Islamists play the 'Israel' card the same way politicians and wack-job groups in the US play the race card.
" For the past 500 years, the region was called Arabistan by Persian rulers (signifying the territory’s Arab character). The central government changed the territory’s name to Khuzestan in 1936. Currently, Al-Ahwaz or Khuzestan is an area of 69,000 sq kilometres, which lies between South western Iran, bordering also Iraq, Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf.
(snipped from the home page of the link for the article)
http://www.ahwaz.org.uk/about.html
It looks like these guys are probably the same group as the Iraqi Shia, but who were on the wrong side of the British-imposed borders drawn post-WWI....they did the same thing to the Kurds, but split them 3 ways.