In her article in The Guardian this week, Nesrine Malik argues that everything now convulsing the Middle East, war in Iran, renewed conflict in Lebanon, chaos in the Gulf, the ongoing situation in Gaza, along with political distortion in the West; flows from a single “original sin”, Israel’s occupation and the plight of the Palestinians. It’s a neat argument, morally satisfying and elegantly simple, but it does not withstand even the most basic scrutiny. The organising force at the centre of regional instability is not Palestine. It never has been – despite the claim now widely advanced across the far left and increasingly the far right.
The inconvenient truth, for those who advance this view, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the IRGC, are driving instability in the region and further afield. Their extremist revolutionary ideology, regional ambitions, and decades-long investment in building, funding and directing a network of proxies whose purpose is not to “free Palestine” nor deliver statehood, but to project Iranian power, encircle, threaten and ultimately destroy the state of Israel, intimidate its neighbours, and challenge the West wherever and however it can.
Palestine and its people matter, of course, politically, emotionally, and symbolically. That is precisely why it is exploited, cultivated and weaponised. Not as a problem to be solved, but as a grievance to be preserved. It provides something far more useful than peace ever could: a permanent moral language through which violence can be justified, alliances obscured, and responsibility endlessly redirected.
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the militias operating in Iraq and Syria –these are not spontaneous reactions to Gaza or Palestinian suffering, unfolding in the neat concentric circles this argument relies upon. They are components of a long-standing Iranian strategy, funded, trained and sustained over years with vast resources, designed not to resolve the conflict, but to perpetuate it, and ensure no resolution is reached that could undermine Iran’s leverage.
In this context, the Palestinian cause is not the engine driving events. It is the banner under which they are sold, the emotional trigger that mobilises outrage, and the moral shield that deflects scrutiny.
The idea that October 7 simply erupted out of Palestinian desperation, detonating a fragile status quo, is not just simplistic, it is wilfully misleading. It recasts a coordinated, strategic and intentionally sadistic assault as an emotional outburst, and in doing so obscures what was actually at stake. What unsettled Tehran was never Palestinian statehood, nor the broader claims of suffering and injustice, but the steady emergence of a regional realignment that threatened to diminish its influence, constrain its reach, and erode its leverage across the region.
The Abraham Accords were not perfect, nor did they provide a solution to the Palestinian issue. But to Tehran, they represented something far more dangerous, a slow and steady integration of Israel into the Arab world, a shift in priorities among Gulf states, and the growing possibility that the Palestinian issue would no longer dictate Arab policy towards Israel. That would have serious implications for the Islamic Republic.
The October 7 massacre and the war in Gaza dragged the Palestinian issue back front and centre of events in the region, setting alight a firestorm across the Western world that continues to burn, and which perfectly serves the strategic interests of Iran and its proxies.
While Malik and others trace lines of causation outward from Palestine, she avoids, or simply ignores, events in Iran itself. The regime has been engaged in the systematic repression and slaughter of its own people. Tens of thousands of Iranians have been killed in brutal crackdowns, shot in the streets, arrested, tortured, mutilated, disappeared or executed. Victims’ families are intimidated into silence. These atrocities have nothing whatsoever to do with Gaza or the West Bank. This is where the argument collapses entirely.
Then again, there is one connection that receives little or no attention. The same regime slaughtering its own people and denying them the most basic freedoms, pours vast resources into Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and every other proxy willing to take up arms against Israel, not out of solidarity with Palestinians, but to export crisis, deflect attention, and keep itself at the centre of every conflict it feeds. And lest we forget, those proxies mirror the regime itself, as they brutalise, exploit and sacrifice their own people in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen.
When Iranians chant “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran,” they are not rejecting ordinary Palestinians or Lebanese. They are rejecting the obsession with the annihilation of Israel, and the cynical diversion of their country’s wealth and future into wars that serve no one but the regime. Where it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price.
What is presented as a moral chain of cause and effect is, in reality, a political inversion. One that strips agency from actors like Iran and its proxies while loading it entirely onto Israel. In doing so, it transforms a multi-layered struggle for power, influence and ideology into a single narrative of grievance, that’s as emotionally compelling as it is disingenuous and intellectually hollow.
The framing of Palestine as the central cause of everything is not accidental. It serves a certain ideology and world view, as well as Iran and the network of proxies and allies that depend on keeping that narrative in place. As long as Palestine remains the default explanation for the region’s instability and related disruption in the West, everything else is forced to conform. Iranian expansionism, Islamist ideology, regional power struggles, proxy wars, terror, and the repression of their own people by authoritarian regimes, are all recast as reactions rather than drivers, consequences rather than causes.
This is where the West enters the picture, not as a passive observer but as an active participant in sustaining and legitimising this narrative. Politicians, activists, media figures and institutions adopt, amplify and entrench it, reducing complexity to a false morality play and elevating one conflict above all others as the organising principle through which everything must be interpreted. That framework replaces reality itself, and anything that does not fit is rejected outright.
“Palestinianism” functions less as a concern for ordinary Palestinians than as an ideological lens, one that simplifies, distorts and ultimately absolves those whose actions are most destabilising and destructive, while concentrating blame on those who are, shall we say, most “visible”. It spreads easily, offering clarity, moral certainty and a ready-made hierarchy of victimhood and guilt. Once embedded, it becomes self-reinforcing, filtering out inconvenient facts and reinterpreting events to fit the narrative. Facts can be so inconvenient.
Then there is the now routine, yet false, accusation of “genocide”. The crime of crimes reduced to a slogan, endlessly repeated not because it has been established, but because it works. It recasts the conflict as a moral crusade driven by assertion, manipulation and outrage, while confirming the very narrative on which this framework depends.
The result is not insight but wilful blindness, a refusal to see that none of this hinges on the Palestinians. They were never the driver. Just a convenient vehicle to be exploited. Iran does not arm Hezbollah because of Israeli settlements, but because Hezbollah is a strategic asset, a means of projecting power, entrenching its de facto control in Lebanon, and maintaining a direct front against Israel. The Houthis do not target shipping lanes out of solidarity with Gaza; they do so because it gives them leverage and relevance. Hamas did not build its military capability and prepare Gaza for war over years to negotiate a peace it openly rejects. It did so to wage an endless war under a banner that guarantees international attention and, crucially, international confusion.
This framework mistakes confusion for clarity and slogans for strategy, and in doing so reinforces a narrative that seeks to perpetuate the conflict and the instability that surrounds it. One in which Palestine is invoked endlessly as the explanation for everything, even as it is exploited, manipulated and ultimately sacrificed by those with the least interest in ever resolving it. The tragedy is real, the suffering undeniable, but the idea that it sits at the centre of regional and global upheaval is not just plain wrong. It’s is a distortion that serves those who profit from keeping the conflict exactly where it is.
In the end, Palestine is not the thread that binds these crises together. It is the story being told, the language used to rationalise them, and the distraction that keeps attention fixed on one “culprit”, while those driving events across the region carry on elsewhere, largely unchallenged, unexamined and, for as long as this narrative holds, unaccountable.
A narrative that obscures what is truly driving events, allows the exploitation of ordinary Palestinians to continue unchecked, and shields those who feed and benefit from the chaos. Beneath it lies something far older and far uglier: a willingness to legitimise almost anything, excuse anyone and justify extreme violence and oppression, so long as it is directed at the Jews.
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