Palestinianism can't survive without the Iranian regime.
For the first time in decades, the Palestinian movement may be forced to confront a question it has spent generations avoiding.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The American and Israeli dismantling of Iran’s military power may prove to be more than a strategic victory. It threatens to expose a deeper weakness inside the Palestinian nationalist project itself. Strip away Tehran’s patronage and the movement faces something far more dangerous than another battlefield loss: an identity crisis.
For decades, the modern Palestinian identity has been built around a single organizing idea: that Israel’s destruction is inevitable and only a matter of time. School curricula, regional alliances, and the entire mythology of “resistance” rest on this assumption. The struggle was never presented as uncertain. History itself was supposedly moving in one direction.
Diplomats, journalists, and activists have long insisted that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the Middle East’s central drama. Solve the Palestinian problem, they say, and the region will finally know peace.
Reality has always been the reverse.
The Palestinian cause did not drive Middle Eastern politics. Middle Eastern politics drove the Palestinian cause.
In fact, the Palestinian cause has rarely driven Middle Eastern politics. Rather it has functioned as a tool of larger ideological and geopolitical forces, most importantly Islamism and the regimes that sponsor it. For the past four decades, the most powerful of those regimes has been the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Palestinian cause itself did not emerge organically as a national liberation movement in the way Western audiences imagine. For centuries, the Arabs living in the land identified primarily as Arabs, part of a broader Arab and Islamic civilization. The concept of a distinct Palestinian national identity only crystallized in the 1960s — and it was engineered at that.
After the Arab world failed repeatedly to destroy Israel through conventional war in 1948, 1956, and 1967, a new strategy was required. Arab leaders, their allied Soviet strategists, and Islamist ideologues arrived at the same conclusion: Israel could not be defeated militarily in the short term, so it would instead need to be delegitimized politically and ideologically.
Their solution was to reframe the conflict as a colonial struggle between indigenous Palestinians and European Jewish settlers. Given that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel and Arabs are not, this narrative was a complete fabrication. But it was emotionally powerful and perfectly suited to the Cold War’s post-colonial political climate.
The Soviet Union actively helped construct and promote this framing through the terrorist organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose founding charter was drafted in Moscow in 1964. Much of what the modern West calls Palestinian nationalism began as a Cold War information operation. At the same time, the movement drew heavily from Islamist ideology, which viewed the existence of a Jewish state in formerly Muslim ruled territory as a religious affront.
Palestinianism therefore sits at the intersection of Arab nationalism, Soviet propaganda, and Islamist ideology. Yet ideology alone cannot sustain a political movement indefinitely. Power is also required. For decades, Iran’s regime has been the primary supplier.
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran set out to export its revolutionary ideology across the Middle East. One way it did this was by placing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict at the center of its regional strategy.
Tehran built an entire military ecosystem around Palestinian militant groups. It funded Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It supplied rockets, missiles, intelligence, training, and money. It helped construct the smuggling networks and weapons factories that transformed Gaza into a heavily armed jihadist enclave.
Even more importantly, Iran surrounded Israel with proxy forces. Hezbollah in Lebanon became the world’s most powerful non-state military force. Iranian backed militias entrenched themselves in Syria. Hamas fortified Gaza. Together they formed what the Iranian regime proudly called its “axis of resistance.”
In this system, the Palestinians functioned as a forward operating arm of Iran’s confrontation with Israel. Without Tehran’s backing, Palestinian militant groups would be only a fraction of their current strength. That is the strategic reality Palestinian leaders are now being forced to confront.
For decades, Palestinian militants could comfort themselves with the belief that time and history were on their side. Iran would eventually provide the decisive military weight. The broader Islamist revival sweeping the region would continue to grow stronger.
That assumption now looks increasingly absurd.
Islamist ideology places enormous weight on the idea that history reflects divine favor. Islam’s early military expansion across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond is interpreted not simply as military success but as theological confirmation. Victory itself becomes evidence of righteousness.
Palestinian militants long claimed they were riding that historical wave’s crest. Iran represented the most powerful Islamist force in state form. If Iran now finds itself battered and strategically diminished, the mythology surrounding that project begins to unravel.
Israel’s existence already challenged this narrative by reversing the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land. A Jewish state ruling Jerusalem is not just a political defeat for Islamism. It is a theological humiliation. History, in other words, has refused to behave the way the ideology promised.
Repeated failures to destroy Israel have therefore produced deep cognitive dissonance within the Islamist worldview. The spectacle of the U.S. and Israel freely pummeling the region’s strongest Islamist state only intensifies that contradiction.
For Palestinian militants, this raises uncomfortable questions. If Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis cannot defeat Israel, what exactly is the path to victory?
For decades, the answer was simple: Time, demography, international pressure, and an expanding Islamist alliance would eventually overwhelm Israel. But that theory only works if the alliance keeps growing stronger. If Iran weakens dramatically, the strategic architecture surrounding Israel begins to collapse. Palestinian militant groups find themselves increasingly isolated.
Israel’s military and economic strength dwarfs anything Hamas or the Palestinian Authority can hope to muster alone. The uncomfortable reality facing Palestinian leaders is that the external forces they long relied upon may no longer be capable of delivering the decisive blow they promised.
Remove the expectation of Israel’s eventual destruction and the ideology loses its organizing center. It is not primarily an ethnic identity or a civic nationalism. It is a political identity organized around the mission of destroying Israel.
This ideology permeates textbooks, speeches, propaganda, and public ceremonies that glorify attacks on Israelis. The entire framework assumes that Israel’s existence is temporary. If that assumption collapses, the movement’s organizing principle begins to crumble with it.
What, then, remains?
Few Palestinian leaders are eager to confront this question. Historically they have preferred to double down on the mythology of resistance even when it has repeatedly produced disaster.
Yet the strategic environment is changing. For decades, Israel faced a layered threat structure: Iran at the top, Hezbollah and regional militias in the middle, and Palestinian militant groups on the front line. If the top layer weakens significantly, the entire structure becomes unstable. The Palestinian movement may find itself increasingly isolated both militarily and politically.
That isolation could force a reckoning.
Palestinians now face a stark choice: They can continue clinging to an ideology of permanent resistance, repeating a strategy that has led to defeat after defeat, or they can begin the far more difficult task of constructing a political identity that is not defined by destroying another people. Such a transformation would require abandoning many of the myths that have shaped Palestinianism for decades. It would also require confronting the Islamist ideas that have influenced the movement from the beginning.
Most importantly, it would require acknowledging a reality that much of the world prefers to deny. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has never been just a dispute over borders. It has always been part of a larger ideological struggle over the future of the Middle East and the role Islamism will play within it.
With Iran diminished, that struggle may now be entering a new phase. For the first time in decades, the Palestinian movement may be forced to confront a question it has spent generations avoiding.
The entire ideology was built around an assumption. If Israel is not temporary, what exactly is Palestinianism for?
This is a sharp, clear-eyed analysis—and an uncomfortable one, because it exposes how much of this movement rests on illusion.
But the real question is whether anything actually changes. History says no. Every defeat hasn’t weakened the ideology—it’s hardened it. That’s because this isn’t just politics. For many, it functions like a religious conviction. And you don’t defeat that with battlefield losses.
If there’s any hope, it’s not military—it’s education. As long as children are taught that Israel is temporary and violence is justified, nothing changes. Change what they’re taught, and you change the future. Don’t, and we’re just repeating the same cycle.
And even if Iran weakens, let’s not kid ourselves—others are ready to step in. Qatar and Turkey are already deeply involved financially and politically . The vacuum won’t stay empty.
So yes, a reckoning may be coming. But unless the ideology itself is confronted—especially in schools, media, and religious institutions—it won’t matter. The players may change. The mindset won’t.
The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity ! Famous words by Abba Eban that never change.