simply another battle in the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians. But in fact, the Israelis found it necessary to move against Hamas in part due to the machinations of an outside player that has long fomented discord and civil war within the Palestinian population for its own ends. That outside actor is Iran.

The predicate of Jerusalem’s decision to move against Hamas targets was the decisive outcome of the 2007 Palestinian civil war that left the Islamist group in control of Gaza, one of the two territories under Palestinian management. The other territory, the West Bank, is under the shaky authority of Fatah, the faction directed by Yasser Arafat for 30 years before his death in 2004. Now under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah is the dominant force within the Palestinian Authority, the official governing body of the aspirational Palestinian state. But Abbas has no power or authority in Gaza, which is now a Hamas fiefdom.

The Palestinians in Gaza are the chief victims of Hamas’s decision in December to provoke more bloodshed by raining rockets on southern Israel following a loosely observed six-month ceasefire. The Israeli retaliation has reinforced Hamas’s status as the primary voice of “resistance” to Israel (the same Israel that disengaged itself from Gaza in 2005 and is, therefore, no longer an occupying force requiring “resistance”). Accordingly, the Arab world and its sympathizers in the West have railed against the Israelis for their targeting of Hamas fighters and arms supplies. But the real fear of Abbas, and of the surrounding Arab countries, is actually the same as Israel’s—that Hamas, and, by extension, its Iranian sponsors, will, in the end, be able to declare the Gaza action a victory for their cause. Such an outcome would be the flowering fruit of an Iranian intervention in Palestinian politics that dates back decades.

The internecine Palestinian struggle began in 1988, in the early days of the first intifada, when the upstart Hamas organization began brazenly to circulate bayanat, or leaflets, in direct competition with Arafat’s Fatah for leadership of the struggle against Israel. The tension between Hamas and Fatah grew steadily, until it reached its zenith with the June 2007 Gaza coup, during which Hamas took control of buildings, roads, and the media.

Public discussion of the Hamas-Fatah struggle for domination of the Palestinian cause has been flaccid. Academic analysis has been virtually non-existent. It should therefore come as no surprise that Iran’s significant role in exacerbating the conflict is all but unknown.

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In 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini succeeded in ousting the Shah from power and launched Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Khomeini had Fatah leader Yasir Arafat to thank, at least in part. While Khomeini was still in exile in France, Arafat’s Lebanon-based guerrilla network, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), aided his cause by providing military training and weapons. Indeed, the first members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is now the elite military force under whose auspices the country’s nuclear program is being managed, were recipients of Arafat’s largesse. In a show of appreciation for Arafat’s support, Khomeini closed the Israeli embassy in Tehran, handed the keys over to Arafat, and flew a Palestinian flag overhead. The building became an official PLO entity, complete with an ambassador.

The honeymoon did not last long. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the Palestinians threw their support behind Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and Khomeini rejected Arafat’s attempts to mediate between the two countries. But it was Arafat’s 1988 decision at the United Nations to call for peace talks with Israel that ultimately led to the total unraveling of the relationship. In 1989, Khomeini’s successor, supreme leader Ali Khame-nei, denounced Arafat as “a traitor and an idiot.”

One of the factors contributing to Arafat’s decision to embrace negotiations after decades of launching terrorist attacks against the Jewish state was the outbreak in 1987 of the first intifada, the violent Palestinian resistance effort in the territories held by the Jewish state. At the time, Arafat was based in Tunisia, to which he had been exiled after being ousted from his perch in Lebanon in 1982. As the uprising spread, he ordered Palestinians loyalists in the territories to take control of the broad spectrum of groups comprising the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising. But he found himself unable to manage the situation from a distance of 1,500 miles. Members of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood created a breakaway organization called Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), whose acronym was Hamas. By February 1988, Hamas began dropping its leaflets challenging Arafat’s authority. Thereafter, the two groups engaged in a propaganda war for the loyalty of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. Each offered competing guidance, and sought to claim credit for inspiring and leading the uprising.

In an effort to retake the initiative during an emergency meeting of the Palestine National Council later in 1988, Arafat recognized General Assembly resolution 181, passed in 1947, which mandated the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. He soon called for peace talks based on other UN resolutions. 

The West rushed to begin a direct “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. Almost overnight, the PLO and Fatah were treated as though they constituted a makeshift government. At the same time, Hamas took the place of Fatah as the leading edge of the openly violent, openly rejectionist resistance, with its primary, indeed its only, stated aim being the destruction of Israel and Israel’s replacement with a rigidly Islamic Palestine. 

Hamas’s intransigent approach was clearly more in synch with Iran. The mullahs quickly understood this and reached out to the new group. In December 1990, Hamas leaders paid an official visit to Iran, along with other rejectionist groups, for a conference in support of the ongoing intifada.

Once U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations enshrined Arafat as the West’s only interlocutor in the Palestinian camp, Iran steadily increased its support for Hamas. As early as 1992, Arafat complained that Iran had provided some $30 million to the rival group, in effect corroborating a report in the Lebanese magazine Al-Shira that Iran had been doling out some $10 million a year to Hamas in funds from oil sales.

After Arafat became a party to the 1993 Oslo accords, signed on the White House lawn with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, his relations with Iran worsened further. In December 1994, hundreds of Iranian demonstrators occupied the PLO embassy in Tehran, destroying property and condemning Arafat as the “biggest collaborator with Israel and the United States.” The mullahs were careful to distance themselves from the incident. But around the same time, Iran began openly to offer support to PLO members still in exile in Tunisia, from which Arafat had returned in glory to the West Bank, if they would maintain their opposition to Arafat. A 1995 report in the Independent, a British newspaper, claimed Iran had backed an attempt to assassinate Arafat. Other hazy reports from the

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