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There is a quote by Niels Bohr about quantum mechanics and how “nobody really understands it”, more known in its (wrong) apocryphal form as “nobody who claims to know quantum mechanics really gets it”. Without thinking too much about this bizarre comparison, one thing that comes to mind is that at the very least any basic science, as weird as it might get, is at the very least useful for predictions. When it comes to politics and conflicts the scenario is vastly different, and even with a deep knowledge of one particular topic, which most commentators don’t have, we can still be completely misguided in predicting what happens next.

As of now Israel and Iran have exchanged a bunch of rockets, with Israel also using targeted air strikes and covert operations within Iran. As expected, Israel’s attacks have managed to hit pretty significant targets. On the other hand, perhaps surprisingly, Iran’s also did, somehow. The 7th October has shown the world that Israel’s invincibility was little more than a PR talking point, and seeing Tel Aviv burn with a few buildings destroyed (and a small but significant amount of victims) would have been an unthinkable event a few years ago, it is no longer.

It’s easy right now for people to view the conflict between Israel and Iran as an extension to the Palestinian issue – or any other “east-west” conflict in the region, really – but let’s not oversimplify things. Let’s see how we go there.

Some facts first

• The Islamic Republic of Iran was born in 1979. Before then, Iran had been ruled for roughly 500 years as one single country by a few successive dynasties, with some interruptions in between. The last monarch, which most people in the west call “the Shah of Persia” (often conflating him with his father, and perhaps with the previous kings as well), left the country during the revolution of 1979.
• Iran is a majority Muslim country, but like many others in the region they preserve quite a few pre-Islamic traditions, sometimes sort of “as-is” (like the Iranian new year¹), sometimes, like in the west, conflating them with Muslim celebrations. This practice is so common in every aspect of the culture that people themselves often don’t know if this or that thing that people do in Iran is because of Islam or not².
• Iran has always been a very multicultural region with a single most common prestige language since the middle ages (modern Persian). However, it’s only since the 20s that the idea of a “Persian nation” started, as, before, Islam was an equaliser of people³. As one expects from nationalist ideologies from the 20s, a lot of racist ideas made their way in the “modernising” agenda, and it’s not uncommon to hear Iranians refer to themselves as “Aryans, like the Europeans” (the subtext is: unlike the Arabs).
• It sounds funny to think about it now, but Iran was one of the first Muslim countries to recognise Israel. Before the Revolution its government was very friendly to the west. Iran’s fighter jets used in the war against Iraq in the 80s, after the Revolution, were American. They’re still in use.

Persians and Aryans

A discussion on the Iranian national identity would be excessively boring, but it’s useful to go through some of it to better understand the situation of the country and its relation to Israel. No western army has ever carpet-bombed Tehran even if it’s completely doable – we’ve all seen how capable Iranian anti-air defences are, and they were definitely worse a few decades ago. Besides the questionable utility, there are some cultural reasons why this is. Yes, now there’s a bit of a history arc incoming that sounds overly pretentious and dramatic but there is some logic to it, you’ll see.

The muslim conquest of Iran terminated in 651 and this imposed Arabic as a state language, causing most “persian” dialects to vanish for a few hundred years. Then one of them started mysteriously appearing again, roughly 200 years later, written in a modified Arabic script. This sparked the diffusion of modern Persian⁴, a language that quickly became the lingua franca of a much bigger region.

Iran isn’t the only Persian-speaking country, as before the Taliban takeover Persian held higher status than Pashto in Afghanistan⁵, and it’s also spoken in Tajikistan, where, just like in Afghanistan, is not called Persian, but it is the same language. Persian was also the court language of many empires not strictly based in Iran – e.g. the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, Timur’s kingdom in what is now Uzbekistan – and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to travel from the Ottoman lands to places as far as Kashgar (in what is now Xinjiang, in China) and be able to communicate with literate people over there in Persian.

There are many myths tied to the leitmotiv of “Persians aren’t Arabs”, many of them tied to the language⁶, and many of them inevitably fuel a nationalist sense of superiority of Iranians towards Arabs. Unlike Turkey which had a modernising movement which eliminated many traditional things (like the alphabet), Iran’s modernisation went hand in hand with tradition, without ever forgetting Islam. A “persian” ethnicity was forged out of the blue – never mind the centuries of mixing, both of cultures and DNA – mass literacy pushed the study of literature and poetry (a big part of the culture, more so than anywhere in Europe), without ever forgetting that it’s still islamic poetry as, after all, all famous classical poets were muslim⁷. The last two kings made efforts into sprinkling the country with more “Iranian” things to be different, one of which was the adoption of the modern Iranian calendar⁸ – the Gregorian calendar is never used in Iran.

There is some symbology in the claim that the modern solar hijri calendar of Iran is “ancient”, whereas it’s actually a 20th century invention (overlapped to older traditions). Does this attitude remind us of somewhere else in the region?

Israel and Iran

Iran’s “superiority” is something Israel recognises and uses on a daily basis for its own propaganda. Essentially, they’re good people, ruined by Islam, and their contacts with Arabs. Some Iranians claim Iranians never really became muslims. Israel definitely wants everyone else to believe that. This isn’t a judgment on the statement itself, it’s just one in a long list of convenient alliances.

Israeli media (and right wing Jews around the world) often pinpoint the antisemitism of the language of the Palestinians – and, often, the Arabs – as Israelis are referred to as الیهود (the jews) instead of Israelis, therefore “Arabs want the death of Jews, not Israelis”. Of course, nobody cares much about the fact that Israelis don’t say “death to Palestinians” but מוות לערבים (mavet la-aravim, you can guess what the second word means). There is a simple reason why this is, and it’s the same for both. Palestinians and Israeli jews don’t recognise each other’s political existence. Saying “death to Palestinians” implies that there is a Palestinian people. Saying “death to Israelis” implies there is Israel, and as it’s known, much of the Arab word doesn’t even use the word Israel, replacing it with things like الکیان الصهيوني (al-kiyan as-sahiuni, “the Zionist entity”).

Israelis never say “death to Iranians”, and probably, deep down, for the same reason, in Iran, مرگ بر اسرائیل (marg bar esrail, “death to Israel”) vastly overwhelms slogans about jews. After all, Iranian jews exist, and even in the Islamic Republic they have one reserved seat in parliament. Israel has a lot of people of Iranian ancestry – not as many as, e.g. Iraqis, like Itamar ben Gvir – but a significant proportion nonetheless. Not only that, but Israeli politics has not forgotten that there was a time when it was possible for Israel and Iran to be friendly.

Israel focuses a lot of propaganda on the regime of the Ayatollah, on the Islamic Republic. Netanyahu himself talks “to the people of Iran”, calls them to rebel. This is of course echoed by the Islamic Republic, which sees every movement against the regime as remote-controlled from Tel Aviv. There are so many examples of this bizarre bromance between Israeli politics and some (more on that later) of the Iranian opposition that we tend to forget about the elephant in the room.

There is no analogue for Arab governments, and definitely not for Palestinians. Iranians are a superior people who are ruled by idiots, the Islamic Republic is essentially a hangover after a democratic past that Iran should return to⁹. Palestinians (Arabs, really, since Palestinians are “just Arabs”), on the other hand, are genetically predisposed to terrorism and barbarism. Their lives don’t matter as much and military strategy reflects this.

This is why carpet-bombing Gaza and blowing up a building for a gender reveal stunt is something even we in the Europe care little about. But if they did anything remotely similar to Iran the reaction would be vastly different.

War against Iran is a trap

Israel’s first attack on Iran has got mixed reactions from within the country. At the end of the day, there has been minimal collateral damage. Some innocent people died, but one could easily say that innocent people die in Iran in large numbers during any demonstration – of course, it’s not a justification, but it helps putting things into proportion, as police brutality in Iran is not comparable to the wildest place in Europe.

The western press rejoiced at the death of a few heads of several branches of the Revolutionary Guard. These people were not saints, and neither were most of the people who lived in the buildings where they lived: let’s not make the mistake of comparing blowing up a IRGC building in Tehran to a hospital in Gaza. You don’t just happen to have highly ranked IRGC staff as your friendly neighbours. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that they have no idea who you are, and they’d like not risk getting assassinated. As a result, any such building is hardly “civilian infrastructure”. I repeat: collateral damage happens and of course passers-by and others have been killed too, but the number of innocent deaths, for such a massive attack, has been kept to a minimum. To the degree that everyone’s joke is “Israel can be surgical, it just chooses not to be, most of the time”.

Unfortunately though, the Islamic Republic is a bit more than just a set of people. We’re talking about the same regime that lost a (fairly incomptetent) president and a (fairly competent) foreign minister in a ridiculous helicopter accident. One would have expected a shake-up in the system: nothing really happened.

Nothing so far has shaken the regime. Even thousands of deaths have had little effect. The Woman Life Freedom movement didn’t even manage to get formal concessions on the hijab (a small part of the issues women face there, but symbolic nonetheless), although it is true that, since then, women not covering their hair are a more common sight in big cities.

The Houthi’s solidity in Yemen should serve as a warning. Their popularity went up following the Saudi-led campaign that had their removal as its main goal. Yemen is still fractured and the Houthi are still not exactly a “free and democratic” government, but it’s obvious that keeping order and “rights” in a country with no resources and that has been torn apart by conflict for ages is challenging at best.

Iran isn’t Yemen, but is Israel willing to willing to risk ruining its supposed relationship with the people of Iran by starting a potentially dead-on-arrival campaign to get rid of the Islamic Republic?

And will the hardline anti-regime people who are now enjoying israeli attacks killing regime staff keep their stance once Israel, possibly, starts being less surgical and more destabilising in its attacks, killing way more civilians?

Who believes what in Iran?

Every place has its own core of conspirationists, but some places are more advanced at that, with government- and opposition-sponsored conspiracies.

In most democracies voter allegiance is shown during polls, but even there it’s hard to gauge interest on individual topics. For example, it’s hard to know how much of AfD’s support in Germany came because of hostility towards immigration, rather than other topics.

In Iran this is much worse. Every camp claims to be a majority, but the reality is that nobody really knows basic things like how much support the Islamic Republic actually has – as a “government system” in itself. The past protests have triggered many IR supporters who are not happy about the economic situation. Many of them turned into IR opponents, but many are also just opportunistic about it, they think the IR is more or less fine, but there need to be some changes. Of course, there are also people who think that the IR is more than fine, and Iran’s issues are exclusively because of the US, the UK and Israel.

The same goes for the actual opposition. From the superior Aryans – who forget their occasional visit to the fire temple – to the secular muslims who just want democracy, to the slightly crazier ones who want Israel to drop a lot more bombs. The opposition has no way of knowing how big it actually is. It also has no way of knowing, within it, what the most significant “current” is. They know they want the regime gone, past that, the sky is the limit.

The Islamic Republic pressures people to go to demonstrations in support of the government by sending SMS as reminders, and those in public sector jobs are often forced to show up (or else). This inflates figures of actual support, but we must not fall into the trap of thinking that “paying a few demonstrators” proves that there is no genuine support to the regime. It also helps that the largest demonstrations started because of economic troubles – a sign that the support of pro-regime people to the demonstrations is essential to attract attention – and even during the last protests the economic situation was definitely lingering.

We’ve all been told that “the new generation is different”, but we only know of those who post memes on social media and get boyfriends or girlfriends behind their parents’ backs, and are usually from urban middle class backgrounds. This is a bit of an echo of the climate before the 1979 revolution, when the urbanite educated opposition to the king was eventually overwhelmed by the masses who had been listening to Ruhollah Khomeini’s tapes. Of course, the world has changed since then – and so has Iran – but this mistake has been made before.

The end of Zionism? The end of the Islamic Republic? Both? Neither?

Israel is currently at its lowest in terms of popularity in the west, and most of the west doesn’t really care about Iran – or even know where Iran is.

Both regimes want the other to disappear. It’s hardly possible that the 2025 Islamic Republic of Iran could even attempt at dismantling Israel, while a drone attack that kills the Supreme Leader of Iran is probably polling quite high on Polymarket. The amount of spies crawling around Iran is so incredible that even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joked about it recently, with a fairly brutal accusation to the system he has always been a big part of.

Before this very recent conflict there had been a lot of rumors on the state of health of Ali Khamenei – including conspiracy theories that he’s actually already dead and the one who shows up every now and then to give speeches is a doppelgänger.

One of the main problems with the Islamic Republic is that nobody really knows who’s in charge. Sayyid Ali’s vengeance speeches might be more of a formality than an execution of a specific ideology. During the protests it was obvious that within the regime there were massive disagreements on how to handle the situation. Within the IR there is general agreement that “everything must stay the way it is” but once the old man is gone this will be true only to some degree. The various heads of the hydra of the regime are relatively autonomous (but functionally cooperative) and there will probably be a struggle for power and influence in the next phase, of course, assuming that the regime doesn’t get toppled.

The situation doesn’t lack its comic relief characters, as every now and then the crown prince of Iran Reza Pahlavi gets out of his cave and claims to be “the future”. We can safely bet on this not happening, ever.

All in all, given the extremely dire economic situation and the grim record when it comes to freedom and basic civil rights, we wonder how did it happen that the situation in Iran got so messed up.

We shouldn’t wonder about that. What we should wonder instead is, given the extremely dire economic situation and the grim record when it comes to freedom and basic civil right, how is it possible that the country is still functioning? This is probably the biggest mystery of modern era Iran.