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WHITE KNIGHTS: HOW IRAN’S SHIA ARE WINNING THE HEARTS OF THE SUNNI PALESTINIANS

Large swaths of the Middle East are coming under Iran’s thumb: Lebanon, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates. From Sunni to Shia, Arabs to Turks, Iran’s influence is spreading—particularly to the most volatile parts, like Gaza. Iran thrives on poverty, misery, and anger, making hell-holes like Gaza easy prey. It’s not yet a contagion there, but it’s fast becoming one.

Over the past twenty years, since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, Iran has quietly but steadily hijacked the Palestinian cause. It started with Palestinian exile groups in Lebanon, but within a few years expanded to the Palestinian territories. This was an unpredicted turn of events, as Palestinians historically have been the wards of the Sunnis, particularly Egypt, Jordan, and the Arab Gulf states.

Iran’s growing influence over the Palestinians is indisputable. According to a 2007 Pew Research poll, 55 percent of Palestinians have a favorable opinion of Iran. Forty-seven percent have a favorable opinion of President Ahmadinejad, versus 40 percent who don’t. (Keep in mind the poll was taken at a time when Ahmadinejad’s public statements were alarming almost everyone in the Middle East, including Iranians.) Fifty-eight percent of Palestinians support Iran’s development of a nuclear bomb, making the Palestinians the only Arabs who do.

Iran overcame sectarian and ethnic differences by offering the Palestinians a real plan for fighting Israel, and providing cash and arms to any faction ready to do so. The Iranians are trying to convince the Palestinians to abandon pointless suicide attacks against civilians for a more traditional military struggle. Palestinian suicide bombings have dropped off steeply, replaced by rocket attacks. It’s possible that this is because of Iran, which has been urging the Palestinians to adopt more conventional military tactics.

The one thing that’s certain is that the Palestinians have made a definite shift away from their discredited, tired secular leaders, Yasser Arafat’s successors. This didn’t come as a surprise. But again, the turn to Iran did. The Palestinians’ natural course should have been to drift toward Osama bin Laden and takfiri Sunnis, if only because they share the same religious tenets and Islamic philosophical influences. (Bin Laden’s early mentor was a Palestinian.) The Palestinians’ embrace of Shia Iran was as if Ireland woke up one morning and abandoned the pope for the Anglican Church.

And it isn’t just in the West Bank and Gaza that Iran has been chipping away at Sunni Islam. As we’ve seen, Iran has made inroads into Iraq’s Sunni Kurdistan. Also, during the 1982–2000 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah picked up increasing support among Lebanese Sunnis, which in itself was remarkable because Lebanon suffers some of the worst sectarian divides in the Middle East.

In a July 26, 2006 poll, 87 percent of Lebanese supported Hezbollah and Iran’s war with Israel, while the war was still going on. Broken down by sects, 80 percent of Christians supported Hezbollah during the conflict, and 89 percent of Sunni Muslims. Sunni and Christian support for Hezbollah fell off during Lebanon’s recent constitutional crisis over the election of a new president, but that only served to remind Hezbollah that war against Israel, rather than against other Lebanese, is what will further Hezbollah’s plan to turn itself into a broad-based, multisectarian liberation front.

How far does Hezbollah’s writ extend among other Sunni countries? In a 2006 poll taken in overwhelmingly Sunni Jordan, more than 60 percent of respondents considered Hezbollah a legitimate resistance organization, the successor to the PLO. As for Iran, in a 2007 Pew Research poll, 46 percent of Jordanians said they looked at the country positively, versus 53 percent negatively. Jordanians were among the Arabs who voted Hassan Nasrallah the most popular leader in the Middle East.

What’s remarkable, again, is the context. The poll was conducted as Iraq was going through its worst sectarian violence. Jordanians, who have strong family and tribal ties to Iraq’s Arab Sunnis, should normally have rejected anything associated with Iran and the Shia. Even factoring in that more than half of Jordan’s population is Palestinian, it is remarkable that Iran enjoys this kind of support.

Iran has also started to pick up support in Sunni Egypt, a country that was a birthplace of Arab nationalism as well as many of the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sunni Islamic revival movements, all of which are deeply hostile to the Shia. Forty percent of Egyptians look at Iran favorably, while 50 percent don’t. And then there’s Sunni Morocco, where 42 percent of poll respondents back Iran, and 16 percent don’t.

So how did Iran and Hezbollah manage to win over the Sunni? Understanding who Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah is, his appeal, and what he means for all Arabs, goes a long way in answering the question. By rewriting Hezbollah’s script, tapping a vein of anger and defiance, and turning Hezbollah into a virtual state and its militia into a modern guerrilla force, Nasrallah has put Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt under Iran’s shadow. Iran still has a long way to go. But Israel’s encirclement is closer than it has been since the 1967 and 1973 wars. If Iran succeeds, and Israel’s back really is put to the sea, the rules change once more.

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Nablus is perhaps the most militant town on the Palestinian West Bank. The Israeli army enters it only in force, preferably in armored jeeps and tanks. I was there nearly a year after Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, trying to find out how the Israelis had managed to so sharply curtail suicide bombings. As it turned out, I learned something else entirely.

Nablus’s main square was a circus, with bumper-to-bumper traffic, old Mercedes and Nissans belching black, oily smoke, and boys pushing carts and weaving through them. Donkeys loaded down with fresh vegetables occupied the sidewalks.

A man in a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle jumped the curb onto the sidewalk in front of me. He swerved at the last moment to avoid a vendor’s cart and screeched to a stop, waiting for traffic to give him an opening.

“We need Hassan Nasrallah here to impose a little order!” he shouted to no one in particular.

I had one of the little epiphanies you get visiting the Middle East: There was a craving here for order, the kind of order Hezbollah had imposed in Lebanon. The kind I’d seen at the Hezbollah martyrs’ school in Nabatiyah.

Hassan Nasrallah isn’t a name you’d expect to hear evoked in Nablus, which is known for its hard-line Sunni clerics—the ones who historically looked to Cairo or Mecca for spiritual guidance rather than to a Shia imam.

Onlookers laughed at the man in the ATV, who drove off the wrong way through a knot of taxis. They leaned on their horns as he cursed them. This gave me an idea.

I walked into Nablus’s old covered bazaar, a dark warren of shops where you can buy anything from pomegranates to Chinese electric fans. It was cool there, with only the thinnest slices of sunlight making it through the rusted metal roof. Here was where I would conduct my impromptu poll.

Shu rayak ‘an Hassan Nasrallah? I asked the shopkeepers. What’s your opinion of Hassan Nasrallah?

At first I got only shrugs. It seemed no one was willing to speak his mind to this odd American wandering around asking politically sensitive questions. Then a man with a dappled gray mustache who stood in front of a glass refrigerator filled with milk and labneh, cultured milk, decided he couldn’t hold back.

“He is a great man,” he told me. “A hero. A warrior.”

The man pointed at a picture behind a refrigerator. It was Hassan Nasrallah.

“Where’s Arafat’s picture?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

Arafat was obviously a man of the past. Not only was he dead, he was forgotten. And the organization he founded in the fifties, Fatah, was also a spent force. Fatah wasn’t going to liberate Nablus. In fact, Fatah had been politically bankrupt for the last two decades, causing only more misery for the Palestinians. Nasrallah was the general on the white horse now, not Arafat. Who cared if Nasrallah was a Shia imam? He knew how to fight.

Others opened up, and it was soon clear that everyone in the market knew who Nasrallah was. After all, only a year had passed since the 2006 war in Lebanon. But what surprised me was how uniformly passionate they were about Nasrallah. Ten years earlier, Nablus was a city that stood behind Saddam Hussein. And after that, Osama bin Laden.

At my next stop, I met the leader of a cell of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a Palestinian militant group linked to Fatah. Wanted by the Israelis, he was holed up in Nablus’s sprawling Balata refugee camp, moving constantly from house to house to avoid Israeli assassination squads. I asked him about Nasrallah.

“I love that man,” he said.

He too couldn’t have cared less that Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah were the creations of Shia Iran. Or that Nasrallah didn’t bother to hide the fact that he answered to Tehran. All that mattered to him was that Nasrallah had taken up arms against Israel. He’d have followed a Christian general into battle as long as there was a chance of defeating Israel.

The foundation of Nasrallah’s popularity in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan goes back to the same event: Nasrallah beat the Israelis on the field of battle, David slaying the Israeli Goliath. In Iran, Nasrallah’s success on the battlefield vaulted him into a position of near reverence.

Ahmadinejad sent a “greeting card” to Nasrallah to mark the first anniversary of the 2006 war. “The wonderful victory of the Lebanese people over the Zionist occupiers,” he wrote, “is a result of faith, unity, and resistance.”

Arabs today look at Nasrallah as a sovereign leader, with the stature of a Bismarck or a de Gaulle.

Born in 1960 in Christian East Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah, like Imad Mughniyah, was the son of a poor vegetable vendor. The Nasrallahs were from Bazuriyah, a small village in the Shia south. Nasrallah grew up in Christian East Beirut, learning early on what it was like to be a second-class citizen to the Christian Maronites there. A Lebanese military officer told me that Nasrallah worked for a while in a barbershop that catered to Christian Maronite army officers, which only deepened his resentment. Nasrallah was another internal exile, like Mughniyah, cut off from Lebanon’s larger society.

When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, the Nasrallah family was forced to flee south back to Bazuriyah. Nasrallah, a studious and pious boy, went to the Iraqi city of Najaf for religious studies. Along with many Shia Lebanese students, he was expelled from Iraq in 1978. He returned to Lebanon and joined Amal, the Shia umbrella party.

Like many Lebanese Shia from the south, Nasrallah at first did nothing to resist the Israelis. An Israeli general who was in Lebanon at the time told me he remembers Nasrallah hosting Israeli officers for tea at the family house in Bazuriyah. But something turned him. In late 1982 or early 1983, the twenty-two-year-old Nasrallah, like Mughniyah, put himself under the flag of the Revolutionary Guards in Balabakk, turning in his Koran for a Kalashnikov.

This wasn’t a difficult choice for Nasrallah. He knew Amal was incapable of organizing a resistance to the Israelis. And anyhow, Nasrallah didn’t think Amal had done enough for Lebanon’s Shia. Like the PLO, Amal was corrupt and ineffective; and just as the Gulf Arabs would never lift a finger for Lebanon, neither would Amal. If nothing else, the Revolutionary Guards were a fresh face. Nasrallah would give them their chance.

Nasrallah’s contact in the Revolutionary Guards was the same man Mughniyah had gone to see in Balabakk in 1982, Sheikh Hossein. And Nasrallah agreed to the same draconian rules: Keep Iran’s hand hidden at all costs. Never discuss anything important on the phone. Deal in cash. Use the name Islamic Jihad Organization for attacks against the West. In other words, Nasrallah, like Mughniyah, signed up to become a clandestine operative—a terrorist. The only difference between the two was that Nasrallah had had religious training.

Sheikh Hossein didn’t care that Nasrallah wasn’t a disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini, or that in Najaf, Nasrallah had fallen under the influence of Khomeini’s theological rival, the Da’wa Party. Sheikh Hossein cared only that this passionate young man agreed to take Iranian orders.

At some point Nasrallah became Mughniyah’s boss, his go-between with Tehran. The Iranians named Nasrallah “Iran’s representative” to the Islamic Jihad Organization. While Mughniyah would become a celebrity of sorts as the public face of Hezbollah terrorism, it was really Nasrallah who was the mastermind. It’s a history that even today Nasrallah would like us to forget.

Nasrallah’s name surfaced in connection with the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which killed sixty people. (Mughniyah would be tied to the embassy attack only after he became the subject of press speculation. Otherwise, there’s no good evidence he was involved in it.) Nasrallah was also directly involved in the mid-1980s kidnapping of Western hostages in Lebanon. It was Nasrallah who gave the final orders to release them in 1991. And in 1996, when Nasrallah started raising objections about international terrorism, he put them aside at Tehran’s insistence, dutifully training the attackers for the Khobar barracks truck bombing in Saudi Arabia—Iran’s final terrorist act as of this writing.

The Iranians had complete trust in Nasrallah, both to follow orders and to make the right decisions when he acted on his own. Unlike Mughniyah, Nasrallah never freelanced. He never pushed the Iranians to carry out attacks they hadn’t already decided on. When Nasrallah’s son was killed fighting the Israelis in 1997, Nasrallah took the news calmly: it was a necessary death to drive out the Israelis. Nasrallah never asked the Iranians to take revenge. He was a loyal and obedient lieutenant, reassuring his Iranian handlers that Hezbollah kept no secrets from Iran.

Still, while Nasrallah was Iran’s trusted caretaker of its interests in Lebanon, he was never its water boy. The Iranians treated him as a respected equal, as if he were a general in the Revolutionary Guards. And as Nasrallah’s star rose, they were obliged to defer to him, treating him now as a victorious general. Nasrallah wasn’t a soft cleric, cloistered in a mosque reading the Koran. He was a charismatic field commander—the only path to earning respect in today’s Middle East.

It was February of 1986 when the United States first caught sight of Nasrallah in the south of Lebanon, fighting with the Islamic resistance. He and Imad Mughniyah crossed into the Israeli security zone to set up an ambush of an Israeli patrol, capturing two soldiers on February 17. It’s unclear whether the Israeli soldiers died during the ambush or were executed. It made no difference to Nasrallah, because he had succeeded in infuriating the Israelis and flushing them out into the open, making them better targets.

The more frustrated the Israelis became, the more force they brought to bear in southern Lebanon, which is exactly what Nasrallah wanted when he’d kidnapped the two soldiers. Nasrallah needed the Israelis to overreact—to shed Lebanese blood, infuriate the south’s Shia, help Hezbollah win more recruits. Ten years later, when Nasrallah was secretary-general of Hezbollah, he applied the same lessons he had learned in the south.

By March 1996, the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah had broken down, and Hezbollah was shelling northern Israel. Between March 4 and April 10, Hezbollah killed seven Israeli soldiers, pushing Israel to the brink once again. On April 9, Israeli general Amiram Levine gave Hezbollah and the Lebanese fair warning. “The residents in south Lebanon who are under the responsibility of Hezbollah will be hit harder,” he declared, “and Hezbollah will be hit harder. We will find the way to act correctly and quickly.”

Over the next four days, Israel shelled Hezbollah positions across the south and around Beirut, blockading Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre from the sea. The Israelis played the part Hezbollah had scripted for them perfectly. The Israelis’ crashing around the south convinced the Lebanese that the Israelis intended to reoccupy Lebanon. Hezbollah would get the war it wanted—but just to make sure, Hezbollah fired more rockets into Israel.

What happened next permanently altered world opinion about the war, about Hezbollah, and about the Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

Qana is believed by some to be the biblical city of Cana, where Jesus is said to have turned water to wine. Though Qana wasn’t known to be pro-Hezbollah, it had the misfortune of being in the middle of Israel’s onslaught, Operation Grapes of Wrath. As the fighting closed in on Qana, about 800 villagers took refuge in a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) compound.

On April 18, 1996, on a clear blue morning, a Hezbollah position just outside Qana fired two Katyusha rockets and eight mortars at an Israeli position on the Red Line, the northern limit of Israel’s “security zone.” Fifteen minutes later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) returned fire, shelling the area with heavy artillery—155mm guns. Most of the shells were detonated by proximity fuses, meaning they exploded in the air to cause maximum casualties.

According to the IDF, it fired 38 shells. At least 13 exploded in or above the UNIFIL compound; 106 people were killed, and 116 injured. Tehran didn’t rejoice about the dead, but it was a political bull’s-eye. You could almost hear the champagne corks, at least symbolic ones, going off in Tehran.

The “Qana Massacre” triggered an immediate outcry in Lebanon and the rest of the Muslim world. The Israelis shouldn’t have been surprised, and probably weren’t, but still they felt a sense of bafflement about the furious reaction.

“I don’t see any mistake in judgment,” Israeli lieutenant general Amnon Shahak said. “We fought Hezbollah there [in Qana], and when they fire on us, we will fire at them to defend ourselves. . . . I don’t know of any other rules of the game, either for the army or civilians.” The United States came to Israel’s defense, accusing Hezbollah of hiding in built-up civilian areas, which did nothing to endear the Americans to the Lebanese.

The world saw Israel and the United States as condoning the murder of women and children. It was seen as evidence of Israel’s impotence: the Israelis couldn’t stop Hezbollah, so they slaughtered refugees, punishing the innocent. The “Qana Massacre” and its fallout also seriously undermined Israel’s deterrence credibility—a vicious retaliation had done nothing to stop Hezbollah attacks. Instead, it undercut whatever moral high ground Israel still had left in Lebanon. It didn’t matter whether the IDF had hit Qana on purpose or not; the perception was that the IDF didn’t make mistakes.

The “Qana Massacre” turned Hezbollah into the moral victor. Qana’s dead evoked the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala, galvanizing Hezbollah’s rank and file. Nasrallah now had proved himself a brilliant strategist as well as a general and a soldier.

These were Nasrallah’s earliest victories, establishing his reputation as a warrior priest. Although he started out on the same footing as Imad Mughniyah, one crucial difference separated them—a difference that turned Nasrallah into a leader, the head of a sovereign state in all but name, while Mughniyah remained a foot soldier who only knew how to throw grenades.

Mughniyah lost Tehran’s confidence because he could never completely turn the corner from terrorist to guerrilla commander, as we saw during the hijacking of Kuwait Airways flight 422 in 1988. But the 1990s were a time when Nasrallah and Mughniyah’s old mentors, the Revolutionary Guards, were incorporated into the regular military and the revolutionary commanders retired. Sheikh Hossein was recalled to Tehran and put on ice. Unable to understand that Iran was maturing into a classic statist power, Mughniyah couldn’t adapt.

Nasrallah, on the other hand, sensed the shift of winds in Tehran. Though he was at the center of Hezbollah’s notorious terrorist campaign of the 1980s, he easily made the shift away from terrorism along with Tehran. Conclusive evidence of the transformation would come during the 2006 war in Lebanon, when the Nasrallah-led Hezbollah didn’t so much as touch a hair on the head of any American in Lebanon—a restraint Mughniyah, on his own, would have been unable to show. Nasrallah was now a victorious de facto head of state, taking and holding ground and commanding a military to match.

Since his assassination in February 2008, Imad Mughniyah has become an iconic legend among many Shia. But it’s Hassan Nasrallah who is seen as the man who’ll liberate the Middle East—the modern-day incarnation of Saladin, the twelfth-century Kurd who drove out the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem. The Palestinians are convinced it will be Nasrallah who frees them, liberates Jerusalem, and drives out the modern-day Crusaders, the United States and Israel.

Shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I got an idea of just how far one Sunni-Shia barrier had come down when a British journalist and I made a trip to Lebanon’s most notorious Palestinian refugee camp, ‘Ayn al-Hilwah.

Sitting on high ground just outside the ancient city of Sidon, ‘Ayn al-Hilwah is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. It’s also one of the poorest, most densely populated, and most lawless parts of the Middle East. Within the camp’s confines, there’s every kind of terrorist and criminal. One of the bombers in the 1993 World Trade Center attack lives there, as do groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden, Usbat al-Islam and Jund al-Sham. There’s a Lebanese army checkpoint outside the entrance, but the army would never dare set foot inside the place. It would have to raze it first.

A single dirt road runs through the middle of ‘Ayn al-Hilwah, but it quickly dissolves into alleyways so narrow you can touch the houses on either side just by raising your arms. Open sewers run through the alleyways, and the electricity is usually off. The shouts of children ring through the camp. Every once in a while you catch a glimpse of the cobalt Mediterranean, fishing boats riding anchor. Amid all the misery, it’s a reminder you’re still in Lebanon.

If I went back on my own, I could never find Munir Al-Maqdah’s office—just as Maqdah, a Fatah military commander, wants it. As instructed, the British journalist and I waited in a trash-strewn lot. Three fedayeen, Palestinian freedom fighters, drove up in an open jeep. One got out, motioning us to follow. We walked in silence, through an even narrower maze of alleys, and at one point we had to cut through someone’s house. Our escort shouted through the open door. A woman with a little girl in her arms ran into a back room. We followed our escort up a narrow stairway to a door with a curtain hanging over it, and he left us there to wait for Maqdah.

We’d asked to see Maqdah to hear what the Palestinians thought about the invasion of Iraq. In the first Gulf War, they almost all had stood behind Saddam Hussein. Saddam had supported them over the years, at least in name. After the second intifada started in September 2000, Saddam would give money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Now how did they feel about his approaching end?

Maqdah walked in, gave us a nod, and sat down on the couch next to me. This wasn’t the first time he had talked to foreigners. Though he was more comfortable fighting than chatting, he was prepared to give yet another Sisyphean sermon about how wronged the Palestinians were. Then again, why wouldn’t he talk to us? With a Lebanese arrest warrant hanging over his head, he had nothing to lose.

“What do you think about the invasion?” I asked.

“The United States has gone to war against Islam,” Maqdah said. He meant that the United States had gone to war against all Muslims, not just Iraqi Muslims.

But what about the fact that the invasion was getting rid of a tyrant no one liked anymore? I was about to ask Maqdah this question, but at that moment an old fax machine in a bookcase began to clatter. Maqdah rose and stood over the machine as it came out. He read it, then handed it to me.

Dated March 22, it was from the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades: a call to all Muslims to go to Iraq to defend the umma, or Muslim nation, and combat the American, British, and Zionist invaders who want to divide the Muslim world, Shia from Sunni.

There wasn’t a single word about democracy, modern education, women’s empowerment, weapons of mass destruction, or even Saddam’s dictatorship—nothing about the reasons Americans thought they were going to war. I read to the end of the fax. The name Saddam Hussein, the Palestinians’ onetime ally, wasn’t there.

Maqdah didn’t care about Saddam either. For Maqdah, the old world—Saddam’s world—had only divided Muslims, as it had failed the Palestinians. Only Islam could take back what the Palestinians had lost, the land they had lived on for thousands of years. The allies wouldn’t be fighting Saddam Hussein, then, but the faithful. It doesn’t matter what you call it—jihad, nationalism, or simply an anticolonial struggle. The point was that Saddam no longer counted; only Muslims did, Sunni and Shia fighting side by side. It was more evidence of how quickly the Middle East was embracing Islam, shedding whatever secularism was left.

The Al-Aqsa fax turned out to be right about the invasion’s dividing Muslims, but not in the way Al-Aqsa had expected. Within a year, the Iraqis themselves would start a civil war, Shia against Sunni. I would see Maqdah again, but never got the chance to ask for an explanation. But I think I know the reason for his misplaced confidence that there would be an ecumenical jihad in Iraq.

In the mid-eighties, Maqdah had thrown his lot in with Iran, fighting with the Islamic resistance. Although he was still taking Arafat’s money, he now took his orders from Tehran. In 1994, after the Oslo Accords were signed and money from the PLO stopped coming, Maqdah broke with Arafat. He signed up with the Revolutionary Guards and integrated his forces into Hezbollah’s.

One of Maqdah’s lieutenants told me that Mughniyah had often operated out of ‘Ayn al-Hilwah, coordinating with Maqdah. He said that Mughniyah had been in the camp as recently as July 2007, a little more than six months before he was assassinated. Predictably, neither Mughniyah nor Iran cared that Maqdah was a Sunni Muslim. If Maqdah was willing to join the Iranians’ cause, they were more than willing to have him—one more Sunni crossing sectarian lines.

And Maqdah certainly was ready to serve under a new flag, as his confidence in Arafat had steadily eroded over the years. In 1993, when Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, he lost the loyalty of many Palestinians. Arafat ceded 78 percent of Palestine to Israel, and got nothing in return other than a vague promise to grant the Palestinians statehood at some undetermined future time—which for them meant never. After Oslo, Maqdah saw Arafat as an Israeli collaborator rather than a liberator. Oslo was an agreement to look after Israel’s security rather than that of the Palestinians. The Israelis have their own views about what went wrong with Oslo, but it’s Maqdah’s that interest us here.

Arafat was just another ineffective exile, as were his lieutenants. Almost all of them were born in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon and had long ago lost touch with the real Palestine. Arafat’s war on Israel, which started in 1965, was fought by exiles, Palestinians who wanted to go home. Their attacks reeked of desperation and futility, gaining the Palestinians nothing but a reputation for being terrorists. Maqdah, himself an exile, finally came to understand that the hijacking of a Western passenger airliner only served to strengthen Israel. It did nothing to get him out of this miserable refugee camp.

With Arafat’s decline, luring a fighter like Maqdah was easy for the Iranians. Iran’s message was simple: Fight Israel on the field of battle, take ground, take back all of Palestine—no more compromises like Oslo. Just as important, the Iranians were ready to step in with money when Arafat couldn’t. And unlike the Saudis and their Palestinian beneficiaries with their hypocritical moral codes, the Iranians didn’t waste their money on Beirut nightclubs and whores.

Though the Saudis shared the same religious beliefs with Maqdah—Sunni Islam—they could never win his respect. Hiding behind the walls of their multibillion-dollar palaces, the Saudi royal family never sent their spoiled princes to Lebanon to fight the Israelis. In fact, when has any Saudi ever died fighting the Israelis? Never.

Maqdah saw the Saudis as a spent race. At 35 percent, Saudis take the prize for having the highest percentage of obese people in the world—more than the United States, at 33 percent. When a Palestinian like Maqdah sees a Saudi prince, he sees not a resistance fighter but a soft billionaire like Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, who bought the world’s most expensive and luxurious private jet, the Airbus A380, to convert into a “flying palace.” No, the Saudis weren’t an option.

Maqdah didn’t share much with the Iranians in terms of beliefs. He didn’t particularly like them, or Hezbollah for that matter. But the Iranians had a strategy—one they’d never give up on, even at the risk of massive Israeli retaliation. A plan that Maqdah and other Palestinians wanted to be part of, to pull them out of their sea of despair. As it did with the angry, poor, young Shia men living in Lebanon, Iran knew how to tap the vein of Palestinian defiance.

And it wasn’t only individual fighters like Maqdah the Iranians were winning over. They also undertook a patient, systematic effort to win the most influential religious and political Sunni organization in the world: the Society of the Muslim Brothers, or the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization the Palestinians gravitated to in the seventies and eighties. And incredibly, considering the inborn hate of the Muslim Brotherhood for Shia Iran, Iran made inroads.

The mission of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna, was to purify Islam. Relying on a strict interpretation of the Koran and the sayings of the prophet, the Muslim Brotherhood, like the takfiris, wants the return of the Caliphate. Today, with branches in every Muslim country in the world (often going by other names), the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest, most broad-based populist movement in the Arab peninsula. The Muslim Brotherhood is another of the cauldrons from which al Qaeda emerged.

Following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Saudi Arabia poured money into the Muslim Brotherhood, into its madrassas, charities, and fighters in the Afghan war against the Soviet army. This was part of the same Saudi effort to counter Khomeini’s revolution, which the Saudi royal family saw as a threat to its legitimacy. The fact that three decades later Iran had started to co-opt Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in spite of all of the Saudi money, was a marked defeat for Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s campaign continues today. It’s making a run at the Egyptian and the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhoods with persistent calls for uniting in the struggle against Israel. If Iran succeeds in truly turning a Sunni fundamentalist organization like this, it will have changed identities in the Middle East in ways we’ve never seen.

In approaching the Palestinians, the Iranians started cautiously. In the eighties, Iran had done well winning over small Palestinian factions based in Damascus and Beirut—the ones cut loose from the PLO by the 1982 Israeli invasion. But now Iran’s sights were on the PLO itself.

Iran knew it didn’t stand a chance of seizing the PLO by force, or by voting out Arafat democratically. On paper, the PLO’s legislative authority is the Palestine National Council, which is nominally democratic but in fact was in Arafat’s pocket. He was too wily to let an election slip away from him; the Iranians would have to break up the PLO piece by piece, right under Arafat’s feet.

They started by trying to win over the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, which would give them a foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. It didn’t take long to enlist the PIJ’s spiritual leader, Abd al Aziz Awda, who assured the Iranian emissary that PIJ cells in Gaza were ready to die for Palestine if they only had money and weapons. The Iranians were encouraged and gave him money, but the Revolutionary Guards needed to carefully vet Awdah and the other PIJ leaders, as it did its other proxies. The Guards were forced to move slowly—too slowly, as it turned out, for Tehran’s liking.

By early 1990, Ayatollah Khamenei, the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini, was frustrated Iran wasn’t making faster progress in the occupied Palestinian territories. Enlisting the exiled PIJ leadership in Damascus was fine, but that wasn’t getting Iran any closer to unseating Arafat, or taking Jerusalem.

In a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Khamenei ordered an “increased commitment” to winning over the Palestinians. He turned to the Revolutionary Guards’ representative and instructed him to form a Palestine Committee to coordinate a new Palestinian campaign. The Revolutionary Guards were to force the groups Iran was in touch with to work together: the PIJ; the Palestinian Struggle Front; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–the General Command; the Abu Nidal Organization.

Khamenei didn’t care that many of these Palestinian factions were avowedly secular, or even communist. Or that Abu Nidal’s organization was a bizarre cult led by an insane recluse. What he cared about was recruits—putting Iran’s hand on membership lists, the names of alienated young men ready to fight in a military struggle.

What Khamenei really wanted, though, was for the Revolutionary Guards to win over Hamas, with its 300,000 members. Hamas alone would give Iran the voice it wanted in Gaza.

But getting to Hamas wouldn’t be easy. Revolutionary Guard officers couldn’t travel to Gaza, where the Hamas leadership lived. Even getting to their members living outside the territories, in camps in Jordan, was difficult, because Iranian officials couldn’t easily travel to them without coming to the attention of the Jordanians.

Hamas was founded in 1987, its leadership coming almost exclusively from Gaza, from the same overcrowded refugee camps that spawned the PIJ. Like the PIJ, Hamas was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Its early funding came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. By the mid-1990s, Hamas had emerged as a unified, populist movement that could speak for the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza.

Iran knew that winning over Hamas would be tantamount to winning Gaza. But again, the problem was getting to Hamas’s leadership. Then, thanks to an epic blunder, the Israelis gave the Iranians the break they needed to turn Gaza into an Iranian base.

During the first intifada, in 1992, Israel decided it could put a quick end to it by expelling 415 members of Hamas’s leadership, shoving them across the border into Lebanon. Israel hoped that exiled in Lebanon the Hamas leaders would fade away. But what Israel didn’t anticipate was that Hezbollah would be at the border the same day the Hamas leaders crossed it, waiting with tents, clothes, and food. Or that within days a Revolutionary Guard officer would travel to the south to make sure the Hamas leaders didn’t lack for anything. Iran’s plan was clear from the start: Teach Hamas discipline, convince it to give up throwing stones, and turn it into a military and political force that would take Gaza.

It wasn’t long before the expelled Hamas leaders drifted north, to Beirut, where Hezbollah provided them apartments and small stipends. Some made it to the Biqa’ Valley for military training. In 2005, when I met one of the Hamas leaders expelled in 1992, he was still in the southern suburbs, living in a Hezbollah apartment and protected by Hezbollah guards.

For Iran, it was as if Hamas had dropped out of the sky into its lap, an act of divine intervention. Israel’s error was the only way the Iranians could ever have gotten to Palestinian internal exiles like Hamas—proving once again that forging an empire isn’t simply an act of will; it has as much to do with luck and the stupidity of the enemy.

The whole of the Arab world saw how Iran had come to Hamas’s rescue. Where was Saudi Arabia, the rich Arabs—America’s allies? No Saudi charity was in Lebanon to take care of the Palestinians. No Saudi diplomat went south to check on their welfare. In all fairness, southern Lebanon was Iran’s preserve. But that’s not the way the Muslim world saw it. With the Hamas blunder, Israel unwittingly had boosted Iran’s standing in the Middle East.

Today it’s still not clear whether Iran will manage to fully co-opt Hamas. There’s too much shadowy intrigue, not to mention Israeli disinformation, in the relationship. Still, what’s certain is that the ties forged in the early 1990s exist and are becoming stronger. Hamas is allied with Iran, taking Iranian money and guidance. In itself that’s an unprecedented shift in modern Middle Eastern history, almost as if the United States were to suddenly co-opt North Korea in an Asian security pact. It was definitely a turn in history no one was prepared for.

Hamas today threatens to be the third Iranian domino to fall, after Lebanon and southern Iraq. And the next ones after Hamas, the Iranians tell the faithful, will be Jordan and Egypt, two countries that currently recognize Israel. If Iran succeeds, Israel will find itself completely besieged—Israel’s second-worst fear after a nuclear attack.

One man who’s afraid that day is closer than we think is Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister of public security.

“Hamas has become the subcontractor of Iran,” Dichter told me during an interview in his unofficial office, in a place he asked me not to identify.

I had come to talk to Dichter about Israel’s success in stopping suicide bombing. But I also wanted to ask him about Iran. As head of Israel’s internal security service, the Israeli FBI, from 2000 to 2005, he knew more than any other Israeli about Iran’s influence on the Palestinians.

I watched as he knotted his tie, peering into a small mirror propped up on his desk. With his chiseled face and self-deprecating way of speaking, Dichter couldn’t be taken for anything other than a battle-hardened counterterrorism expert—not the self-appointed kind you find on American TV. He was a soldier’s soldier, and had a record to back that up: on his watch, Israel had beaten Palestinian terrorism, more or less putting an end to suicide bombings. It matters little whether it was thanks to Palestinian second thoughts, good police work, targeted killings, the controversial West Bank wall, or just plain intimidation. Dichter’s knowledge was hard-won.

And indeed, Israeli intelligence knows the Palestinians—their families, clans, factions, squabbles, the way they think. Israeli security listens in to all cellphones in the West Bank and Gaza, and the borders demarcating Palestinian areas are tightly monitored. The Israelis keep vast databases on the Palestinians, including the refugees living in camps all over the Middle East.

The Israelis’ job is made much easier by the Palestinians’ relative transparency. Unlike the Shia, whose telephone conversations are impenetrable to outsiders—remember taqqiyah, the Shia code of silence?—the Sunni Palestinians talk, gossip, and plead their case openly. They complain about injustice, their plight, how the world ignores them, how the Arabs have abandoned them. And they do it on the phone, on lines the Israelis are listening to. In the same conversations they give away details they shouldn’t, which is one of the key reasons Israel has been so effective against Palestinian terrorism.

But Iran, as Dichter knew better than anyone, is a different story. Thanks to Palestinian indiscretion, Israeli security was able to easily monitor Iran’s contact with Hamas, and when the Israelis found out that Iran and Hamas had made contact, they became alarmed. This was a problem they knew wouldn’t be easily containable, especially if the Hamas members expelled in 1992 found their way back into Gaza.

“It’s interesting,” Dichter told me, “because when Hamas first went to Iran in 2001, Iran refused. The Iranians wanted their relations to be similar to those they had with the PIJ—through Hezbollah. But Hamas refused; they didn’t want to be beneath Hezbollah.”

Dichter’s point was that Hamas didn’t want to be brought down to the same level as the PIJ, terms Iran agreed to. Enlisting Hamas was a huge catch for the Iranians, Dichter admitted, the foothold in the territories they had so long sought.

“Since 2001, we’ve seen an increase in the level of coordination and training by Iran,” Dichter went on. “We now have Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is a battalion of the Iranian army.” More important, he said, “Hamas has started to be built as another arm of Iran.” Just like Hezbollah.

Dichter was certain things were going to get worse. “The strategic aim of Hamas [and Iran] today is to take all capability that they have in the Gaza strip and transfer it to the West Bank,” he told me.

Dichter had no doubt about the damage the Palestinians, funded and organized by Iran, could do to Israel. Referring to Israeli losses during the second intifada expressed as a proportion of population, he said, “What we’ve lost is the equivalent of 45,000 Americans.”

And Israel holds Iran responsible? I asked.

“Yes.”

Dichter is a self-acknowledged hawk on Iran, but because he is the minister of public security, his word carries a lot of weight in both Tel Aviv and Washington. He’s convinced Iran is Israel’s main enemy, having turned the Palestinian question into an intractable problem.

There’s little chance Iran will give up the Palestinian cause easily, and it certainly won’t under Israeli threats. For one thing, the Iranians still are convinced they have to champion the Palestinians as an essential vehicle for dominion over the Arabs, to steal the fire of Sunni Arabs. It’s hardwired into the Iranian regime’s mind that every revolution or empire needs a cause bigger than itself. Rome, Napoleon, the Soviet Union each had one. Without the Palestinians, Iran is just another country with raw territorial ambition.

Westerners tend to think of the Middle East as a place where religions are set in blood and stone. Palestinians are Sunni, Persians are Shia, Iraqis are a mix of Sunni and Shia, and so on. The Iraq civil war seared into our consciousness the idea that there’s an unbridgeable divide between Sunni and Shia.

But sectarian divides do break down under the right circumstances, usually when there’s a common enemy like Israel or the United States. The spectacular rise of Nasrallah’s popularity in Nablus, for example, is due solely to Israel.

The fact that Saddam Hussein, a secular leader, was forgotten—his name nowhere to be heard in Nablus even just six months after his execution—is more evidence we’re living through the twilight of a secular Middle East. Thirty years ago, the Middle East was far more secular than it is now. As late as the 1993 Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat could count on overwhelming support in Nablus, even among the religiously conservative. Today the most powerful force there is Hezbollah, led by the warrior priest Hassan Nasrallah. After Arafat was buried, the Palestinians were left with two choices: surrender unconditionally or ally with Nasrallah in battle.

Most Americans looked at Saddam’s execution as a fitting end; he was the Arabs’ Hitler. The United States saw Iraq as another battle won in our long struggle against totalitarianism and fascism. But our fixation on dictators caused us to miss the rise of Nasrallah; the culture of resistance he represents, one born of humiliation and defeat; and the conviction that Islam and war alone will deliver the Middle East from occupation. Like the Israelis, the Americans are still fighting World War II, even in the teeth of a completely new set of facts.

Again, it was the 34-day war in 2006 that changed everything. Across the Middle East, a wave of sympathy followed Nasrallah’s victory in Lebanon—a wave in which Shia and Sunni joined together. Every time I go back to Damascus, Cairo, or Jordan, there are fewer bars and restaurants serving liquor, in deference to Islamic law. Muslim beliefs are taking tighter hold of the Middle East. The state is withering away, giving ground to a stateless, powerful, and cross-sectarian movement inspired by Nasrallah.

All this points to another Iranian learning curve. The first was their transition from radicals to pragmatists, learned from lessons on the ground in Lebanon. Iran abandoned terrorism for a more classic military struggle; the anarchists turned Machiavellian statesmen.

But there’s another arc Iran traveled: It coalesced its sympathizers from rigid, exclusionary sectarian factions into a united Islamic front, unlike anything that has been achieved in Islam’s history since the Crusades. By co-opting two radical Sunni organizations, PIJ and Hamas, Iran has taken a big step in unifying Muslims. An out-and-out civil war in Iraq, Shia against Sunni, or even one in the Gulf or Lebanon could undo Iran’s progress. But until then we should count on the Iranians holding on tight to the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian domino hasn’t tipped over just yet, in the sense that Lebanon and Iraq have. But it’s on its way. And once Iran has successfully co-opted Palestinians, what’s to keep them from doing the same in Jordan and Egypt, overcoming sectarian differences? If there’s a full-on war between the Palestinians and Israel, Jordan and Egypt will find it almost impossible not to fight under Iran’s banner. In fact, they’ve already started.

Jordan, for example, has a majority Palestinian population, many of whom live in refugee camps. Historically, most Palestinians living in Jordan were loyal to Yasser Arafat. But after Arafat’s death in 2004, and with Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006 and the violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Hamas has recruited more and more of Arafat’s onetime followers among the Palestinians in Jordan. They’re more radicalized than ever, more susceptible to Iran’s influence.

Much of Iran’s influence passes through Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, which goes by the name the Islamic Action Front, and whose platform is very much like Iran’s: free the West Bank, lift the Israeli embargo on Gaza, create an Islamic state in Palestine. The largest opposition party, the Islamic Action Front was at one point so powerful in Jordan, it threatened to win a plurality of the vote in free and fair elections—a nightmare that frightened the Jordanian government into restricting its election laws for the November 20, 2007, parliamentary vote. The Islamic Action Front’s vote count was set back, but the Iranians see that as temporary.

And this wasn’t the Iranians’ only entrée into Jordan. Another came clandestinely through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–the General Command. The PFLP–GC was nominally under the thumb of Syria, but Damascus never had enough money to keep it going, and after 1982 a large part of it went to work for Iran.

The PFLP–GC helped the Iranians carry out terrorist attacks in the mid-eighties. Some still believe Iran carried out the mid-flight bombing of Pan Am 103 in December 1988 with its help. But by 1996, Iran had abandoned terrorism, and it needed the PFLP–GC to expand Iranian political influence.

Iran used the PFLP–GC to recruit from other Palestinian factions in Jordan’s refugee camps. Those recruits came to Lebanon for training, and returned to Jordan to set up the core of a new military force. The PFLP–GC also helped Iran establish Jordanian Hezbollah, a clandestine organization. Jordanian Hezbollah didn’t have a visible effect, but just getting a toehold in Jordan was enough to convince the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence to keep funding it.

As its pool of Palestinian recruits increases, Iran comes ever closer to provoking a Palestinian uprising, overthrowing the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—America’s most steadfast Arab ally in the war on terrorism—and encircling and showering Israel with rockets. It will be poised to shell Israel into extinction.

But will it?

In uniting Sunni and Shia, Iran achieves the universality required by all successful revolutions. As more and more Muslims accept Iran as a protective power, Iran will become a truly serious threat to Israel, even without a nuclear bomb. The question then becomes whether Iran truly intends to destroy Israel.

This is doubtful. President Ahmadinejad’s threats aside, Iran has shown a history of acting pragmatically. In its relentless push toward winning Lebanon, the Gulf States, and the Palestinians, the Iranians have acted more rationally and consistently than the United States has. The Iranians have pulled back from confrontation with the United States in Iraq. They have avoided confrontation with the U.S. Navy in the Gulf. And they have restrained Hezbollah from being dragged into a civil war in Lebanon.

It’s a small detail, but the Iranians are also careful with their money. They haven’t sprayed money all across the Middle East, providing arms and cash to shadowy fighters who would ultimately turn on them and wreak havoc worldwide, as the Saudis and Americans did during the Afghan War against the Soviets. And the Revolutionary Guards have established a reputation for being in-corruptible. In 1988, when they caught the head of an obscure Palestinian organization stealing money from a student aid program, they very publicly cut off the organization’s funding.

For the last fifteen years, Iran has demonstrated a consistent, coherent strategy: It tests its strategy, vets its proxies, judges who is serious and who isn’t, and makes plans accordingly. Whereas the United States, especially under George W. Bush, threw money at untested and unreliable exiles, governments, and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, who mostly pocketed it. The money is beyond auditing, and no one knows how much ended up in the hands of America’s enemies.

Iran knows it is winning. It knows one day the United States must come to terms with that reality. Instead of falling back on the out-dated, incorrect notion that Iranians are a riot of mad, scowling, turban-wearing mullahs, the West needs to realize the Iranians are potentially partners in a Palestinian settlement. But this can only be determined through serious engagement.

In any case, Iran definitely knows that a nuclear confrontation with Israel isn’t winnable. The Iranians know that Israel would massively retaliate with their own nuclear weapons, and everything Iran has worked so hard to win would be lost.