Iranians long ago came to terms with the reality of repression and corruption at home. Along the way, they also ignored the burden of economic sanctions inflicted by world leaders who routinely said they cared for their rights. The people of Iran have found their own ways to navigate the vertiginous labyrinth of survival in the face of frequent betrayals.
When Israel launched unprovoked military strikes on Iran on June 13, the scenes of incineration and destruction in Tehran, Tabriz, Yazd and Kermanshah were marketed as a gift of freedom. On the eve of the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the “proud people of Iran” that their path to liberty was being cleared: “This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard.”
But the people, whose resilience has been tested in multiple ways over recent decades, were not ready to countenance the sight of foreign fighter jets, bombers and unmanned aerial vehicles piercing their country’s airspace and dropping explosives at will. And the military operation that was said to be about targeting nuclear sites soon mutated into a full-scale war.
In 12 days, 935 Iranians were killed. The tally includes an undergraduate student of photography, a 24-year-old poet, a 17-year-old tae kwon do athlete and a renowned painter. When Netanyahu pronounced the Persian words “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” in his video message to invoke the popular motto of the 2022 uprising, his supporters hardly expected to see wanton violence unleashed in the name of “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
But even the diasporic Iranians who had pinned their hopes on Operation Rising Lion to do wonders and restore Iran’s royal grandeur found it daunting to try to rationalize people in their ancestral homeland being killed while they, reveling in the comfort of their Los Angeles and Beverly Hills villas, chatted about regime change.
At the beginning of the conflict, a trend gaining momentum on Persian social media, amplified by pro-Netanyahu handles, was geared toward the genealogy of the Iranian victims. As soon as a civilian casualty was identified, bots attempted to find a namesake for the deceased in the Iranian government to suggest they were killed because of some nefarious ties with “the regime.”
An early example was Parnia Abbasi, a young poet whose life was cut short when an airstrike on Tehran’s iconic Sattarkhan neighborhood razed multiple buildings to the ground. The daughter of a retired banker and a teacher, her father, it was widely alleged, was Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and one of the high-profile fatalities of the first day of the attacks.
Notwithstanding the distinct variation in their last names, which in Abbasi-Davani’s case even signifies his city of origin, this practice of misrepresentation continued, even while journalists sought to share accurate information and chronicle the stories of Iranians under fire. The government in Tehran had become so inexcusable and unpleasant that any potential link to it, however tenuous, would be enough to deny its perceived associates their humanity.
Shortly before the announcement of a ceasefire deal on June 23, Israel carried out airstrikes on Tehran’s Evin Prison, an attack that the United Nations human rights office described as a “grave breach of international humanitarian law.” Initially, the dominant talking point used by right-wing Iranian influencers and other pro-war outlets was that facilitating a prisoner break lay at the heart of the attack. When it became known that at least 79 people were killed in the operation, the narrative reverted to painting the deceased as having been government affiliates.
Bita Mousavi, a noted culture and arts journalist, lost her brother, sister-in-law and nephew in an Israeli airstrike on Tehran’s Shariati neighborhood on June 15. The three bodies were crushed under the weight of the debris, and only a DNA test could verify their identities. At the height of her grief, she had to spend hours on social media responding to violent messages casting doubt on the authenticity of her family ties.
“The family lived near a police station in Tehran, and when the police office was struck, their house collapsed and three of the four family members were killed,” said Ameneh Mousavi, a politics reporter with Tejarat News, who has been friends with Bita for several years and who spoke to New Lines about her colleague’s ordeal. “A wave of solidarity emerged to support her, but at the same time, she was harassed on social media by people who claimed her family members had government ties,” she said.
“The spate of online attacks while she was grieving was so significant that she had to delete all the posts where she had explained her brother and his family were not government-linked,” Mousavi added, pointing me to her friend’s Instagram page, where the Tehran-based journalist had been consistently writing in support of humanitarian causes and dissidents.
As far back as 2022, Bita had even imperiled her career by congratulating the exiled actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi for winning an award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Ebrahimi’s work is banned in Iran, and the media were advised against publishing her name and picture. Around the same time, Bita had joined a group of actors and artists signing a petition to denounce the rise of violence against women in the Iranian visual arts scene.
Whether the suspicion around the civilians who were killed was real or part of a structured plan to trivialize Iranian lives in anticipation of the next stages of a broader conflict is difficult to tell. Some Israeli sources say the war effort had been in the making since Donald Trump won the November 2024 presidential election. Preparations for the psychological operation could have been part of that endeavor.
What can be confirmed with the benefit of hindsight is that conjuring ties between the victims and Iran’s military or intelligence institutions served as a workaround to downplay the aggression, deflecting the responsibility away from Israel when it contravened the U.N. Charter. When Netanyahu initiated the attacks, the nuclear talks that were underway between Tehran and Washington, with a next round scheduled for June 15, unraveled as a result.
But what was clearly not accidental was the silent consensus among NATO and European leaders that the violation of Iran’s sovereignty and the loss of civilian life were secondary to concerns around hypothetical nuclear proliferation. Excited pundits were convinced the long-awaited overthrow of the Islamic Republic was within reach. In the ensuing frenzy, that promise eclipsed the suffering of those who were supposed to be the recipients of a democratizing putsch.
Hamid, a photographer in the city of Rasht who preferred to use a pseudonym over concerns for his safety, said that, long before the war broke out, he was consistently “heartbroken by the government’s culture of corruption and lawlessness.” But the new reality of foreign intervention gave him an alternative perspective — especially after Rasht became one of the cities that experienced limited airstrikes. “I and many of my friends realized that things could get much worse, and we also learned that we should lower our expectations of other countries as well as Iranians outside the country to do us any favors,” he told New Lines.
“If I want to speak in more candid terms, I’d say it’s a vulture-like attitude to expect the people of Iran to pay a huge price so that a chaos happens, and then some people or groups come to impose themselves on everyone,” he said, referring to contenders for power in a post-Islamic Republic scenario. He added that it is now highly likely that the Iranian government exploits its military setbacks in the war to retaliate against ordinary citizens or dissidents at home.
The U.N. continues to refer to Israel as an “occupying power,” and Iranians, no matter how antithetical their views are to domestic authoritarianism, have no stomach for foreign occupation. They have learned the hard way that intervention by external actors — including the U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored coup that unseated their democratically elected prime minister in 1953 — often backfires without yielding democracy.
Kia Ekbatan is a 58-year-old retired teacher and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. He said one of the notable effects of the war was the people of Iran coalescing around the territorial integrity and sovereignty of their country, despite their unhappiness with the theocratic government.
“In an incursion by the foreigners, the people of Iran put aside their differences and stood by the idea of Iran,” he told New Lines. “But this doesn’t mean that popular support for Iran should be interpreted as support for the Islamic Republic. With the state’s hardcore attitudes and these turbulent economic circumstances, any support can be quite fragile.”
Voices in the Iranian diaspora were also not monolithically pro-war, despite appearances at the outset. The pro-monarchy groups that cheered for Israel, hoping that its campaign could pave the way for former crown prince Reza Pahlavi to reclaim the throne of his late father, were the most visible stakeholders. Their activism culminated in street protests and familiar social media fights. It was their moment.
But in the United States, where more than 540,000 people of Iranian ancestry have been documented by the Census Bureau, the spectrum of views expressed, often rejecting war, was striking. In most cases, people were surprised at the mainstream media failing to deliver on their essential mission, including reporting on the horrors of the conflict and the individual stories of Iranians killed by Israel.
A young Iranian-American lecturer in political geography at a California university was on the phone with their friend in the city of Karaj as she marked her 30th birthday on June 18. It was an intimate gathering of family members amid a barrage of projectiles slicing through the night sky.
“With a stifled cry in her voice, she told me, ‘Pray for us to be released one day,’ and what she said really moved me,” the professor told New Lines, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And she said she wasn’t happy that those outside Iran thought it would be okay to make decisions for the people of Iran living in their own country.”
The taking away of Iranians’ autonomy while the international community is actively talking about their future has historical resonances. For a nation that has never been colonized but has endured the pains of foreign boots on its soil, the division of large swaths of its territory through imperial treaties, and world powers micromanaging its politics, the signs these days are ominous. When the idea of Europe’s “dirty work” being done by Israel was openly stated by the German chancellor, more Iranians got wind of what was underway.
“The Israeli surprise attack on Iran, in the middle of U.S.-Iran talks over Iran’s nuclear program, received little international condemnation because the West has a very complex relationship with Israel,” said Shahram Akbarzadeh, professor of Middle East politics at Australia’s Deakin University. “Many Western powers, top among them Germany, carry historical guilt for what happened to Jews. The awful experience of the Holocaust has left a lasting stain on European conscience, and Israel is very good at leveraging that guilt by pointing to Iran as an existential threat,” he told New Lines.
Those who shared their thoughts with me believed that it was only the abysmal standing of the Iranian government in the world that enabled the declaration of war by Israel to remain unchecked, resulting in substantial civilian casualties. Of those who were killed or sustained damage to their properties and businesses, many were artists, writers, students, philanthropists, activists and others who would normally be considered the engines of civil society.
Now, it is unclear if what has happened will precipitate the alleged regime change project or entrench the existing undemocratic structure. So far, three people have been executed on charges of espionage for Israel and hundreds of arrests have been made as the parliament has ratified a reinforced version of the espionage law. It remains to be seen if the space for democratic change and debate will shrink further.
“This recent bombing, first by Israel and then by the U.S., suggests that they had long ago abandoned Iran for their own interests,” said Persis Karim, a professor of comparative and world literature at San Francisco State University. “The Iranian people are caught between a rock and a hard place, persecuted and abused by their own government but also treated so poorly by the international community — in terms of no recognition of how this bombing affects them, their economy, their future,” she told New Lines.
Karim has been a director of the university’s Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, which ceased its operations as of June 30. She believes those in the Iranian expatriate community advocating for regime change through a military expedition are “out of touch with the realities of Iran and of what the Iranian people want.”
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