Today’s London Times has an important piece on the Hamas-Iran connection. According to the report, Hamas has been sending its best minds to train in Tehran alongside the Revolutionary Guard for more than two years now. In addition, 650 Hamas fighters have trained in Syria “under instructors who learnt their techniques in Iran.” The Hamas commander interviewed also says that they are deliberately modeling themselves on Hezbollah, and are constantly upgrading their forces, munitions, and weapons. “They come home with more abilities that we need,” he says, “such as high-tech capabilities, knowledge about land mines and rockets, sniping, and fighting tactics like the ones used by Hezbollah, when they were able to come out of tunnels from behind the Israelis and attack them successfully.”

So let’s keep our eyes on the picture as it has emerged. The image of Hamas as just another Palestinian resistance group is simply wrong. Maybe that is what many of its followers are thinking when they launch those Kassam missiles at apartment buildings and kindergartens. But as I have said in the past, from a wider strategic perspective (and just like Hezbollah), Hamas functions as an arm of Iran. It exists so that there will be another front against Israel‘s Western flank, to parallel the one up north. The group hides behind its statelessness, taking no responsibility and suffering little sanction in terms of international treaties. Hezbollah, at least, is part of an actual state. And even if Lebanon is not currently held accountable for the group’s actions at all, at least one can hope for some kind of Lebanese anti-Hezbollah effort in the future, maybe even through force of arms. But Hamas is a non-state inside another non-state, distancing it even further from international standards. The Palestinian Authority, even when it had the power to kill Hamas off, never showed much interest in doing so. Hamas lives and breathes in the lacunae of international law. And it does so at the behest of Iran.

According to the Times piece, Iran’s main goal right now is to trouble the Israelis so much with different kinds of terror–shootings, missiles, mass rock-throwings, and so forth–that Israel will have no mind to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Given how much progress Iran seems to be making on the bomb, and how distracted the Americans are right now with the elections, let us hope that the stratagem fails.