The fallout from Israel’s war of aggression on Iran has left us at CPT worried about the safety of our teams in Iraqi Kurdistan and Al-Khalil/Hebron. In the West Bank, Palestinians bear the brunt. Their homes are being seized and turned into military outposts which, in the team’s words, “turns Palestinian civilians into human shields.”
The West has returned to its mantra: Israel has a right to defend itself. CPT Palestine urgently reminds us that, with the world’s gaze averted, Israel has once again turned tanks on Gazans standing in food lines—committing some of the genocide’s worst massacres.
I’m again caught in that maddening, incapacitating feeling—that the West is deaf to reason, that it inverts cause and effect, distorts our lived experience, and denies its own historic complicity in everything that’s come to pass.
I’ve spent my whole life anticipating the bombardment of Iran. My sister and I grew up in the shadow of Khomeini. Our dad came to Britain as a student in 1975 and watched the ’79 Revolution from afar. We learned about the horrors of the Iranian state—its televised trials and executions—and saw the fear with which our father’s generation still guarded their words, a continent away.
But we also knew our history: that this started in 1953, with the CIA and MI6 coup d’état against Iran’s first and last freely elected government. Mossadegh had nationalized Iranian oil and taken it out of the hands of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (rebranded today as British Petroleum).
The US and the UK reinstalled a brutal Shah. Some of our elders now remember him nostalgically, willing his dynasty’s return. He crushed Iran’s liberation movements—with Israeli, British, and American support—forcing them underground, keeping them so weak that when the revolution arrived the Ayatollahs stole the victory.
My uncle, who went through things he still can’t speak about, hasn’t been the same since he came home from the eight-year war with Iraq—when the US sponsored Saddam to break post-revolutionary Iran. The year I was born, the US shot down an Iranian passenger flight; I didn’t really believe my dad when he told me that story: nobody else seemed to remember.
We dream of the day the next revolution allows us to return and our cousins to thrive. But not like this.
No matter how we feel about the Ayatollahs, we know Iran has been held to a different standard—moralized by those blind to their own brutalities, backed into endless outward-facing antagonism, only further whetting its paranoid appetite.
War hawks and liberal interventionists hijack our liberation struggles, using them as evidence of “Islamofascism”—a one-dimensional diagnosis that serves a self-absolving, Allied-era, warpath righteousness. They don’t give a damn whether Iranians stand on their own feet. Instead, they promote illegitimate “alternative governments in exile.” Each intervention causes clampdown in Iran, deferring homegrown liberation by another decade.
Iranians face an impossible choice: keep silent so as not to feed the conquerors, or retreat into defensive, survivalist nationalism—with all the dangers that brings to Iran’s Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, and Afghans.
When I was growing up, the Iranian case had not been fully integrated into the broader narrative of Western imperialism and racism. Too many of those who left the country fell into the trap of fuelling the case for war. Some, following the edict that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, back Israel to the hilt.
But a new generation of Iranians in the diaspora, having witnessed the Gaza genocide’s justificatory tactics—its slander, distraction, and historical revisionism—has learned how to navigate traps. They see affinity in the Palestinian struggle, and avoid the pitfalls in pursuit broader truths—fighting two fronts at once.
