Israel must cut off the head of the octopus in Iran

Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the Iranian regime’s public support for it, the war of words as to whether Hamas should be called a “proxy” for Tehran has been rekindled. In this article I will try to argue why despite not technically fitting the term, Hamas should still be regarded as a proxy force for the Islamist regime of Iran and must be dealt with accordingly.

Since the 1960s, Arab nationalist groups with pro-Soviet tendencies among Palestinian Arabs led the war on Israel. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which emerged under the charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat, was the most important and well-known of those organizations.

At the time, many Iranian Islamists and leftists, in line with their “anti-imperialist” struggle against the West in the heat of the Cold War, developed a deep bond with Arafat. Many of them were trained by the PLO and sometimes even fought by Arafat’s side.

After the 1979 revolution in Iran, these people would immediately take Arafat to Tehran to seek Ayatollah Khomeini’s support for his anti-Israeli efforts. It was during that historic meeting that Khomeini issued his infamous decree to “conquer Quds” and “wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,” thereby setting Iran’s Islamist regime on a collision course with Israel. READ MORE