Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have blamed Iran for Israel's security problems, despite the country's ongoing socio-economic polarization, political and judicial crises, and settlers' pogroms in the West Bank. Every Palestinian attack on Israelis is preceded by Israeli army raids or settler attacks on Palestinian communities, and reports indicate that this year is the most violent in the West Bank in nearly two decades. The UN has described the violence as a "concerning trend" attributed to a "growing sense of despair about the future."

The UN humanitarian agency, OCHA, had similar findings. It said that nearly 600 settler-related ‘incidents’ were reported in the Occupied Territories in the first six months of 2023. Settler attacks have resulted in “Palestinian casualties, property damage or both.”

However, Netanyahu and Gallant are diverting attention from the ongoing human rights violations in Palestine by blaming Iran for the supposed threat.

For Netanyahu, blaming Iran allows him to stoke the fire of instability in the Middle East, unite all Israelis behind their supposed defender and avoid any accountability for the ongoing human rights violations in Palestine.

As for Gallant, blaming Iran elevates the military and all branches of intelligence services; instead of being seen as failing to stop homegrown Palestinian struggle, he wants to paint an alternative image of a heroic army fighting an ‘existential threat’ hatched elsewhere.

This is not a simple case of lacking self-awareness, but a deliberate diversion of the actual problem: the Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Throughout the years, Israel has insisted that Palestinians are not political actors capable of making their own collective decisions, and that some bogeymen elsewhere – the Arabs, the Iranians, the communists, the Islamists, and so on … – are to blame.

But Tel Aviv is wrong. For Israel to understand the reasons behind the growing Palestinian resistance in all of its forms, it needs to look at the devastated refugee camps of Jenin, Balata and Nur Shams – not Tehran – for the answers.