Iran’s Sky and Soil: The Conflict of Dreams

Naftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister of Israel, addressed the Iranian people on the day of the Israeli attack, saying: “Your time is now. Free yourselves from the yoke of cruel dictators and build a future full of life and freedom for your children.” Sky News, in an analysis, wrote: “Hours after Israel’s first strike, Netanyahu could not have been clearer: Iranians must overthrow the regime.”

What has drawn certain segments of the Iranian right^[i] toward Israel—beyond financial interests—is the belief that an Israeli attack could spark a popular uprising, eventually toppling the Islamic Republic. This hope was echoed by Reza Pahlavi^[ii], the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch, who told reporters in Tel Aviv: “I am ready to fill the power vacuum.”

In these moments, we should recall the long history of Iran's struggle against dreams of domination, monarchical and otherwise. The modern history of Iran is a record of the struggle against unjust and unfree visions, from the Constitutional Revolution^[iii] of the early 20th century to the 1979 Revolution, and from 1979 to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of recent years. It is a history of attempts to awaken Iranians to the possibility of an undominated world. 

The IRGC offered Iranians the dream of a secure Iran, yet Israel's assassination of its commanders has exposed its fictiveness. And now, we are caught in a nightmarish vison conjured in Israel’s war rooms and materialized in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. This dream is the “New Middle East.” Israel has been unscrupulous in imposing this vision on the world. In just the past few days, Iranians have felt this vision in their flesh. The objections raised by some Iranian secular intellectuals to Israel’s genocide in Gaza—although these objections exposed them to accusations from right-wing factions of aligning with the Islamic Republic—were, in fact, a foretelling of a dream that has now materialized in Tehran. Israel’s annihilation of Gaza is an apocalyptic revelation of Israel’s vision for Iran.

Beneath the war in the skies over Iran, an equally significant war is unfolding on the ground —a ground that now extends wherever Iranians live, both inside and outside the country. Backed by the full force of their media machines, the Iranian right is actively marketing Israel’s dream as if it were the dream of the Iranian people. All their propaganda extending “gratitude toward Israel”[iv] are offerings to Israel. They are, in fact, valuable gifts to Israel, as they enable it to frame its aggression as “an act of helping to save the Iranian people.”

Let me put it more clearly: What Iran’s rulers have done in pursuit of their own dreams has had unintended consequences—it has opened the moral conscience of some Iranians to embrace Israel’s nightmarish vision. A people long exhausted by the dreams of their own rulers now face the danger of falling into the trap of Zionism’s ominous dream. This is the key to understanding the rising prominence of Iranian supporters of Israel—particularly among monarchist opposition figures and other right-wing factions. The moral decay that is manifested in the discourse of this opposition, in their endorsement of aggression, is nothing but a Persian-language articulation of Israel’s strategic vision.

Israel’s military advances and regional successes have emboldened the voice of the right-wing opposition and lent their language a new sense of clarity and confidence. The crucial and irreducible point is this: behind their celebration of Israel’s attack lies a profound mistrust of social movements, revolution, and, more broadly, the power of the people. They betray a deep-seated belief that the people themselves cannot bring about meaningful change, making foreign intervention necessary. And when Israel kills Iranians, they justify the deaths as collateral damage in the liberation of the Islamic Republic. Under this ideological and discursive framework, “patriots” openly applaud Israel’s war on Iran.

But the Naftali Bennets of the world fundamentally misunderstand Iran’s middle class . What he fails to grasp is that those placing their hopes in him and in his cannibalistic government are, in fact, individuals with no real intention of taking political action. They expect Israel to overthrow the regime precisely because they are unwilling—or unable—to do so themselves. Their applause is not an expression of agency, but of impotence. If Israel is waiting for its supporters to rise up, or if Israel’s supporters are waiting for Netanyahu to bring down the Iranian government, then both are caught in a recursive and fruitless loop—one that will end only in disillusionment. 

Over the past few days, it has become clear that those who invoked Iran and its internal crises to justify their indifference to Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza are, in fact, the very same people for whom an attack on Iran itself carries little or no moral weight. Their apparatus of justification—through the erasure of harm, casualties, and consequences—has implicitly, and at times explicitly, expressed satisfaction with these events, often reducing the entire assault to a single line: “They only targeted IRGC commanders. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is understood as emblematic of the structural and ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic, then the Iranian right can be seen as a mirror reflection of its imagined enemy: authoritarianism. Beneath their proclamations of patriotism and opposition to tyranny, their support for military strikes on both Gaza and Iran—and their overt expressions of satisfaction at the resulting loss of life—clearly reveal their political orientation. This opposition—whether operating through media platforms, policy circles in Washington, or urban centers within Iran—ultimately reproduces the very authoritarian tendencies it claims to resist. In doing so, it disregards the militaristic nature of Israel’s regional project, denies the concrete realities of war, and diminishes—or even renders irrelevant—the deaths of civilians in the very homeland it purports to represent and defend. 

There are rare and exceptional moments in history when the deep-rooted bond between the state and its opposition (a segment of the nation) fully reveals itself—a fundamental ontological relationship that freedom-seeking and justice-oriented movements have always sought to sever. These movements have consistently aimed to transform this bond into a relationship between society and the state—one based on accountability, not identity. In collective psychology, patriotism is a fluid concept—it can attach itself to anything and dissolve into it.

This is why it has given rise both to liberation movements and to fascism, to both heroes and monsters. The crucial difference lies in who invokes the word homeland. Reza Pahlavi uses it, as do figures such as Dariush Forouhar^[v]. The 1979 Revolution against monarchy in Iran was a freedom-seeking and justice-oriented one and Iranians, just like the rest of the post-monarchical world, are trying to build a just and free society on their own terms. Reza Pahlavi and Naftali Bennett desire a "Bourbon Restoration;” we want a republican government true to its name. 

That is where the true distinction lies. Yet on Iranian soil, there has always been resistance to these ominous dreams, whether domestic or foreign. For a century and a half, Iranians have endeavored to awaken themselves from unjust and unfree dream worlds. They refuse to replace one dream of domination with another. They remain loyal to the “people’s dream,” They understand that Israel’s war is unjust and refuse to reduce civilian deaths to collateral damage.  They understand that Israel’s dream annihilates the terrain of struggle in Iran and leaves no trace of the results of struggle. The struggle against Israel and its supporters is a struggle against all dreams of domination. To end this war, those of us who refuse those dreams must stand in solidarity.