The USA is gearing up for war with Iran. I’ve anticipated this war all my life, but I didn’t expect to feel quite so disoriented when it came. Another Iranian friend said he doesn’t know how to explain all this to his son, told him to “just leave it”, and confessed to having disengaged. The instinct to retreat feels widespread.
Since December’s nationwide protests and January’s massacres, it’s been on my mind to write something in this bulletin about what’s going on in Iran. I’ve been putting it off. There are things I just don’t understand. Lacking the language and having never lived there, it’s hard to know who the actors on the ground are and what social forces are at play. It unfolds on social media, where I watch waves of contextless, brutal clips from my kitchen, trying to make sense of how the early days, full of possibility, transformed into something darker. My solidarity is with those on Iran’s streets and in the prisons.
Many have done their best to mystify this moment. To take any position at all invites recrimination from other camps in the diaspora and in internationalist circles. If you insist on the West’s historical and ongoing aggression, you risk the charge of “regime apologism”; insist on the Iranian state’s brutality and you’ll be branded an “imperialist” by a small but vocal faction of anti-Zionists. Meanwhile, many of those who want their King of Persia to return have aligned themselves with the Israeli state and other ethno-nationalists in Europe and North America. It’s jarring to see them hitch Iran’s freedom to the Israeli flag and pit it against the Palestinian cause. It’s hard to swallow, too, when former allies take this as evidence that Iran’s bid for freedom is simply an Israeli plot.
When I was younger, I envied the strength of Palestine’s international solidarity movement. Iran didn’t have such a clear path onward, and we had comparatively few outspoken elders to guide us. Now I recognize how much work it took in the diaspora to build such infrastructure. Once, much more inexperienced, I came across a group canvassing for signatures against executions in Iran and added my name to the call. When the organizers called the house my dad answered, then slammed the phone down. “You don’t know who they are”, he told me. And though his instincts were correct, the message was: don’t get involved. That caution, born of repression and muddy waters, still limits my ability to move.
The terrain is unforgiving. To navigate the propaganda requires making peace with inevitable missteps. But if we cannot distinguish bad faith from error, we will see every misstep as betrayal. This moment requires the generosity of honest argument, realignment, and return.
