Reader Q&A Part II: Iran and the new proxy wars
A guest post by Yaasamine Mather + some news!
Greetings all! This week we’re turning to a reader question about Iran — a country which has a very special place in the Dr. Small Talk cinematic universe because it was a lively debate about Iran that inspired Mother Mary’s original Declaration of Only Small Talk At the Dinner Table (which I recount here).
But first, a little writing news: I’m pleased to share a new essay that was just published last week in Aeon on risk and the actuarial self. The essay takes up a contemporary paradox: Why is it that we’re called upon to serve as our own personal risk assessors but also told repeatedly that we suck at the job? I uncover the anti-social and anti-democratic logic that informs many of our public approaches to risk, and have some particularly sharp criticism for the ‘Nudgers’ (and also the ostensibly liberal former president who appointed a libertarian as the US’s top regulator). Give it a read and let me know what you think!
And now back to Iran: I have a few comments of my own to share, but am also going to turn the mic over to Yaasamine Mather, an Iranian scholar and political commentator who knows the lay of the land much better than I do. Let’s dive in.
James M asks:
I'm wondering why the role of the Iranian regime is typically left out of discussions of these issues. Without their involvement (and also to a lesser extent, of Turkey, Qatar, and Russia), what would the situation look like? Would there be a negotiated two-state solution and relative peace, and a more progressive Israeli government which also limits settler extremism?
The question of how local conflicts exist in a fully globalized world is an extremely rich one, and I’m often thought about it with regard to the Syrian civil war. Basically, without Russian military support, would the Assad regime have fallen to opposition forces the way that we’ve been accustomed to expect of extremely unpopular regimes? With regard to Israel/Palestine, we could basically ask the same question about the role of the United States, i.e. would Israel have been compelled to compromise without the endless military funding and diplomatic cover provided by the US government? I tend to think so.
Regarding Iran, I think it’s hard to understand its regional proxy agenda without understanding something of internal Iranian politics, and here Yaasamine has a lot of crucial insights to share. As she noted to me by email, “Iran is the only country in the region where there has been no major demonstration, no protest (either spontaneous from below, or state organised) about Palestine.” The photo below is from one of the few demonstrations held in Iran, and the context is important. As Yaasamine explained, “These are volunteers who want to go and fight in Gaza, they have their passports with them but they have gone to an airport that serves internal flights!”
This might seem, on the surface, inexplicable: How could Iranians of all people not be out in the street supporting Hamas given the position of their government? Yaasamine offers a few ideas to account for the mismatch between state policy and popular sentiment:
1. Rhetorical fatigue from constant political posturing: the Islamic Republic has, since its inception in 1979, consistently voiced its support for the Palestinian cause. The regime’s leaders have often used strong anti-Israel rhetoric, claiming they were in the forefront of all regional struggles against western-supported injustices in the region. However, years of such often hyperbolic rhetoric, without corresponding concrete action, have led to considerable skepticism and fatigue among many Iranians... sections of the populace now see pro-Palestinian declarations more as political maneuvering than genuine concern, leading to a diminished public response to events in Gaza.
2. The ‘enemy of my enemy’ misconception: the Iranian government’s dwindling popularity domestically has led to some sections of Iranian society adopting the idea that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Many people, disenchanted with the regime, wrongly believe whoever is opposed to the government, including Israel, might be their allies. This logic, although obviously flawed, has led to decreased public resonance with the Palestinian cause among certain sections of Iranian youth.
3. Influence of foreign propaganda, especially via satellite television: the media plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, and Iran is no exception. Over the years, Persian-speaking foreign media, particularly certain satellite TV stations with alleged ties to Israeli intelligence, or funded by foreign entities with a vested interest, have effectively broadcast content that seems to trivialize or distort the Palestinian struggle. By presenting a skewed view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, these channels have managed to influence a section of Iranian youth, leading them to be either indifferent or misinformed about the issues involved.
Considering Iran’s actions in this context is enlightening because it clarifies just how much of its relationship with regional proxies is built for an increasingly skeptical domestic market. And while Iran has been among Hamas’s most vociferous supporters both rhetorically and financially, it has hardly been propping up the group alone. Numbers on this stuff are very hard to come by, but the most reliable data we have indicates that Iran gives about $100 million annually to Hamas, putting it well behind approximately $180 million from Qatar (which began in 2018 to pay salaries of humanitarian and social service workers who until 2017 were paid by the Palestinian Authority) and the roughly $624 million collected via taxes and extortion. $100 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also not the most important source of funding for Hamas and I see no reason to assume that the latter would magically vanish were it not for support from Iran.
Two related points: A while back, someone sent me an essay that attributed Iran’s actions to theological causes — arguing in particular that “Iran’s obsession with the Jews and Israel is rooted in the cult of the prophet Imam Muhmammad al-Madhi.” I think this argument is genuinely bananas, but also illustrative of a major analytic flaw in The Discourse: rooting around the 9th (or 7th) century CE to explain contemporary political phenomena. In the case of Iran, the shared sense of anti-American anti-imperial struggle is far more determinative than anything that occurred twelve centuries ago. I wrote a book about why this form of reasoning leads us astray and prevents us from grasping the true significance and indeed danger of religious reactionaries: they are a product of modernity itself, not its negation.
In short, what we see presently is never the ‘natural’ elaboration of earlier theological ideas, but rather the result of the latter getting passed through the sieve of contemporary material realities and political priorities (if you don’t believe me, consider how quickly Israel has developed a robust settlement theology). On a related note, pundits who for years attributed Iranian-Saudi rivalry—and indeed, much else in the region—to Shi’a v. Sunni sectarianism should be engaged in some serious analytic soul-searching about why they have assumed religion to be the primary driver of politics. The fact that Shi’a Iran has also been supporting Sunni Hamas for decades should also have complicated the sectarian argument.
The second point is that I am wary of arguments that try to attribute too much weight to Iran and indeed paint the state as a puppet master engineering all that is wrong in the Middle East. Just to reiterate, I’m not denying Iranian influence or material assistance, but, for example, I find the idea that Iran developed the Oct. 7 attack plan and pushed Hamas to carry it out to be entirely bogus. Assigning outsized power to Iran serves to downplay real Palestinian grievances, as if a people living under occupation and blockade for decades would not one day rise up violently to try to remediate this reality.
Both in the Iran-as-puppet-master argument and the Shi’a-theology-as-prime-mover argument we find shades of the same impulse: a refusal to reckon with the specific context and history of Palestinian suffering. Instead, these pundits cast around for some outside actor to explain what would not be inexplicable if they had been paying attention for the last several decades. It’s shades of attributing every anti-colonial revolution during the 1960s and 70s to Soviet communism. Old patterns die hard, and sometimes not at all.