The right side of history
What does it take for a demonstrator, marching through central London, to hold a placard declaring that a regime that maims and blinds young women for the ‘crime’ of wanting to choose how they dress is on the right side of history?
Why is it that so many women on that same march happily chanted “We Stand With Iran” while dressed in a way that would see them beaten and imprisoned by that same Iranian regime, and despite all the horrors it perpetrates on its own people, most of whom would be glad to see the back of it (even if they don’t welcome Israeli and American bombs)?
It was entirely predictable that the pro-Palestinian movement that has solidified on our streets and online since October 7 would swing firmly behind Iran once Israel - and now the United States - bombed Iran’s nuclear and other military facilities. That the Iranian regime hangs gay men from cranes was never going to stop Owen Jones from choosing the Iranian side in this war. Any discussions about the true intentions of Iran’s nuclear programme, the state of international negotiations, and the possible ways this conflict now plays out are a distraction from the only thing that matters: the belief that Israel is always in the wrong, that its actions are never justified, and that everything it does is a crime of inhumane cruelty that exceeds rational explanation. All else flows from that; all is justified in opposition to it.
Hence the idea that Ayatollah Khamenei is leading the right side of history, as that placard declared. Yet Khamenei is, amongst other things, a fully committed and fervent antisemitic conspiracy theorist. In his 2005 message to Hajj pilgrims, Khamenei spoke of “the big Western and Zionist capitalists, who are the real backstage actors of all imperialist governments.” He has warned of “bloodsucker capitalists and Zionists, and the global Zionist network, which possesses most of the global media” and said “The claws of the Zionist financial powers and companies are so firmly sunk into the American government, its officials and the Congress that they have to look out for their interests... The money, power and capital of the Zionists have their impact.” More recently he has tweeted that “Zionist capitalists were a plague for the whole world” and that “The Western powers are a mafia… At the top of this mafia stand the prominent Zionist merchants, and the politicians obey them.”
It’s like a bingo card of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy memes, all from the mouth of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the man who controls its foreign policy and its nuclear programme. This conspiratorial antisemitism derives from Ayatollah Khomeini himself and runs through Iranian state institutions. Iranian officials regularly claimed that ISIS was a Zionist invention to undermine Islam, even when European governments were trying to enlist Iran’s help in tackling ISIS in the Middle East. When Iran’s Press TV lost its Ofcom licence in 2011 for broadcasting the forced interrogation of an imprisoned Iranian opposition activist, their response was to quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as supposed proof that the world’s media is controlled by “the American Jewish Lobby.” Press TV now broadcasts David Miller’s Palestine Declassified that is, by some distance, the most antisemitic media currently produced in the UK (why this is allowed to happen is beyond me).
This is often overlooked in the debates amongst Western policy makers and think tankers over whether Iran is a rational actor: a subject that is especially pertinent right now, as the world waits to see Iran’s response to the United States’ bombing of their nuclear facilities. It is not that Iran is blinded by hate; rather that, within a fundamentally irrational worldview, irrational choices can appear rational. If you believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy to destroy your country and your religion, and that the Western powers are having their strings pulled by wealthy ‘Zionists’ to coerce them into war, then attacking Jews wherever you can get to them, even to the point of developing a nuclear weapon to use against the world’s only Jewish state, becomes a rational response.
Combine all of this with Khamenei’s oft-stated desire to see Israel destroyed - “The dangerous, deadly, cancerous tumor in West Asia must and will be eliminated”, he tweeted just last month - and you can see why Israel might be alarmed. Iran has never hidden its determination to destroy Israel once and for all. Its semi-clandestine war against Israel has been going on for decades, and takes in terrorism against Jews around the world, as well as funding and arming Hamas, Hizbollah and other terrorist proxies to kill Israelis within Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. But such things carry no weight with the protestors in London marching for Khamenei. There seems to be an assumption either that Iran doesn’t really mean it - that this is just the kind of flowery rhetoric you have to expect in the Middle East (with all the orientalist implications of that view) - or that if they do mean it, then Israel, America and the West must have done something really terrible to force Iran to become so extreme.
(The same never applies in the opposite direction, of course: all those protestors accusing Israel of terrible crimes and calling its government extremist never treat this as an understandable, if regrettable, response to something Palestinians have done).
Underpinning this refusal to take Iran’s threats seriously is a fundamental belief amongst many in the West, and especially in Western Europe, that there is no such thing as an enemy. The eighty year peace since 1945 has fooled many people into thinking that the entire concept of an enemy can be dispensed with - it’s just so 20th century! - and that any adversary can be persuaded, through diplomacy and negotiation, to see that we all have shared interests, usually economic ones, that outweigh any national, cultural or religious points of conflict.
The profound shocks to the geopolitical order over the past few years ought to have shaken people out of this misapprehension. The Western powers have enemies, as does liberal democracy in general, and so, definitely, does Israel. After October 7, Israel decided that instead of ignoring or patronisingly dismissing all those “Death to America, Death to Israel!” chants in Iranian mosques, the safer option is to believe that they mean it. After last night, it seems that Donald Trump feels the same way. I am sure there are too-clever-by-half academics in Middle East Studies departments shaking their heads at such simplistic thinking, but they are the ones who suddenly seem out of touch.
A similar thing can be seen amongst the defenders of Palestine Action, who are due to be proscribed as a terrorist group following their attack on two planes at RAF Brize Norton over the weekend. Palestine Action have attacked hundreds of buildings over the past few years, including factories, offices, banks and other premises that they claim, not always accurately, are linked to Israeli arms firms. A lot of their ‘actionists’ are in prison as a result, and many more are awaiting trial. Their supporters euphemistically call this “non-violent protest” and have condemned proscription as an unacceptable restriction of the right to protest, as if smashing up a factory while terrified workers cower in fear is no different from marching down the street chanting “Free Palestine”.
While Palestine Action have not killed anyone (at least, not yet: they are not always averse to using violence against police officers or security guards who get in their way), there is no doubt that their activities meet the UK’s legal definition of terrorism, which includes “serious damage to property” that is done “for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.” At a time when the UK urgently needs to build up its arms industry and remilitarise in the face of Russian and other state threats, you simply cannot have a bunch of extremists smashing up weapons factories and damaging RAF aircraft. They are becoming a threat to UK national security, never mind the impact they might be having on Israel’s military supply chain (which I suspect is not as great as they think), and they and their supporters are naïve to imagine they would be allowed to continue for much longer.
But whether it is marching for the Islamic Republic of Iran or defending the fanatical vandals of Palestine Action, the argument always comes down to the idea that the ends justify the means. The Palestinian cause is so necessary and urgent, and Israeli oppression so unconscionable, that any methods are justified, even criminal ones - so the thinking goes. This is why some MPs will disingenuously claim that Palestine Action is peaceful when it clearly isn’t, and why bare-shouldered women will declare their support for Ayatollah Khamenei. To say otherwise would be to admit that their own movement is not pure, that Israel has real enemies, and that things are more complicated than they seem. Opposing Israel, and with it the West, is the overriding factor every time, and nobody should expect anything else from this movement.
"Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.” George Orwell
Excellent as always and many congratulations on your award!