Since its founding, the Islamic Republic of Iran has cultivated legitimacy by embedding itself within global progressive movements—particularly those oriented around anti-imperialism and racial justice. Rhetoric, repeated, obscures reality: the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is an imperialist project that will not enable a free Palestine.
The IRI is built on an expansionist doctrine resembling Manifest Destiny, which claims both the authority and obligation to extend its political-religious system beyond its borders. The IRI’s constitution frames the state’s mission in transnational terms: to advance a struggle for the liberation of all deprived and oppressed peoples in the world, forging a path for the formation of a single world community that is a unified Islamic order. The preamble of the constitution lays out the Guardian Council, Velayat-e Faqih, a system of clerical guardianship appointed by the Supreme Leader.
The military supporting this struggle for liberation and unifying a single Islamic world order is the IRGC. The ‘I’ in IRGC is not ‘Iranian’ it is ‘Islamic.’ The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not just a national military charged with defending Iran’s borders (for example, from Daesh, Al Qaeda, and ISIS), but it is also charged with preserving and expanding Islamist ideology. National borders are subordinate to the Islamist ideology that undergirds a single world community over which the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader and his Guardianship Council extend their constitutional authority. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
The Islamic Republic functions as an crypto Islamo-fascist state: it enforces a singular, extremist interpretation of Islam through clerical guardianship, criminalizes dissent as heresy, and legitimizes unlimited violence in the name of ideological purity and global mission. Political authority is inseparable from religious absolutism, and pluralism is treated as an existential threat to be eradicated rather than a condition of governance.
The IRI’s ideologically driven imperialist mission shapes the regime’s investment in Palestine. The regime’s military apparatus, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), operates an extraterritorial arm known as the Quds Force. Quds is Jerusalem. The objective is to bring Jerusalem—and Palestine—under the purview of the single world community overseen by the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. This requires the destruction of Israel, but it would not produce Palestinian freedom. If Iran today is indicative of how the Supreme Leader and the Guardianship Council treat people under their authority, then Palestine under this Islamist political guardianship would become a gender apartheid state, religious differences would be persecuted, and political dissent would be criminalized.
Within the IRI’s constitution, ‘oppressed’ functions less as a descriptive category than a moral instrument selectively invoked in Article 3 (Paragraph 16), 152 and 154 of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution to confer legitimacy, sanctify violence, and justify intervention. But attention to what constitutes ‘oppressed peoples’ reveals the IRI’s foundational lie. ‘Oppression’ in the IRI’s constitution is defined not by lived conditions but by ideological alignment. To best understand the hypocrisy and contradiction in the Islamic Republic’s vision of ‘liberation,’ consider the nearly half a century of their oppressive governance: systematic mass arrests and executions, the criminalization of dissent, and the repression of ethnic, religious, and political minorities. Women and girls live under a system of gender apartheid that polices their dress, bodies, and movement. Kurdish language and culture are criminalized. Baloch and Arab communities are stripped of civil rights and subjected to extreme state violence. Baha’i people are arrested and executed for their faith. Millions of Afghans are denied legal status, barred from education, healthcare, housing, and banking, banned from residing in 19 of Iran’s 31 provinces, and live under constant threat of detention and deportation. Journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents, artists, filmmakers, and singers are routinely imprisoned or disappeared.
Different expansionist projects produce different forms of violence. Israel’s founding political framework was explicitly territorial, organized around land seizure, borders, and demographic engineering. This has produced a system of military occupation, dispossession, and a legal regime of apartheid-like control over Palestinians, structured through spatial domination, citizenship law, and territorial fragmentation.
The Islamic Republic’s expansionism is ideological. It is organized around militarization, clerical guardianship, coercion, and corruption, producing forms of domination that do not rely on annexation but on ideological subordination. Where Israel’s violence is exercised through the management of land and population, the Islamic Republic’s violence operates through proxy warfare, permanent militarization, and the suppression of plural political life. Both projects foreclose Palestinian freedom—but through distinct colonial logics: one through territorial domination, the other through ideological capture that replaces Palestinian self-determination with submission to an external Islamist authority.
The IRI employs three interlocking strategies to fortify its ideological expansion: weaponizing progressive movements for cultural legitimacy, embedding itself in conflict zones through proxy forces, and shaping Western policy environments through soft-power influence. Nowhere are the consequences of this strategy more visible—or more destructive—than in the regime’s manipulation of the ‘Free Palestine’ movement to obscure the urgency of supporting Iranian civil society in ending the Islamic Republic’s regime.
The Islamic Republic relies on Palestinian oppression to advance its imperial ambitions and sustain its claim to higher moral authority and regional relevance. From 1979 onward, the Islamic Republic framed Palestine not as a national movement with its own plural political programs, but as a stage for its revolutionary identity. The IRI’s stance shifted sharply when the PLO—under Arafat and Fatah’s leadership—embraced peace negotiations with Israel. The IRI refused to endorse the 1993 Oslo Accords and portrayed Arafat and Fatah as capitulating to U.S. and Israeli interests. In the early 1990s, the IRI cultivated Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), providing both with financial aid, weapons, and training as part of a strategy to back actors that aligned with its own ideological narrative. Palestinian resistance became a resource for the IRI: a means of sustaining ideological legitimacy while justifying endless militarization, domestic repression, and regional expansion of its political-religious ideology. By instrumentalizing Palestinian suffering to serve its regional and ideological ambitions, the regime has shifted international attention away from Palestinian demands for decolonization, return, and equality, and toward a narrow security framework dominated by violence and militarization.
The regime does not want Palestine to be free. A free Palestine (defined by sovereignty, equal rights, and political self-determination) would strip the regime of the moral capital, symbolic enemy, and ideological coherence that anchor its claim to global relevance. The Islamic Republic of Iran may be a response to Israel, but it can never be the answer to Palestinian liberation.
This dynamic is clearest in the regime’s relationship to Hamas. Hamas is one Palestinian actor among many, shaped by conditions of siege and dispossession—not an embodiment of the Palestinian people as such. By the early 2020s, its popularity had significantly waned, with Palestinians across the political spectrum criticizing its governance and strategic choices.
Yet, the regime’s material and political backing elevated Hamas as the dominant international face of Palestinian resistance. In doing so, it narrowed global perceptions of Palestine to an armed Islamist struggle, eclipsing the broader Palestinian political landscape. This reframing traps Palestinians in a permanent theater of war, in a militarized paradigm, that cannot deliver decolonization or durable rights, sidelining Palestinian political projects grounded in law, civil resistance, and equality.
The regime’s strategic frame is functioning as intended when the central public question becomes ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ rather than ‘How do we dismantle apartheid and secure equal rights and safety for Palestinians and Jews?’, while the horizon for Palestinian liberation narrows. Further, the Israeli government itself has been supporting and funding Hamas and uses that support to ruin Fatah and other Palestinian groups. This produces a clear political outcome that benefits both the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel because it allows the latter and its allies to collapse ‘Palestine’ into ‘Iranian-backed terrorism.’ In this framework, Gaza becomes a battlefront for Israel and Iran. Palestinian claims for sovereignty and liberation fall away, while the regime violently suppresses Iranian civil society in the name of Palestine, delegitimizing protest by branding dissidents as Zionists or agents of foreign power.
This is how authoritarian violence sustains itself. After all, it is not by happenstance that the Iranian regime’s mass atrocities against Iranian civilians are happening as ICE agents execute U.S. civilians, and as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza. The regime is emboldened by these human rights abuses and opportunistically invokes a false equivalence to flatten vastly unequal realities. This mutual reinforcement of brutality has each actor pointing to the other’s crimes to justify its own, collapsing moral judgment into a contest over whose violence is less condemnable. In that distortion, mass repression inside Iran is normalized, Palestinian suffering is instrumentalized, and legitimate critique against violence is silenced.
The Islamic Republic’s Quds Force does not aim to free Palestine, but to decimate Israel and bring Jerusalem under the guardianship of the Supreme Leader. This maximalist vision replaces one form of domination with another, and forecloses any political future Palestinians might freely choose.
The regime’s imperialism is not only ideological; it is material. While presenting itself as anti-capitalist and anti-Western, the Islamic Republic governs with extreme violence while it systematically hollows out Iran’s wealth—exporting oil, gas, and natural resources and channels the proceeds into proxy militias and military campaigns abroad to expand the ideological reach of its clerical guardianship. This is not anti-imperialism. It is classic imperial extraction.
The regime has invested heavily in a global soft-power infrastructure designed to extend its influence beyond Iran’s borders. It trains and funds proxies, cultivates sympathetic intellectuals, academics, and activists abroad, and strategically deploys the language of anti-imperialism and progressive justice to legitimize repression at home and ideological expansion abroad. Authoritarian rule and political violence are obscured behind a rhetoric of resistance, while Palestinian suffering is instrumentalized to claim a bloody moral high ground over the West, a strategy enabled by Western states’ own selective justifications of mass violence and policing for political ends. Resistance that requires permanent war and collective erasure is not liberation; it is a demand for endless sacrifice in service of an external ideological project. Commitment to Palestinian liberation and anti-imperialism must therefore recognize Iranian civil society’s struggle for self-determination as inseparable from the Palestinian cause. Anything less emboldens a regime that feeds off confusion and moral evasion, allowing repression and violence to metastasize into an unchecked monstrosity.