Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. The US and Israel began a joint strike on Iran on February 28th. On the same day, the US hit a girls’ elementary school, killing more than 180, the vast majority of them children. That day, the leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, was also assassinated. He has since been replaced by his son, Mojtaba. They have continued to kill high-ranking figures in Iranian leadership. On the day of this recording, March 17th, they killed top security official Ali Larijani. This war is preceded by a grassroots uprising against the regime in early January, which may have killed as many as 30,000 people. This crackdown has been cited as a justification for the war in both the US and Israel.

AA 00:58

Meanwhile, Iranians on the ground and in the diaspora are fracturing over US and Israeli actions. Many in the diaspora have been very loud in pushing for war and supporting the return of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah deposed in 1979, who has been living in exile ever since. The human toll of this war is already being felt in Iran. Almost 1,500 Iranians have been killed since the start of the war, and more than 3 million have been displaced. On March 6th, Israel struck three oil depots around Tehran, sending noxious particulate into the sky, which has been raining toxins down on the city. This destruction of infrastructure and long-term damage to the health and well-being of the city’s inhabitants is testing support for the war on the ground and in the Iranian diaspora.

AA 01:43

Today, we’re going to be focusing particularly on the debates in the diaspora around this war, and to do that, I’m so grateful to have two really great guests with me. Narges Bajoghli is an anthropologist and associate professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of How Sanctions Work and Iran Reframed. Welcome to the show, Narges.

Narges Bajoghli 02:03

Thanks for having me.

AA 02:05

And Manijeh Moradian is the author of the book This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, a professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College, and a longtime feminist anti-war activist in New York City. Manijeh, thanks for being here.

Manijeh Moradian 02:20

Thanks for having me.

AA 02:22

So, part of what prompted this podcast is, Narges, reading your piece in New York Magazine called “Hard Feelings,” written in the first week of the war. You say: Over the past week, the Iranian American community has been fracturing in real time across dinner tables, in group chats, in the silence of blocked numbers. You talk about how your own cousins are denouncing you for not using your platform to back the bombings, and you talk about the diversity of Iranian community on the ground and in diaspora, but how that has become extremely polarized very, very fast. And I think you explicitly compare it to the way that Jewish communities fractured after October 7th. I was just wondering if you could set the table for us in helping us understand where these fault lines are and how we understand, particularly, I would say, the pro-war side in the diaspora?

NB 03:14

Sure. So, to set the scene of how we got here, the diaspora—Iranian diaspora—as well as Iranian politics inside of Iran, like any society, has been extremely diverse. You had people who wanted monarchy, you had people who were leftists, you had secularists, you had nationalists, you had all of these different groups. But over the past about decade, similar to what we’re seeing in societies around the world, there’s a severe level of polarization that is happening. So, when President Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in his first term in office ‚he instituted maximum-pressure campaigns, which were sanctions against the country in severe form, but also a lot of funding that went into different media spheres, cyber operations, and things like that. In the media realm, a lot of that money went into far-right discourse and far-right YouTube channels, social media influencers, and building out a far-right social media apparatus in Persian. And again, this was happening across many different kinds of communities at the same time.

NB 04:18

So, in the span of the past, I would say, eight years, and then in a very pressure-cooked kind of way over the past four to five years, this very diverse Iranian diaspora that did not agree with one another whatsoever, it has cleaved into two opposing views. All of that diversity has been really dampened,and what you have now is one side, which, the person who has been pushed to the forefront has been Reza Pahlavi, who is the son son of the former monarch of Iran who was overthrown in the ’79 revolution. It’s important to note that Reza Pahlavi, up until a couple of years ago—besides the fact that he was the son of the former Shah, he was never at the forefront of diaspora politics in any way that we can conceive of like today. So, he really was pushed forward by a number of different satellite television stations that broadcast in Persian on a 24-hour basis, both of whom are headquartered in London. And these really began to push pro-monarchy lines, and shows, and all of that. In this mix, you had this polarized, opposite side of the political spectrum bring out a slogan of “man, nation, and prosperity.” Mard, Mihan, Abadi. It is very much a right-wing misogynistic movement that is the backbone of a lot of this.

NB 05:41

When the strikes began in late December due to a currency crash—in 2025—again, due in large part to these maximum-pressure sanctions, merchants began to strike in Tehran. For about a week,those protests and strikes were ongoing, and they began to become nationwide. In this mix, the Persian language Mossad Twitter account puts out a statement and says that: We are with you on the ground, and we wish you much success and to continue the protest. Mike Pompeo, the former head of the State Department, also makes a similar kind of tweet. And then, Reza Pahlavi comes out and says that on January 8th and 9th, he is calling for Iranians to take over city centers. Over those two nights, there was a widespread state massacre of protesters. And then, in the aftermath of that, you began to have a further cleaving happening in the community around the fault line of this horrific massacre that occurred. And then people began to call for President Trump to do something, and he said help would be on the way.

NB 06:46

And then, that fast forwards into about six weeks later, and then we have the start of the war. And once the war starts, on the first day, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, is assassinated. And that becomes a moment in which there were parts of the diaspora, as well as sectors of societies in Iran, that were celebrating that. And then, there were other parts of the diaspora and centers of society in Iran that began to say: Okay, fine, we may have very complex feelings about Khamenei, not want him,but also, in those first strikes, a girls’ school was hit in southern Iran in which over 170 children were killed. And this becomes what I began to feel like in the aftermath of what my Jewish American friends were talking about, what happened with October 7th, in which there was these very mixed feelings of wrongs that had been done and then further wrongs on top of that that were costing so much human life. The community just began to turn on one another, depending on where they fell along these lines and along these feelings. It felt like everything just collapsed on each other and turned extremely personal,and that was what gave rise to that article that you’re speaking about.

AA 07:59

Yeah, I mean, something that’s interesting in what you write in the article is that there is both this polarization but that there’s also this double consciousness present, in your words, at all times, where people are kind of holding the dialectics within themselves, but they’re also feeling pulled in different directions. So, I want to trouble that a little bit. Manijeh, I want to bring you into the conversation. I read your dossier in Jadaliyyah—Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom—and you talk about how Free Iran has kind of become a right-wing slogan at this point, but also that there is this left-wing, feminist, grassroots movement. I’m just going to read a little bit from the intro: “There’s an urgent need for antifascist, anti-capitalist feminist alternatives to the politics of despair, as well as the politics of pragmatism, neither of which adequately respond to the popular desire to get rid of the Islamic Republic. We affirm this desire is legitimate and express our solidarity with Iranians who want to change their circumstances, including their government. Iranians should not be asked to sacrifice themselves in the name of anti-imperialism or die for an abstract principle of national sovereignty. When these values are emptied of justice and weaponized by the Islamic Republic, people will grasp for any exit from the status quo. Under these conditions, legitimate aspirations for freedom can become fodder for colonial and neo-colonial conquest. The political task is to build forms of collective power that can pursue liberation without surrendering it to imperial violence or authoritarian control.”

AA 09:36

I feel like when I read that, there was so much going on that for me, as someone who’s not initiated into this, it’s almost difficult for me to know exactly what you’re asserting here. And so, I wanted to get deeper into what it means for Free Iran to be coded right-wing, and what it might mean to also recognize some of the currents on the left and on the anti-war side without conceding to this right-wing project.

MM 10:03

Absolutely. It is a contested political space, and I think, sadly, that the left anti-war forces, we are very weak right now. We don’t have the upper hand,and I think that’s something that we have to historicize. We have to understand. So, we can go back to the reformist era, which crystallized with the stolen election of 2009. There were mass protests then, where people were trying to have fair elections. They went through a lived experience of watching the reform movement shut down, the leaders put under house arrest, activists imprisoned, tortured. There were multiple uprisings around economic conditions. There’s been strike wave after strike wave. Of course, we had the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, which I hope we can go back to, because I think it really marked an alternative to this horrible choice between imperial domination and living under an Islamic Republic, which is not what the majority of people want anymore.

MM 11:02

Because of their own experience, not just because Mossad and the CIA. Yeah, there’s propaganda, but it has to actually connect with people. People aren’t just brainwashed dupes; it has to actually have some meaning to describe their situation. And I don’t think that right-wing propaganda really did until people got to a point of feeling a complete sense of powerlessness and despair. And to me, that paves the way for war, for fascism, for all kinds of right-wing, reactionary forces to take hold. Once people no longer believe that they themselves can make history, once they no longer believe in their power to chart an alternative future, the most reactionary forces, internally and externally—they benefit from that despair and that disarray. And so, I think we just have to keep insisting there is an alternative to the two poles that Narges described so well, this hyper-polarization.

MM 11:55

So, for example, there were Iranians who celebrated the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, and there were Iranians who mourned because he was their spiritual leader. But there were also some Iranians who were like: We don’t want imperial bombs assassinating these people. We want to have our own process of putting these people on trial, holding them accountable for their crimes, actually going through some kind of accountability. Democratic transition. All of that is foreclosed when you have imperialist war because we know the US and Israel are not interested in anything to do with justice, democracy, freedom, accountability. They’re the biggest war criminals in the world. So, in many ways, again, it’s not this poll or that poll. What’s being destroyed, in addition to people’s lives, and buildings, and schools, and infrastructure, are these other possibilities for a future for Iran, those other ways of imagining self-determination from below that really I think reached their high point with the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

AA 13:58

I want to just make sure that I’m understanding certain parts of this correctly. You mentioned, Narges, that Reza Pahlavi—that this is a very right-wing movement. The slogan nearing around it is almost like diametrically opposed to the kind of Women, Life, Freedom idea. And yet, this is the thing that’s being championed or almost co-opted by the most murderous elements of American and Israeli—like, I saw some really bad AI on International Women’s Day of Israeli female fighter pilots liberating Iranian women (that were shared also by Iranians). So, first of all, what are the politics of this, and how do they square the circle between the liberation narrative and the right-wing narrative? And also, how do they square that with a rogue, murderous Israel in this moment? I mean, we talked about like seeing Israeli flags at diaspora protests. What is that about?

MM 13:56

I think, in many ways, what you have is a kind of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” narrative. And so, any problems Iran has—sanctions or whatever—they’ve brought on themselves. The logic for the folks who are really championing this war would be: All of the problems that Iranians face are the result of a theocratic Islamist state. Any problems Iran has, sanctions or whatever, they’ve brought on themselves through their foreign policy, through their anti-Israel rhetoric. And so, therefore, Israel is somehow justified, or the US are somehow justified, in things like sanctions, war, these kinds of things. And what the ultimate goal would be is quote-unquote “normalizing relations”—having a government in Tehran that that is pliable and subordinate to US and Israeli interests in the region. Some kind of client state, or even worse, a quote-unquote “failed state,” where they basically destroy infrastructure, instigate civil war, and let chaos reign so that there’s no more challenge to their hegemony.

AA 15:00

Well, but forgive me for asking this like really dumb question, but why would Iranians want that?

MM 15:05

Well, they don’t. I don’t think they want that. What they want is the former. They want to normalize. They want a government in Tehran that is integrated into the global capitalist system, even if that’s on unequal terms—which, of course, it would be. But I think there’s a reality that being isolated from the global economy through sanctions, through maximum-pressure sanctions, has been awful for Iranian people. I mean, Narges wrote a whole book about this. The experience of being isolated from the global economy is perhaps worse, or people think it is, than being integrated on unequal terms into the global economy. So, we on the left spend a lot of time critiquing IMF, World Bank, the ways that Global South countries have been structurally readjusted and forced into these subordinate roles in the global economy. I think, for a lot of Iranians, they would love to be forcibly integrated into the global economy on any terms at all, because the experience of being isolated has created such incredible collapse and such incredible pressure that that’s what triggered the mass uprising in December: This feeling that we can no longer go on like this. We don’t have a future. We don’t know how we’re going to feed our families. We don’t know how we’re going to live.

MM 16:18

So, in those conditions of intense desperation, and then the massacre, you get people drawing two horrible conclusions that are completely manipulated by the right wing. One, we can’t change our situation on our own. And two, there’s no alternative. The only people with any power are the US and Israel, so we have to look to them. We have no one else. And that’s, I think, the devastating mess that got us here, where so many Iranians inside and outside the country are hoping for some positive change from this war. I think, that’s what’s created so many hard feelings, to borrow the title, because I think for many of us who’ve been anti-war activists probably our whole lives, we just don’t share that reality. We just don’t share that perspective. There’s no part of us that can go along on that journey of imagining something better is going to come through imperial war. There’s just no part of us that can do that. So, our numbers are very small,and I think especially those of us who understand and are in solidarity with so many Iranians who are like: We’re done with the Islamic Republic, we don’t want to live like this anymore. There’s no hope for us with this government. Reform is closed off. They massacre us. We’ve tried everything. Okay, I get that. But this? These bombs? No way.

NB 17:38

If I can just add something in here: The Women, Life, Freedom movement, as much as it was co-opted on the outside, on the inside had a very difficult time being co-opted and actually led to what I would consider to be the biggest social and cultural revolution in Iran, because it tapped into longstanding civic society and civic actors in Iran who have been organizing for decades and have very real strategies of how you bring about change. It basically led to the Islamic Republic giving the biggest concessions that they have ever given since the beginning of the revolution, which is, de facto, women now can go out dressed how they want. It wasn’t even just about dress how they want. It was about a much deeper issue of patriarchy within society that went from the home to the street and back again. For me, it’s no surprise that the immediate reaction to that was a co-optation of it from the outside, especially by Benjamin Netanyahu. I mean, he loved talking about the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

AA 18:43

Oh, Israelis right now are in the bomb shelters talking about how they’re so proud that they’re liberating Iran.

NB 18:49

Yeah, exactly. And there’s always moments of extreme forms of setback. But right after the massacres in Iran, you had so many Iranian intellectuals writing: We need to go back to the foundations of Women, Life, Freedom. We need to get this idea of liberation out of the claws of the fascists and reclaim it because they don’t actually want liberation. We’re the ones who are seeking that. And so, that is also what’s getting lost in this polarization. Like we’re just focusing on these two ends, but there’s a lot that’s going on, but it needs chance to breathe.

MM 19:23

So, here’s the thing, though, with Women, Life, Freedom. I believe it innovated a whole new idiom for feminist revolution. I could talk for a long time about what I think was so groundbreaking and brilliant about the Women, Life, Freedom movement that we all can learn from in our own societies, in terms of fighting patriarchy, fascism, and militarism in our own societies, including the United States. But I think two things happened there. On the one hand, as Narges said, it was this extraordinary revolution from below. Social relations were transformed in the everyday, at the level of how people felt in their bodies, how they related to one another in the home, on the street, in the school, in the workplace. It was this transformation from below, which is to say that if we reject the idea that the state should dominate and control women’s bodies, then we have to reject all these forms of domination, hierarchy, inequality, and control. So, it opened up space to talk about the discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. It opened up space to talk about queerness and transness in Iran. It opened up space to reclaim solidarity with Palestine from government propaganda—from essentially the property of the Iranian state—to something that could become once again, as it was before 1979, a site of solidarity for Iranians fighting for their own freedom.

MM 20:41

So, Women, Life, Freedom opened up tremendous possibilities for imagining an Iran that was not a client state and not a theocratic Islamic Republic. But then, what happened? The Islamic Republic government responded with massive amounts of violence: Shooting people in the eye, shooting people dead, arresting thousands of people, executing, torturing. So, this is people’s lived experience, too. We had this incredible movement for life and an alternative where we could come together and see each other differently and imagine a different Iran. And what’s the response of the government? Massive amounts of violence literally drove people off the streets. And then, they did not actually change a single law. In fact, the government responded by instituting new laws to punish women further. If you’re driving without hijab, we can seize your car. If you’re not wearing hijab and you go in a bank, you can’t access your money. They instituted more repressive laws. So, people already had to recover from that. But then, there was the June war, and they had to recover from that,and then there was the economic collapse,uprising, and massacre. So, it’s in the context of all of that that we can even get to a place where people would say: All right, I guess bring on the bombs. Okay, maybe Pahlavi. I don’t know, anything but this.

AA 21:57

We haven’t really talked too much about that human dimension. What does that look like for you all in your lives right now? What does it look like in terms of friend groups, family groups? How acrimonious is this? How acrimonious is this also between people here and there? Like, I know that both in the Jewish and the Palestinian conversation, there’s ways that those conversations play out, like the difference between diaspora Palestinians having one kind of politics and Palestinians on the ground maybe having different. I’m just curious how this is playing out within communities and families.

NB 22:33

One of the ways in which this plays out is that a lot of it is happening, as I wrote in the piece, in families across kitchen tables. I’ll talk about that in a second. But I think it’s also important to note that another big component of this is happening in the digital world and in the online sphere. And so, the way that that manifests itself is if you say something—if you say something anti-war, if you say “Pahlavi doesn’t have any experience, he’s being used like Ahmad Chalabi was used for the invasion of Iraq in 2003”— If you kind of put things in context or say that “I don’t fully agree with this,” there is an onslaught of online hate, and that is on purpose. The reason I say that that’s on purpose is that it’s meant to scare people from saying some of this. For me, for example, the way it’s played out is online death threats, then people showing up at places where I’m speaking and really getting extremely nasty and in your face. So, it’s both offline and online.

NB 23:36

And then, also, because of the way in which it is so loud in the online sphere, and then because of the way that many of us are so addicted to our phones in the post-COVID world and are spending so much time online, that tenor taking up the conversation to those levels then spills out into our personal relationships too. So, then you have cousins, or your dearest friends that you grew up with and you love dearly, and all of a sudden, they’re in your DMs, or in your texts, and they’re like: Why the hell can you not see that other side? Why are you being pro-regime? Because that’s how it gets. If you’re against war—9/11 and the post-9/11 wars was my coming-of-age story. I’ve seen this game play out multiple times. This is literally the same blueprint. It’s the same thing that’s happening again. If you point that out, they’re like:Well, you’re pro-regime.

NB 24:29

And so, that circulates so much online, and then it spills over into our personal relationships, and it makes it so that people don’t even want to talk to each other again, because they feel like they are on not only just opposing sides of a political spectrum but opposing sides of their values and viewing of the world, and that is a chasm that cannot come together any longer. I think the depth of that chasm is what makes it so incredibly heartbreaking. It’s not like: I voted for this, you voted for that. It feels existential. It’s like: We fundamentally see things differently, fundamentally believe in things differently. As a scholar of media, I can take a step back, and I can try to like trace it and see how it’s happening. But then, when you’re inside of it, it is like you are in a boxing match, and you’re trying your hardest not to get pummeled, and you’re trying your hardest to find your people, to be like: First of all, I’m not crazy in this because it feels like it’s so much. And then, to also be like. Hey, are we all thinking this way? Do we all want these bombs to drop? Like, I thought we were all not for that. And so, you feel like you don’t know where steady ground is anymore, and then the punches are coming from everywhere.

MM 25:43

I mean, this is one of the things:If we talk about wanting a democratic Iran, we have to learn how to treat each other differently, even when we disagree. We can’t have a “if you disagree with me, you’re the enemy” politics, because that is what produces dictatorships, and one regime falls, the next one comes, and fills the prisons with its enemies. I mean, we’ve seen this happen in Iran. So, we need to fundamentally change the way that we have political disagreements and debates and learn to stop attacking and threatening each other over disagreements. But I guess what I could share is that the way this affects me in my, in my everyday personal life is that every day I am checking to see if the people I’m closest to in Iran are still alive. This is a daily practice. I spent over a decade going back and forth to Iran, living with one part of my family—an aunt, an uncle, and first cousins I got very, very close to. And one of their daughters is now in Canada. So, every day, they call from their landline directly to my cousin in Canada, saying: Yes, we’re still alive. And I get the update from the cousin in Canada that they’re still alive.

MM 26:53

So, I think this is also one thing that gets lost in the story, is that many of us in diaspora, we’re living with this constant fear of not knowing if the people we care so much about are going to live till the next day. It’s incredibly stressful and painful, and I know this is something that Palestinians, Lebanese folks in diaspora have been living with for a very long time. And so, there’s a lot of empathy, commiseration, solidarity, I think, that’s circulating among these diasporas of war and empire that’s going on right now as well. And then, I think the other thing that for me—because I tend to travel in very anti-war, left, anti-imperialist circles—I don’t really interact with pro-war Iranians. I just don’t know them. They’re not around me. I’m a little bit in the left bubble. But even within the left, you can be accused of being liberal or not anti-imperialist enough, or people might attack you for criticizing the Iranian government because you’re reproducing right-wing talking points. And so, you get into these kinds of debates and tangles with folks. So, there’s also a lot of pain and fracture, even on the left.

AA 28:02

Okay, my last question here—I know we’re getting close to time—is: Where does this actually leave us, and what does it actually mean for how not just the diaspora but how leftists in the West engage with this question? How do we in the West actually support the Iranian people who want freedom, or is there no way for us to help because getting our government involved in any way only looks the way it does now? What should we actually be fighting for, especially with a situation where there’s a blackout in communications, where we can’t even develop thick relationships on the ground?

NB 28:42

I think we need to really be thinking very deeply about how we can impact questions of foreign policy right now, among the left. And I mean in a very strategic way. Yes, we need big rallies, but we need other kinds of strategies as well, and we need a politics and a strategy that is anti-war, but anti-war in the full sense of the term. So, that means stopping bombs from falling, stopping another forever war in the Middle East that will make the past two and a half decades look like a walk in the park, frankly. And also, really taking into consideration this idea that sanctions are part and parcel and a key component of American warcraft abroad. I mean, we see it in the case of Iran, but look at what is happening in Cuba right now. It’s a full-on siege of the island. No oil has been allowed in. The country has been under heavy sanctions from the United States for six decades.

NB 29:41

So, in the ways that we think about our movements—I think in many ways, we are still within the remnants of the late 20th century. 21st century anti-imperialism is different than late 20th century anti-imperialism, and we need to develop a more robust politics about how we are going to, on our end in the United States, get our government to do less harm. That is what our most immediate concern is, is to stop bombs falling, stop our government from strangulating populations. Because if people are thinking about, “How am I going to afford food,” it’s a much harder thing for them to be then fighting against their very authoritarian systems. And we have to be able to put the pressures where we can, and that is on our own government.

MM 30:27

Yeah, I think we have to figure out why we don’t have a larger anti-war movement. Narges said that we need to have big rallies but also other strategies—well, we don’t have big rallies, and I think we have to get really honest about why. I don’t know all of the reasons, but one of the pieces of the puzzle, I think, is the fact that I think progressives in the US, anti-war folks in the US, are confused about how to relate to the Islamic Republic. There is a history of anti-war groups meeting with Islamic Republic officials, trying to counter the demonization of Iran, the Islamophobia, the racism, trying to show:No, these are just rational state actors, and they’re just like any other government, and we should work with them, and negotiate them, and stop treating them like they’re pariahs, or monsters, or something.

MM 31:16

Okay, I understand that. But if we want to have a consistent ethics, and if we care about the question of solidarity, then I think we also have to say: But these officials have been running a country into the ground, and sanctions—as Narges speaks and writes so eloquently about—are an overall stranglehold on the country, but within that, the Iranian government itself has ruthlessly pursued austerity, extraction, all sorts of neoliberal privatization, subsidy cuts that have created an oligarchy and that has enriched itself at the expense of the majority of people. Not to mention, the government has decided, over and over again, that instead of reform, instead of concessions, instead of any structural change, it will use mass violence.

MM 32:01

So, if our anti-war movement is going to be meaningful to people in Iran, in a way that can help, quite frankly, pull people back from this despair that the right is conscripting into its own agenda—I mean, we are in a transnational world, and what we do here does matter for people in Iran. It matters if they feel abandoned when their own government kills them, and then they see: Oh, a few people in the US seem to care when US bombs kill us, but not when we’re killed by our own government. So, these are the kinds of contradictions and problems that we have to address. I think if we’re going to build a robust anti-war movement that’s going to connect broadly with people in this country and somehow be accountable to conditions on the ground in Iran, we have to find a way of being against the US-Israeli war and the forms of everyday and increasingly dramatic repression that the Islamic Republic is waging on its own people. I don’t think it works to try to mobilize masses of Americans in support of the Islamic Republic.

AA 33:06

But yet, then there’s also the American context, which is that Iran has complied with the Iran deal when it was in existence, that there actually wasn’t any preemptive action. And so, I do understand, on the other hand, continuing to push back on this narrative that is so common—that Iran poses this substantial, existential threat to both Israel and the United States, which, it may pose some threat to Israel, but it certainly doesn’t pose any threat to the United States. And even still, it has not shown itself willing to pursue it.

MM 33:43

Yeah. So, I think we have to debunk those lies and distortions. We have to explain what this war is about:that the US and Israel—these are wars of conquest. These are wars to destroy any threat to US and Israeli hegemony in the region. That’s what this is about. This isn’t because of Iran’s unwillingness to negotiate or secret nuclear. It’s not about that. But I think we also have to say that the Iranian government poses the biggest threat to its own people. That’s why I think this is so difficult, because for many, many people on the ground in Iran before the war, you didn’t hear people complain a lot about sanctions. They just took that for granted as something beyond their control. For them, the everyday source of their oppression and difficulty is their own government. So, yeah, I think we have to debunk the lies and excuses for war. We have to say: Yeah, Iran is just, like any other state. It’s trying to stay in power. It’s trying to advance its own interests. But that’s different from condoning those, or supporting those, or lining up behind those as if they’re somehow anti-imperialist and some kind of left-wing cause.

MM 34:46

And so, I think the quote that you read from that introduction about: The Iranian Revolution was supposed to make people’s lives better. You know, it was supposed to liberate Iran from Western domination, and that was supposed to make people’s lives better. And for a combination of reasons—both foreign pressure, and internal dictatorship, and state violence—the culminating experience is that people feel their lives are worse. This isn’t the way they want to live. So, we have to focus our efforts on stopping this war, but I’m just saying, in terms of how we do it, can we also make space for saying: Look, Iranians have a right to choose their own government, their own future, their society free of foreign intervention, and we have to stand on those principles of self-determination. As long as the bombs are falling, any possible hope of democracy, women’s rights, all the things we might care about are foreclosed. And then, I think there’s another set of demands: Lift the internet blackout, free political prisoners. There are other kinds of demands that I think would be in line with our shared values here, where we also want to end prisons and things like that.

AA 35:52

I think that’s a good place to stop. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, share it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time. Thanks, everyone.