Pro-Palestinian protesters are suddenly supporting Iran. They might want to talk to some Palestinians

Protesters in Seoul demonstrate against the U.S. attacks on Iran during a protest against in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza on June 22. Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman June 25, 2025

There’s a photo floating around social media of a blonde woman at an anti-war rally last week in London, wearing a keffiyeh and holding up a photo, as if in solidarity, of the Iranian news anchor who fled her TV studio under Israeli attack.

The woman seems earnest, committed — and delusional. Whom, exactly, does she think she’s helping by taking to the streets to advocate for the essential rights of Iranian state TV?

Ongoing protests against Israel’s presence in Gaza, which even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called “indiscriminate, unrestrained and brutal,” are justified. And I understand, too, why a majority of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran — these things can end badly, and it’s unlikely that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, or its interests abroad.

But what I truly don’t understand is the sloppy morality that conflates legitimate concerns for Palestinian lives with the defense of Iran’s despicable regime.

It is a clear and well-established fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran oppresses and tortures its own people. It underwrote the slaughter of some 500,000 Syrians, helped destroy civil society in Lebanon, and gives substantial funds and support to Hamas, perpetrators of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that precipitated the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.

Now, following Trump’s declaration of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, the Iranian regime is turning its firepower on its own people.

In one city it arrested 115 people, accusing them of espionage on behalf of Israel. On Monday, it executed a well-known regime critic, Mohammad Amin Mahdavi Shayesteh, charging him with spying for Israel. Unable to defeat the Zionist entity, the regime will now lash out at its own defenseless citizens.

And yet not a few Westerners, in the streets of England, Australia and New York, are rising up to defend it. Many of the 300,000 people who marched against the attack on Iran held up placards featuring the face of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the words, “Choose the Right Side of History”

“Western, liberal, ‘woke’ feminists, clueless about the brutal reality in our country, consistently stand with our oppressors under the delusion of saviorism,” Sana Ebrahimi, an Iranian-born doctoral candidate, posted to X in response to the photo. “They have no understanding of the decades of humiliation, violence, and systemic oppression we’ve endured under the Islamic Republic.”

“Well-meaning but misguided progressives in the West have swallowed the Islamic Republic’s propaganda,” the Iranian-born actress Nazanin Boniadi added on her X account. “Millions of Iranians would trade places with you in a heartbeat — while you defend their oppressors.”

For 48 years Iran’s totalitarian regime has tried to position itself as the savior of the Palestinians, a cynical way to commandeer their country’s resources and lock it in a perpetual battle that upholds their repressive rule. A war such like that, in a quote immortalized by the film adaptation of 1984, “is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

That these Western protesters should fall for it, marching for the Islamic Republic as if it has the same moral claims as starving children in Gaza, is especially galling, considering Palestinians themselves want nothing to do with Iran’s so-called support.

Last year, when Khamenei praised the Oct. 7 attacks, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shot back that the Palestinians “do not need wars that do not serve their ambitions for freedom and independence.”

So let’s review. If Palestinian leaders reject Iran’s murderous meddling, and brave Iranians inside and outside the country oppose the regime’s authoritarian brutality, why exactly are Western protesters chanting and waving placards in support of it?

The kindest possible excuse is that street protests are crude platforms, and “Free Palestine, Stop the Bombing and By the Way Down with the Iranian Regime” is just too much to fit on a poster board.

But that gives these protesters credit they don’t deserve for even a modicum of sophistication. Their logic is simple, and simply misguided: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The same people who people shout, “By any means necessary”; refuse to acknowledge the massacres and rapes that took place on Oct. 7, 2023; refuse to call hostages “hostages”; and see Hamas as “freedom fighters” — their twisted moral compass points toward Iran as a liberator, victim and savior.

“Don’t let anybody lie to you and tell you it’s just a minority” of these protesters that see Gaza and Iran as joined in unjust victimhood, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-born policy analyst, said last week at an event in Beverly Hills sponsored by the Israel Policy Forum. “It’s mainstream. Some people will be outright pro-Hamas. Some people will say, ‘Well, resistance is justified,’ or ‘Israel doesn’t leave them any choice.’”

Meanwhile, a Gaza mother, who has lost six family members to Israeli bombs, told the Christian Science Monitor that she has no tears left for Iran.

“Iran doesn’t strike Israel for our interest. It does it for their own; no one is doing anything for us,” she said.

Paradoxically, Israel’s strikes against Iran are actually those with the greatest chance of helping Palestinians — because weakening Iran’s leaders and disrupting their military and intelligence networks will weaken their proxy armies, including Hamas, which continues to be brutal toward Palestinians in Gaza even amid Israel’s onslaught.

Which is why, beginning in late May, thousands of Gaza residents started taking to the streets to protest Hamas. This is not a pro-Israel movement. But it reflects the sentiments of a population that has experienced firsthand the death and destruction that Hamas and its funders in Tehran have brought to the strip. I’ve scanned their banners and read the translations of their chants. No one is waving a photo of the ayatollah. And no one is cheering for Iran.