Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

January 28, 2026

How Palestinian Terrorists Helped Pave the Way for Islamic Iran

A half-century-long alliance.

Not only has the anti-Israel movement—so eager to speak of human rights and compassion for the suffering—expressed no sympathy for Iranians being murdered, maimed, and tortured by their government, but its leaders have even labeled the protesters “Zionist stooges” and wished the Islamic Republic well. This position, Kyle Orton writes, is “entirely consistent” and grounded in history. Telling a complex story involving the KGB, Lebanese militants, a Libyan dictator, and a tangled web of Middle Eastern terrorists, Orton traces the close links between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Shiite radicals who in 1979 overthrew the shah and established the current regime. 

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