The religious authority H.E. Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah was asked this question in his weekly seminar:

As the war goes on in Iraq , the Israelis continue to massacre Palestinians with the aim, despite all the British and American talk of a “new road map for peace”, of putting the Palestinian cause on the shelf. How do you see the future of the Palestinian cause as it becomes increasingly obscured by the fog of the Iraq war?

Answer:

1. As the current American administration is totally under the influence of Sharon it would never contemplate pressurizing the latter. Rather, it would exert further pressure on the Palestinians and force them to accept Israeli amendments to the so-called “Road map for peace”, thus making it a totally Israeli plan that would then be presented to the Arabs formulated in the most optimistic possible way.

2. The American administration has already declared that it understands Israeli reservations regarding the “Road Map for Peace”. That is why they have decided to coerce, override and eventually steer the committee of four (UN, EU, Russia and the USA) in the direction of the Israelis choosing, as it did with the UN Security Council over the issue of Iraq. This, and that the Israeli generals believe that a strategic threat to the Israelis will have been eliminated, explains the Israelis’ enthusiasm for the current war against Iraq.

This indicates that there is in fact a kind of Israeli collaboration in the war against Iraq as it has been confirmed that Israel has taken part in the planning and in the actual participation of this war.

3. I have said from the beginning that Palestinian cause will be the biggest loser of this war, and I am afraid that the developments of the war will be used to exert more pressure on the Arabs and Palestinians. They will all be dealt with as the defeated party just as in the aftermath of the Kuwait invasion or the war in Afghanistan.

4. That is why I say to all Palestinians at this very difficult stage that they must remain conscious of the war on their own front. I call on them to work as a unified political unit in order to thwart the plans that America will try to impose on them in the current state of chaos for we still believe that the Palestinians’ cause is the major cause. Palestinian steadfastness and confrontation could not only undermine American plans but also strengthen the Arabs and Muslims as a whole.