One late January evening in Tehran, I watch Baba Saeed, my 87-year-old grandfather, listen to Israeli TV in the darkly lit living room that also serves as his library. As he hunches in his velvet armchair, the light absorbs him and turns his glossy white hair and his face a bluish-green. I sit beside him on the carpet. Above us on wooden shelves, Japanese dolls with long kimonos from my childhood stand with dusty cheeks. Here, probably Baba Saeed’s last house, objects mourn their own ruined decadence.
On the screen, a man Baba Saeed’s age, Menashe Amir, broadcasts from Jerusalem in a deeply ominous, raspy voice, predicting Israel’s victory over the Iranian “political establishment.” I’ve heard Amir say this for 30 years, but in the past 4 months with Israel’s onslaught against Gaza violating every conceivable moral and legal convention, Amir’s pronouncements have gotten menacing about Iran, too. He argues that just as it is necessary to take out the Palestinian resistance at any cost, in Iran, “civilians would have to be killed” for the “Iranian regime to be toppled.”
Baba Saeed used to openly denounce Amir. To my dismay, he now shakes his head in agreement. I start reading a pediatrician’s account of Gaza out loud: a one-year-old’s arm and leg have been blown off by a bomb, and “flesh was still hanging off the foot. He had a bloodstained diaper, which remained, but there was no leg below.” The U.S.-backed Israeli occupation forces have killed over 15,000 children in Gaza. Baba Saeed does not know this. Israeli TV never gives specifics about what their “military response” entails. But I am certain Baba Saeed has registered my words because he moves his hands and head up and down erratically like shooing a fly, signaling at me to stop. He ups the volume on the TV.
I keep watch until, eventually, Baba Saeed starts dozing off. “Do you think what is happening in Gaza constitutes naslkoshi?” I ask, using a word that means “the killing of generations,” or genocide. The International Court of Justice at the Hague — the same city where Baba Saeed once appeared before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal to defend revolutionary Iran against the United States — has just voted for a measure introduced by South Africa stating that Israel is plausibly committing genocide: “acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm, and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.”
Baba Saeed can bark at me without raising his voice, but I see the drooping skin beneath his chin shake like a pendulum as he gathers a response: “YOURS is a generation of ignoramus young people brought up on Islamist venom going around spitting words like genocide! GENOCIDE! Do you even know what that is?”
We pause and drink tea. We usually drink tea in such moments. I’ve rattled him. Now I let him speak. He explains that it is not a genocide, but a campaign against Gaza’s resistance, a “necessary eradication just as needs to happen in Iran.” People in the region who defy the U.S. and Israel “deserve whatever comes to them,” he explains, particularly Iranians whose “grave” this “smoke” is coming from.
“What grave?” I ask him.
“The Revolution,” he snaps. I am satisfied — he has led us directly to the heart of our dispute.
He turns his attention back to the TV. He is done talking to me — for now. I will wait for my next turn. I want to shake the Amir out of the man in front of me, find my grandfather. I have seen him break before my eyes. I know his rejection of his past revolutionary self comes from a despair that has erased his honor.
“The essence of revolution is not the struggle for bread; it is the struggle for human dignity,” writes historian Adolfo Gilly.
If the Revolution does not reassert itself, our pride could once again be devoured.
The revolutionary past
I am about 7. It is the early 1990s, at the end of a long war. Crumbs of saffron cake I’ve spilled over my plate perfume the air. The sun is setting and Baba Saeed finishes reciting his first evening prayer, filling the darkness in the room with scratchy sounds of strangers’ voices. He perches on a wooden chair next to his Kenwood stereo system. I sit on the carpet with blue silk flowers, leaning against his leg. He switches between Persian-language radio from Iran, the U.S., and Israel.
The voice of the anchors is mostly static-y background noise to me as I search for pictures in his heavy books. I’m looking for the familiar — our city in the maps, the five-thousand-year-old ziggurat we visit often, the broken bull sculptures I’ve stood before. Menashe Amir, born Manucher Sachmechi in Tehran, comes on. His ferocity startles me as he sends veiled warnings of military incursions from “Israel” into Iran — a threat to zap our city to a violent death. “What’s going to happen?” I ask.
Baba Saeed narrows his big eyes angrily and bends over to switch off the radio. He says, “My heart, don’t take him seriously, he’s not a good man.” He picks up the book I’d pretended to be reading and brings out a map. “We are here,” he says. He points to a land that borders the Mediterranean Sea to the left of Iran, showing what I learn is Palestine, home of Jesus of Nazareth. “He’s [that man on the radio] changed his name to steal land from here, and god willing, he will continue to fail,” he says, proceeding to play an album of classical Iranian tar.
By the radio, Baba Saeed imparted wisdom to me that had led from life around the ziggurat to our neighborhood. This was an ancient land where the people had long practiced the truth of their continuation. They called out their occupiers as “thieves” — dispossession was not a state to be normalized but to reject and overcome. The resilience that had carried him would be passed on to me, a bead in a rosary that extended from Palestine to Iran and grandfather to child.
Palestinian scholar Tariq Dana defines Israel as “the most sophisticated settler-colonial project of our age”. People across the region the age of Baba Saeed — people who were older than Israel and had witnessed the Regime (as they called it) come into being — shared that view. Their generation saw Zionism as a European ideology driving the usurpation of Palestinian land through the killing and dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants, enabled by the militaristic and diplomatic might of imperialism, the UK, and then the U.S.
The insistence that Israel was a singular homeland of the Jewish people had no resonance for Baba Saeed. He’d grown up praying with his mother and aunts at the tomb of a Jewish prophet. He knew Western Asia as a multi-religious, multi-ethnic land where people of the Abrahamic religions lived together. Iran had given refuge to both Holocaust survivors and those fleeing the Armenian Genocide — genocide could not serve as an excuse to colonize.
Iran voted against both the partition plan of Palestine (into Israel and Palestine) and Israel’s admission to the United Nations in 1947 and 1948 respectively. “Governments who recognize this regime are like a dagger in the heart of the Muslim world,” the Iranian representative to the League of Nations told parliament. The dagger — Western imperial expansion with the UK and then the U.S. at its helm — wasn’t just in Palestine. Baba Saeed had witnessed it plunder his hometown.
As a teenager I’d asked him about the British occupation of Iran when he was my age. He’d recount blond colonial officers beating their Indian laborers on the streets of his hometown: “They hurled those clubs like they were hitting wood, as if it couldn’t tear or bleed.”
The United Kingdom occupied southwestern Iran during both world wars to ensure the flow of Iranian oil to its war in Europe. The strategic access to vital oil reserves — oil reserves that didn’t belong to it — played a crucial role in the Allied victory during both world wars and the rise of the American order following World War II. By university, Baba Saeed joined the student movement that sought to end parasitic contracts that gave Iran only 10% of its oil income. A growing Iranian movement was determined to nationalize Iranian oil and bring the management of the industry and its profits into more Iranian hands.
Neither the British nor Americans appreciated natives wanting a bigger share of their own wealth. They swiftly moved to impose an economic blockade on the country, hoping that this would break Iranian will by toppling the Iranian government.
Baba Saeed, who has a framed picture of that prime minister, Mohamad Mossadeq, on his work desk, told me that the PM, who had been elected by an overwhelming majority of Iranians with the mandate to nationalize oil, only grew more popular. With economic and diplomatic pressure failing to stop him, MI6 and the CIA led a coup against Mossadeq, whom Western papers had called a clown, a demagogue, and Hitler. The coup regime put him under house arrest and executed members of his government. It reinstated the monarch, a jet-setting playboy who had fled Iran during the tumult to shop in Rome’s most opulent street, the Via Veneto.
Imperialists had violently removed a leader who manifested their resolve and crowned a puppet to rule over Iranians — to their utter humiliation. Estemar, or imperialism, I’d learn from my grandfather, destroyed a people’s self-determination by breaking their will. The Shah, forever paranoid of losing power, sought to establish himself as the policeman, the gendarme, of Western supremacy in the region and thus vie for their protection of his throne. He drew Iran closer to Israel as he brutally suppressed growing internal dissent through coordination with Israeli and American intelligence services.
But it was no longer just Baba Saeed’s generation rejecting the Shah. His daughter, my mother, was also turning to the revolution. For every generation, Palestine showed the full breadth of imperialist intent and showed the way to defy it.
My mother recalls her first revolutionary act as pouring orange juice on the curb behind their house, after Baba Saeed saw “Made in Israel” on the can. He’d shaken his head in disbelief. “Food grown on stolen, occupied land is haram — it is unholy to go into the body.” He was ashamed that Iran was a destination for Israeli products, he told her.
Something in his words spoke to her — stolen land — resonated deeply. My mother despised the way she and her classmates were compelled to sing for the Shah and American presidents at school. Classmates who had been too openly defiant would be expelled and one would never be seen again. On weekend trips out of the city, they drove by American bases. She’d feel a deep sense of shame, “as if we were occupied though not formally, and we could do nothing about it.” Her father recounted the time the Shah flew 18 planes of couture dresses, hors d’oeuvre, and rare French champagne from Paris to golden tents erected upon the desert ruins of Persepolis to celebrate “2500 years of the Persian Empire” with over 600 guests — most of them European. The country was ruled by a man completely indebted to imperialists for his rule, lost in a delusion of grandiosity heading to a point of rupture.
In explaining the years leading to the Iranian Revolution, M. H. Pesaran (writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Walton) writes, “The mood of discontent in 1977 was further reinforced by a prolonged period of political suppression and the torture of political prisoners of which people were becoming increasingly aware, and the relatively large presence of U.S. military personnel in Iran that revived the anti-American sentiments of the 1950s.”
Within a year of pouring the orange juice, my mother would cover her long braids underneath a Palestinian kaffiyeh, as university students are now doing throughout the world, and my grandfather wore a beard — signs of piety and public support for the growing resistance movement against the Shah.
At night my mother would pull the blinds as Baba Saeed called the family. He’d smuggle in cassette tapes of speeches by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the fiery cleric who had emerged as the most imposing voice of their resistance movement. Khomeini was a marja’ — a Shi’a authority of the highest decree — who had been exiled to the Iraqi city of Najaf, home to the most renowned Shia seminaries. He was preaching a revolt that had both political and spiritual dimensions, and the radio had become his transmission medium.
Khomeini had likened Israel’s “usurping” of Palestinian land to the U.S. military’s control of Iran: a form of occupation. Increasingly, he prescribed the overthrow of the monarchy, the opulent, corrupt kingdom, or the taqoot, as both within oneself and against imperialism and its puppet regimes, like the Shah. To reject the powers that aimed to devour them, Iranians had to seek Ezzate Nafs, a dignity that only god could bestow through spiritual purification.
The household kept a photo of Khomeini hidden underneath a book in the library, but there was another portrait alongside it of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the largest Palestinian armed resistance group, Fatah — like Khomeini, he was also a refugee. To the family, they represented the front that the people of the region formed against Israel, and thus against Western hegemony.
Honoring the way of the prophets
Iran has always rejected Israel’s claim of being a singular homeland to the Jewish people, a claim that intentionally omits Jewish life in Western Asia that goes as far back as the Biblical narrative. Just as Iran had been a home of the Jewish people, Revolutionary Iran would be joined by Iranian Jews. Lior Sternfeld, whose book Between Iran and Zion chronicles the life of Iranian Jewry in the twentieth century, writes that Jewish Iranians who came of age during the coup, as my grandfather had, were “already acquainted with socialist theories and politics and expressed its views loudly and clearly as the rest of Iranian society prepared for a revolution.”
These Iranian Jews were to play a critical role in establishing the separation of Zionism — the ideology vying for the colonization of Palestinian land in the name of Jews — from Judaism. In so doing, they asserted their radical and revolutionary status in the struggle against imperialist rule.
“Prophets of god all wanted to free mankind. Moses is mentioned more than any other in the Quran. Our revolution honors the way of the prophets. Zionists have no religion, they are usurpers and thieves,” Khomeini said.
Haroun Yashayaie, an Iranian Jewish activist and media executive whose revolutionary Marxist group publicly supported Khomeini stood at the steps of the airplane that brought him home to Iran on February 1, 1979. Yashayaie subsequently followed him, with other Jewish leaders, to the martyr’s cemetery where Khomeini made his first sermon as the leader of the revolution, denouncing the existence of American bases on Iranian soil. The Shah had escaped the country and the revolutionary government was declared within days. Yasser Arafat was the first foreign dignitary to visit revolutionary Iran, calling the Iranian revolution “a great triumph for Palestine.” My mother says that Baba Saeed had tears in his eyes that night as he sat by the radio whispering the salavat — a veneration to Prophet Muhammad — quietly under his breath each time Khomeini’s name was repeated.
Punishing the revolution
Iranians would relieve their country of U.S. bases. But the U.S. still dominated Western Asia and most of the world. It would come after Iranians by other means. Fearing the revolution’s rippling power, the U.S. threw its weight behind a proxy war that would stop at nothing to thwart Iran, even enabling the use of chemical weapons for the first time since World War I to burn Iranian advancement. The conflict lasted nearly a decade and ended with Iran and the U.S. facing off directly in the Persian Gulf, thereby revealing what Iran had long known about U.S. expansionism — to protect its interests, the U.S. would even occupy and fight natives in their waters. Iran would bear most of the bruises of that conflict but it would remain intact and serve as a powerful link between aggrieved resistance movements, whose communities had suffered at the hands of the U.S. and Israel across the region. That is when I first remember sitting next to my grandfather.
Henceforth, the United States would not pursue direct military confrontation with Iran but it would proceed to bleed Iranians to obedience. Frantz Fanon describes that Revolution would be forced to face an adversary who “ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited exploration of new means of terror.” A global U.S.-imposed blockade sprinkled with military aggression and campaigns of sabotage and terrorism carried out by Israel has intensified throughout my lifetime.
One-third of the Iranian population is being starved under siege. Mossad has gunned down Iranian scientists on our streets next to their children. Baba Saeed, who flew to The Hague as a respected legal scholar, is now rationing chicken. The revolutionary government to which my grandfather committed his life appears to him drowned in corruption. Mass protests erupt and end in violence. The country is spinning out of direction, to a place for which we have no name. After a lifetime of listening and rejecting him, Baba Saeed accepts Amir’s doomsday visions. It is my grandfather’s bitter disillusionment that leads him to reject his past so violently as to succumb to a horror whose depths he is unwilling to acknowledge.
The revolutionary present
I sit with Marjan Yashayaie, Haroun Yashayaie’s 56-year-old daughter, whom I’ve known for a decade now. Her midtown Tehran apartment is familiar and unpretentious, like Marjan, whose kind brown eyes and warm embrace remind me of an aunt. Pictures of her nephew’s bar mitzvah in a stripe tallit shawl hang to the wall in front of us. She shows me photos of her grandson in Shiraz as we drink tea sitting at the dining room table. The children of Gaza are present with us as she deplores their killing and the “apocalyptic scenarios” Iranians are willing to imagine upon themselves, forced on them by what she calls “the voices of Iran’s enemies on satellite television.”
“We’re in a dangerous place, but we are also an old nation. We’ve been here before and we’ve found a way out — the Revolution was that exactly,” she says as she recounts her first memory of the movement’s victory: young army officers accepting chubby pink carnations from people on the streets of Tehran and putting them in their rifles. Of course, the Revolution would be so much more — the past 43 years more — but she says, “Those who say the revolution wasn’t necessary don’t remember the terror from which it saved us.”
It had been a country where “my family was afraid of saying the Shah’s name in our home,” where her father’s friends were executed overnight and buried in mass graves — a satellite state controlled by foreign powers.
Her father, a young man on the streets of Tehran during the coup against Mossadeq, would impart the pain and humiliation of foreign intervention to his children, along with the will to reject it. He supported the Iranian Revolution as a culmination of an anti-imperialist movement that sought to establish Iran’s independence, Marjan tells me. Up until very recently, Iran carried through to establish a government that vouched for popular legitimacy through elections while also trying to find solutions out of the new challenges imposed upon it by the very forces it had risen to oppose.
One lesson, Marjan explains to me, is that once a revolutionary society succeeds in defying its oppressors, the revolution can be cast as unnecessary, even a mistake. As a revolutionary society tries to forge a path forward, getting increasingly weaker under the blockade, it is forced to justify its existence — to the very people who brought it into being. Those imperialist forces which Iran sought independence from would stop at nothing to “wipe our memories away as a first step in weakening our collective,” Marjan says, for the crime of “daring to take the management of our country into our own hands.”
As the editor of a health magazine, she is intricately aware of the ways sanctions, which aim to pulverize a revolutionary society’s ability to govern itself, “destroy a nation like a virus consumes a body.” This was most notable during COVID to her, when the U.S. intensified the blockade against Iran as Iranians were dying of a pandemic. “It was difficult to pinpoint where sanctions ended and disease began,” Marjan tells me. “They both were out to take our lives and only we were there to save ourselves.”
She is proud of Iran’s COVID response. “We pulled through, like we did during the war. To me that proves it [the Revolution] is still amongst us.”
On nights I visit Baba Saeed, we talk intermittently into the late hours. If I manage to steer the conversation as I plan, he will eventually tell stories of his revolutionary days, so long as they are far enough into the past so as not to disturb his present conclusions. But I am content. Those moments are proof to me that Amir’s visions of our obliteration have not materialized. Much has been lost, but I am sitting on the same carpet on which he and my mother gathered, now thinned by time, where I, too, scheme a way to liberation. I am empowered by what I know of his past, though bound to what he wants to remember. Like Baba Saeed, I find the clearing by looking to the Holy Land — to Gaza. Gaza’s resistance is kindling a revolutionary fire around the world, for Gaza is subjected to man’s darkest cruelties while refusing to break.
Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s children, blowing its universities into dark ash, murdering doctors, and burying patients in mass graves. The trail of tears is photographed on the face of a child crushed under rubble. And still for 200 days, as I write, the Israelis and Americans have failed to “secure” Gaza. The city will not surrender. Its fighters are pushing back the Israeli occupation forces. A grandmother cooks bread in a clay oven she has built from the earth around her tent. Doctors birth a baby from the womb of her dead mother. Israel’s massacre becomes more unthinkable, every escalation exposing its true intentions — genocide. The U.S. sends Israel more fighter jets and 2000-pound bombs. The American Vice President tells viewers that Israel has little choice, that it must “defend itself.” Genocide claims inevitability. African-American philosopher Lewis Gordon describes it as taking on “cosmological” manifestations.
Between Tehran and Gaza lies the oldest continuously inhabited region of the world, home to the Abrahamic religions. They who have most ardently practiced the art of continuity outright reject a world in which their land and children are up for pillage. Revolution is the power they find within their own communities to denounce the reality imposed by the occupier and bring their emancipation into being. It will light a flame in the hearts of all truth-seekers. It will pave the clearing.
This piece represents a new low, even for Mondoweiss. It obscenely glorifies a movement that led to an even worse and more vicious tyranny than the one it overthrew, a regime that commits acts of violence beyond its borders, kidnapping and murdering Iranian dissidents in Europe and North America while it oppresses women and minorities and stifles free expression at home. The author, Mr. Aran, and Mondoweiss through their pompous and self-righteous distortions and falsifications have stained their hands with the blood of the Imams’ victims.
Sorry not patient enough to read this.
The optics say: Khomeini and the rule of the imams is good because they support the Palestinians.
I think Khomeini and the rule of imams is very very very bad and anyone who supports it is quite openly antidemocracy and anti women.