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Two Peoples, One Struggle. The Green Movement and Palestinian Liberation
Abstract
Iranians before and after the Iranian Revolution have identified and sympathized with the struggle in Palestine. In the 1970s, for example, leftist Iranian guerrillas bombed Israeli targets in Iran both in solidarity with the Palestinians and to defy their monarch’s proximity to the Israelis. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic situated the emancipation of Palestine at the core of its ideology and foreign policy. In other words, the legitimacy of the Palestinian movement amongst revolutionary circles in the 1970s was afforded state sanction in the post-revolutionary period. That state sanction amounted to the government raising an entire generation after the revolution with the tenets of Palestinian liberation, the changing of the aesthetic landscape of the country, the establishment of Jerusalem Day, and much more. In 2009, a generation of Iranian youth raised under the authority and ideology of the Islamic government negated such legitimated Palestine-centered discourse in order to condemn that very state. The slogan “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life is only for Iran” (na ghazzeh, na lobn?n, j?nam fad?’-ye ?r?n) on Jerusalem Day (September 18, 2009) is well-documented and known. What is less known and more strategic, however, is how certain segments within the uprising did not negate Palestine as a symbol, but co-opted it to legitimate their uprising and castigate the government. They equated themselves with the legitimacy of the oppressed Palestinians, and the Iranian state with the occupation of power akin to Israel. The paper will outline how pre- and post-revolutionary Iranians heralded Palestine as a political symbol of monumental significance, and that history is important because it gives that very symbol tremendous weight and meaning in the Iranian milieu. The paper will then proceed to chronicle how the Green Movement harnessed this weight and meaning when it appropriated the state’s hegemonic discursive control of Palestine as a symbol, and wielded it with all its emotive power against the Iranian state in 2009.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Arab-Israeli Conflict