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Iran Is at the Center of Regional Instability, Not the Palestinians
(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Gary Cohen - In the Guardian last week, Nesrine Malik argued that everything now convulsing the Middle East flows from a single "original sin" - Israel and the plight of the Palestinians. But this argument does not withstand even the most basic scrutiny. The organizing force at the center of regional instability is not the Palestinians. It never has been. The inconvenient truth, for those who advance this view, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the IRGC, are driving instability in the region and further afield. It is their extremist revolutionary ideology, regional ambitions, and decades-long investment in building, funding and directing a network of proxies to project Iranian power, encircle, threaten and ultimately destroy the state of Israel, intimidate its neighbors, and challenge the West. The Iranian regime has been engaged in the systematic repression and slaughter of its own people. Tens of thousands of Iranians have been killed in brutal crackdowns, shot in the streets, arrested, tortured, mutilated, disappeared or executed. Victims' families are intimidated into silence. These atrocities have nothing whatsoever to do with Gaza or the West Bank. The same regime slaughtering its own people and denying them the most basic freedoms, pours vast resources into Hamas, Hizbullah, the Houthis, and every other proxy willing to take up arms against Israel. When Iranians chant "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran," they are rejecting the obsession with the annihilation of Israel, and the cynical diversion of their country's wealth and future into wars that serve no one but the regime.