ABSTRACT
Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was the first foreign leader to visit Iran shortly after the revolution in February 1979. He was greeted by the Iranian revolutionaries as a national hero, he received the keys of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran, and, in a symbolical gesture, Iranian revolutionaries raised the Palestinian flag on the premises that still serves as the Palestinian embassy today. However, the honeymoon between Arafat and the Islamic Republic of Iran was short-lived. The objective of this chapter is to understand the shift in Iran-PLO relations and to investigate how the Islamic Republic engineered its pro-Palestinian policies during the first decade of the revolution despite its icy relations with the PLO’s leadership.
