Emily Schrader
Ynet News, Mar. 10, 2023
“If Arafat’s welcome in the days after the fall of the Shah is any indicator, the terror ties between Tehran and the PLO were ironclad. Arafat was greeted by IRGC members upon his arrival, along with 59 of his companions, and he was escorted by the son of the ayatollah himself throughout his visit.”
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, also called Islamic Revolution, Palestinian leaders have cozied up to Iran’s ayatollahs. As protests and calls for regime change continue to echo throughout the world stemming from Iran for over six months continuously, the Palestinians’ long and sordid ties with the Islamic Republic are coming to light more than ever before.
Going back to 1979, just days after the Islamic Revolution succeeded in overthrowing the Shah, Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), flew to Iran to celebrate it, even calling Iran his “home.” He was escorted by none other than the Iranian Air Force, newly allied with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and received a hero’s welcome.
The ties between the PLO and the ayatollahs in fact pre-date the Islamic Revolution as the PLO had assisted in anti-Shah activities for some time, with the home base for such “revolutionaries” being Lebanon in the 1970s.
The PLO assisted both the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), as well as pro-Khomeini revolutionaries, the most notable of which was Mohammad Montazeri, a terrorist with a leading role in developing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) post-revolution. Montazeri also explicitly asked Arafat to send PLO terrorists to Iran to help train the IRGC post-revolution.
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