Anxiety, War, and Interwoven Narratives

She looks at me anxiously and says: “You saw that they are saying Tehran should be evacuated. Where are all these people supposed to go? Even if they wanted to leave, with what petrol? And to where?” It is not as though those giving the warning do not know this. They say: leave, all of you, because we have unfinished business in your city. Go so that you will not be harmed. Yet the truth is that this familiar collective exodus gives them a feeling of absolute victory.

The population of Gaza was moved repeatedly from north to south, while along the same route nothing was left of their lives. Their modern war machine is merciless and, on the road to victory, takes no consideration other than victory itself.

Her words reminded me of the tweet this morning by their defence minister: “The residents of Tehran will pay the price for the killing of our citizens.” A short while later he corrected himself, saying that he had not meant killing people in revenge, but that they would have to move to preserve their lives; obviously, he said, we have nothing against civilians. I thought to myself that whether we believe the original post or the correction depends largely on what we already believe.

I had translated and read many of the Hebrew comments beneath the first post. Many people reminded him how inhuman and terrifying those words were. Many Iranians wrote beneath the post asking: what happened to the friendship you said you had with the people?

Several comments caught my attention. One person defended the post and explained his reasoning. He wrote that it was tragic, but this is the logic of war. When the Allies attacked Germany, or Japan came under attack, did anyone ask the people of Berlin how much they hated Hitler, or whether the opinion of ordinary Japanese people and the extent of their support mattered? War has its own logic and must be won according to that logic. If people wanted otherwise, they should have overthrown their own government before a foreign attack. The same, he argued, applies to Iranians. Apparently not a few of them still sympathise with their rulers, since they have done nothing so far. “The only thing that matters to me is the lives of my own compatriots.”

An Israeli replied: “What can people under attack do? Ordinary people under severe stress can only flee. Shouldn’t we stop and give them time? Our problem is not the Iranian people. Even imagining that they are the same as terrorists is dangerous and wrong.”

An Iranian replied beneath his words that giving this regime even a single minute was a mistake. Several Israelis liked that comment.

Historical Memory and Collective Trauma

Last night I spoke with a friend. He said: “I don’t know how, when they say homeland, the word does not stick in their throats and choke them.”

When they have power, everything serves the sacred system and the people are divided into two categories: opponents and overthrowers, or supporters of the system and the revolution. The perfect representatives of this system are people such as Radan and Salavati. Yet when public support is needed, suddenly their love for Iran, the homeland, Damavand, and Arash is unveiled.

They speak of civilian casualties as though the roughly two hundred people killed so far were not equal merely to the number killed in a typical week of road accidents on our cursed roads, and as though people do not live every day under the risk of disasters such as Metropol, Plasco, or a plane crash.

Death comes once, and mourning comes once. We have to be freed from this deep cancer.

I open Twitter and a post catches my attention. It says that when the Arabs attacked Sasanian Iran, there were people such as Salman the Persian who told themselves that Iran needed to be saved from Sasanian oppression and corruption. And once it had been “saved,” what could these desert Arabs possibly do in Iranian lands? So, it says, they opened the gates in advance of the Arab army, and the rest is history—what followed left for future generations to judge. The post then told those whose hearts are attached to the enemy: come and unite behind your system against the enemy. Someone else continued with the story of the Mongol invasion, first undertaken to punish the Khwarazmian ruler and then followed by massacres in every city and settlement that did not submit unconditionally. Another reminded readers that Iran’s separatists are waiting for the appropriate moment and that this is the essence of their plan.

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