In Pursuit of Whiteness: Why Iranian Monarchists Cheer Israel’s Genocide

‘We have been reliably informed by sources within the Met Police, that (…) the Far Right led by Tommy Robinson, [and] a group of Iranian monarchists (…) will be attending the protests tomorrow to antagonise and damage the peaceful protests.’

Text message received before a pro-Palestine rally, 2024

Anyone engaged in Palestine solidarity in Western Europe or North America has witnessed a disturbing spectacle: Iranian monarchists in the diaspora supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians with fanatic zeal. At pro-Israel rallies, clad in pre-1979 flags, they march shoulder to shoulder with Jewish supremacists, the far right and other enablers of mass slaughter. On TV debates, they justify the systematic murder of Palestinian children. Their commitment is not merely rhetorical, as they often physically intimidate their pro-Palestine compatriots. In 2024 in London, a towering young male monarchist called an elder Iranian activist woman a terrorist and told her to “go get raped by Hamas.” She was later mocked online for her age and vulnerability.

In some diasporic communities where monarchism is strong and Zionism enjoys structural support—Southern California being the prime example—their commitment can turn violent. Iranian pro-Palestine activists report regularly receiving death threats. Self-appointed Iranian vigilantes have physically attacked the UCLA encampment students with batons, their methods eerily reminiscent of the plainclothes thugs who brutalise protesters in Iran itself. The fervour of monarchist Zionism is all the more surprising as it defies trends observed elsewhere. Across the West, while state, corporate and media support for Israel’s genocide remains unwavering, public opinion—bombarded daily with images of starved children, incinerated families, and murdered aid seekers—increasingly recoils from Israel’s savagery. Yet Iranian monarchists move in the opposite direction. Their Zionist passion intensifies with each livestreamed atrocity, undeterred even by Israel’s June 2025 attack on their own country, which killed over 1000 Iranians, including many innocent women and children.

This monarchist fervour represents just one manifestation of a broader phenomenon. Iranian pro-Zionist sentiment manifests itself across the spectrum of opposition to the Islamic Republic regime, both abroad and inside Iran. Iranian cyberspace overflows with evidence: Iranians chanting ‘shove that Palestinian flag up your arse’ in the country’s stadiums, or hoisting Israeli flags besides Tehran’s landmarks while crying “long live Israel.”[1] Yet, diaspora monarchists stand out for their visibility, the sheer intensity of their hostility toward Palestinians, the consistency of their support for Israel, and their very real impact in the spaces of Palestine solidarity across the Western world.

What drives Iranian embrace of Israeli genocide? Conventional wisdom attributes Iranian Zionism to oppositional politics: Palestine is the Islamic Republic’s cause, Hamas is Tehran’s “proxy”, therefore opposing the regime demands supporting Israel. By this logic, Zionist bravados are to be seen as courageous acts of resistance. In my view, however, oppositional politics fall short of accounting for the perverse belief that Palestinian extermination will bring about Iranian liberation. When Babak Eshaghi, a correspondent for the Iran International new channel, inscribes “Woman, Life, Freedom” on Gaza’s genocidal rubble, reactive contrarianism is only part of the picture; his satisfaction with the extermination of innocent Palestinians is another, and this is the elephant in the room that the conventional explanation ignores. Iranian anti-Palestinian attitudes must be seen as deep-seated, dehumanising, racial hostility, rooted in what I call Iranian “dislocative nationalism”. This ideology, particularly strong among monarchists, sees Arabs and Muslims as the age-old enemies of Iran, and their destruction as our redemption. What dislocative nationalists do not realise, however, is that their nationalism has internalised the racial hierarchies and Islamophobia central to Western and Zionist colonial epistemologies, which ultimately endanger all Middle Eastern peoples, Iranians included.

What is Dislocative Nationalism?

In my previous work[2], I have argued that dislocative nationalism was born in the nineteenth century, when military defeats and territorial losses to the Russian and British empires shattered Iranian elites’ sense of strength and security. What makes dislocative nationalism so remarkable is its counterintuitive response to this crisis. Rather than rejecting European epistemologies, it embraced them wholesale—internalising the very racial theories and Islamophobia that underpinned European domination in the first place. For any non-white people subjected to European imperialism, this represents an extraordinary feat of ideological contortion.

Two factors have enabled this unlikely adoption. The first was a quirk of the Aryan race theory. When nineteenth-century European thinkers racialised the speakers of Indo-European languages as members of the so-called “Aryan race”, Iranians found themselves reluctantly included. Membership of this white club was never unconditional—racial thinkers like Ernest Renan and Arthur de Gobineau considered Iranians a “debased” variety of Aryans at best. Yet some Iranian intellectuals seized upon even this grudging inclusion, seeing it as a pathway to claim kinship with their European tormentors, who—in a stunning psychological reversal—became our cousins. The second factor was Iran’s ambiguous experience of colonialism. Unlike so many territories in Asia and Africa, and though subjected to Russian and British interference, Iran was never formally colonised. This meant that European racial violence was never systematically imposed upon Iranians in ways that might have inoculated them against European racism. They kept hoping for inclusion in the dominant race, a seductive though naïve belief. 

I define dislocative nationalism in terms of its function; what it does is to rhetorically dislodge Iran from its observable reality. Iran—geographically situated in the Middle East, culturally intertwined with Iraq, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf, historically connected to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and predominantly Muslim for well over a millennium—gets reimagined as an Aryan nation, a wayward cousin of the Europeans lost in the wrong neighbourhood where the Arab “Semites” live, the Aryans’ racial others. The last Shah captured this perfectly when he described Iran’s Middle Eastern location as an “accident of geography.”

The Aryan race theory racialises Islam as the product of the “Arab/Semitic mind” and assumes that it is fundamentally alien to Iran’s supposedly Aryan essence. Here lies the key to understanding contemporary Iranian monarchist Zionism and Islamophobic opposition to the Islamic Republic. The rich, complex, centuries-long process by which Persianate societies adopted and transformed Islam gets brutally reduced into an overnight event: the “Arab invasion”, which epitomises the supposed racial hostility of Arabs towards Iranians and the Persian language. This narrative is historically fraudulent. As historians know, Persianate elites played a crucial role in Islam’s eastward expansion, and the Persian language became Islam’s second tongue, stamping out other Iranian languages such as Sogdian and Bactrian in the process.[3] But in nationalist belief systems, historical accuracy matters less than ideological function. The purpose of the “Arab invasion” myth is to provide a racial scapegoat for every Iranian failure, from nineteenth-century military defeats to the 1979 Revolution. Each catastrophe becomes evidence of contamination by “Semitic filth”—the racial mixing that represents every racial thinker's nightmare. The solution to Iran’s predicaments, according to this dislocative nationalist logic, is racial purification—uprooting Islamic practices and Arabic loanwords like surgical removal of foreign tissue. This national mutilation will supposedly restore Iran to its pre-Islamic glory. As 1930s ideologue Ali-Akbar Siyasi put it, Iranians must “clear up the Persian soul from this impurity [Islam] and allow it to shine from the sparkle peculiar to the Aryan genius.”[4] 

From the Pahlavi State to the Diaspora

History has a dark sense of irony. What began as a marginal ideology among nineteenth-century Iranian intellectuals would, through the accidents of politics and power, become the official creed of the Pahlavi state (1925-79). The transformation was swift and total. In the 1930s, Tehran sprouted neo-classical buildings with Achaemenid elements like concrete monuments to ancient fantasy. The dislocative nationalist reading of history—locating Iran’s stage of grandeur in its pre-Islamic past while casting Islam’s arrival as an apocalyptic “Arab invasion”—was hammered into young minds through mass education. Entire generations learned to see their own culture as contaminated by Islam and the Arabs.

The most perverse aspect of this project was its claim to authenticity. Reza Shah’s brutal campaign to Westernise Iran—banning Islamic practices, imposing Western dress, including forcibly unveiling women—was marketed as a return to “genuine Iranianness.” The destruction of Iranian cultural and religious life masqueraded as its restoration. His son Mohammad Reza adopted the historically meaningless title Āryāmehr (Light of the Aryans) while copying British royal pageantry down to their coronation ceremonies, court dresses and even royal carriage. This wholesale aping of Europeans is still celebrated today as a patriotic achievement—a stunning example of how dislocative nationalism transforms cultural suicide into national pride. But the clearest evidence of the Shah’s ideological commitment lay in his foreign policy, built on a close alliance with hegemonic powers, particularly the US. Anti-colonialism is simply not in the dislocative nationalist DNA. When Western powers are your racial cousins, they become allies by definition; only the racial other—the Arab Muslim—can be the enemy. Colonial collaboration becomes inevitable.

Fast-forward to today's diaspora, where dislocative nationalism thrives among Islamic Republic opponents, particularly Pahlavi nostalgics. Beyond providing a language of resistance to the current regime, it offers something more seductive: apparent social mobility in Western societies through proximity to whiteness. While the Aryan gambit increasingly backfires—for most Westerners, Aryanism evokes Nazism—Islamophobia opens doors. Dislocative nationalists eagerly embrace anti-Muslim tropes—extremism, misogyny, sexual deviance—finding receptive Western audiences. Their “insider” perspectives in turn lend legitimacy to Western Islamophobia in a perverse circle. They oppose mosque construction, fuel conspiracy theories about stealth jihad and great replacement, and, when convenient, deploy the seemingly progressive language of femo-nationalism and pinkwashing as weapons against Islam. This versatile Islamophobia becomes their passport application to whiteness.

In white supremacy, there is a long history of co-opting individuals from racialised groups. African Americans know their “house negroes” and “Toms”. During their liberation struggles, Zimbabweans decried the “sell-outs” and “coconuts” among them. Closer to us – Palestinians have their “normalisers” (3omala) and “collaborators” (motabi3oon) who cosy up to their Israeli oppressors. However, what makes Iranian dislocative nationalists distinctive is that they are not mere collaborators. They wholesale embrace white supremacy itself. Rather than challenging the system of racial oppression, they uphold it and seek inclusion within it—throwing victims of racial violence, including Iranians themselves, under the bus in the process. The limits of this strategy reveal themselves with cruel clarity. Despite Iranian-American support for Trump, he included all Iranians in his “Muslim ban” regardless of their politics. Recently, Iranians holding US citizenship and even avowed enemies of the Iranian regime have been routinely targeted by an ICE turbocharged by Trumpism. As Neda Maghbouleh brilliantly captures it, Iranians in America encounter the “limits of whiteness”—a glass ceiling that hovers perpetually overhead.[5] No degree of Aryan posturing or Islamophobic performance can shatter it. 

Zionism as the Ladder to Whiteness

Dislocative nationalism and Zionism are both products of Western modernity’s core features: ethnic nationalism, racial hierarchy and capitalism. Moreover, Zionism embraces the fundamental Western colonial assumption that non-white peoples only exist to solve white peoples’ problems. In this context, the problem is Europe’s unique history of antisemitism and its tragic culmination in the Holocaust. The solution was formulated in terms of a Jewish state in Palestine, which requires that Palestinians be dispossessed of their lands, and their indigenous society be destroyed. This is a classic colonial equation in which the non-white indigenous must pay the existential price for Europe’s mistakes.

For dislocative nationalists, this arrangement offers additional appeal. The destruction of a largely Arab and Muslim population serves a double purpose: it advances the Western colonial project they desperately want to join, while simultaneously delivering what they imagine as Iran’s historical revenge for both the “Arab invasion” and the 1979 Revolution. During one of Israel’s many military incursions into Gaza, an Italian friend travelling in Tehran was told that the Gazans’ suffering, though regrettable, was a case of “karma” for Islam and the 1979 Revolution. As Arabs, Palestinians are inherently and collectively responsible for our problems. In this context, and as perverse as it might seem, Palestinian suffering becomes a vicarious victory against the racialised enemy. Here lies the ideological foundation for dislocative nationalist complicity with Zionism: both systems require Arab-Muslim destruction to achieve their vision of racial redemption.

Israel’s current hostility toward the Islamic Republic creates a strategic opportunity for Israeli propagandists to claim allyship with the Iranian people against their oppressive regime. It is easy to appeal to dislocative nationalist sensibilities; all it takes is to praise Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage and lionise Cyrus the Great. Israeli officials do it very well, even while bombing Iranian cities, and it works. Even Reza Pahlavi himself, claimant to the throne, has been recruited into this propaganda campaign orchestrated by Gila Gamliel, the former Israeli minister of intelligence. He and his wife toured Israel in 2023, praising the “values” that we apparently “share” with Israelis. The strategy works devastatingly well and has now been institutionalised through Israeli influence over diaspora opposition media, most notably the London-based Iran International news channel, which is today more zealously pro-Israel than many Israeli outlets.

To understand why Iranians can praise military attacks against their own country, it should be remembered that dislocative nationalists do not see the Islamic Republic as Iranian at all, but as a manifestation of the supposed age-old Arab-Islamic hostility towards Iranians. The regime’s leaders are routinely referred to as tāzi-zādeh (of Arab descent), and Reza Pahlavi even refers to them as “occupiers”, stressing their supposed foreignness. The Israelis have gladly embraced this discourse, including in their military propaganda at the height of their bombing campaign against Iran, which presented the regime as Zahhāk, a mythical villain understood in popular culture to be an Arab usurper. In this twisted logic, monarchists applaud each Israeli strike as liberation against a supposedly non-Iranian regime. This manipulation represents the ultimate triumph of hasbara: transforming victims of Israeli aggression into cheerleaders for their own destruction. 

However, despite these systemic and contingent alliances, Zionism serves an even more fundamental purpose in the diasporic quest for whiteness. In the minds of dislocative nationalists, no gesture earns Western validation quite like enthusiastic support for Zionism—the most structurally Western of all ideologies. Born in Europe as a response to European antisemitism, realised through European colonial methods, and sustained by Western imperial power, Zionism represents the purest distillation of white supremacy projected onto the Middle East.

For diaspora Iranians seeking entry into whiteness, supporting this project becomes the ultimate loyalty test because it demonstrates two essential qualifications for whiteness: complete de-Islamisation and total abandonment of Global South solidarity. Cheering the destruction of an Arab and Muslim majority population represents, in the Western colonial imagination, the highest form of civilisational advancement. This is why the intensity of Iranian monarchist Zionism often exceeds that of many Western supporters. They must prove themselves more committed to Palestinian destruction than those who designed it, more enthusiastic about Muslim suffering than those who orchestrate it. Supporting a live-streamed genocide against their neighbours becomes not betrayal but graduation—the final exam in the curriculum of whiteness. That this test is rigged, that whiteness remains perpetually out of reach, that today’s Palestinian victims can prefigure tomorrow’s Iranian targets—these truths remain invisible to those whose view of the world has been shaped by dislocative nationalism. 

The Limits of Oppositional Politics

The explanation that Iranian Zionism is merely a matter of “oppositional politics” hardly stands up to scrutiny. If Iranian monarchist hatred truly stemmed from opposing everything the Islamic Republic supports, we should see equivalent fury directed at the regime’s most important allies: Russia and China. These powers do not merely offer diplomatic support—they actively enable domestic repression. Russian and Chinese technologies power Iran’s surveillance apparatus, facial recognition systems, and crowd control methods. When Iranian protesters face batons or journalists disappear into prison, they encounter tools perfected in Moscow and Beijing.

Monarchists, including Reza Pahlavi himself, do criticise Russia and China for their relationship with Tehran and even make bombastic claims about Iran becoming a “Chinese colony.” Yet despite these criticisms, the emotional responses could not be more different. No Iranian monarchist chants “death to Russia” with the fervour they bring to cursing Palestine. None proposes using Chinese flags for toilet paper, as they gleefully suggest with Palestinian symbols. When Ukrainian drones kill Russians, Iranian opposition social media does not erupt in celebration the way it does when Palestinian children are incinerated.

This asymmetry becomes more glaring when we consider that Palestinians—unlike Russia and China—pose zero threat to the Iranian opposition. It is structurally impossible for a subjugated nation, victim of 80 years of colonisation and genocide, to support the Iranian regime in any meaningful way. Palestinians remain passive recipients of whatever help they can get, while Russia and China are global superpowers whose repressive technologies directly harm Iranian dissidents. Aware of this logical contradiction, dislocative nationalists desperately cite Yasser Arafat’s 1980s support for Saddam to manufacture timeless Palestinian enmity, or baselessly claim the regime hires Palestinian operatives to beat Iranian anti-government protestors.

The smoking gun lies in their response to Palestinian suffering itself. As Gazan children starve, some Iranian accounts celebrate with the hashtag #بیا_اینو_بخور [AD1] (“come eat/suck this”—a vulgar sexual taunt), posting pictures of lavish Iranian dishes as if to torment the starving Palestinians. This represents the lowest moral point in modern Iranian history. It also exposes oppositional politics as a fraudulent explanation. Such inhumane depravity cannot stem from political disagreement but from deeper ideological poison—specifically, dislocative nationalism. Only this framework explains monarchist behaviour: the combination of internalised racial Islamophobia, desperate pursuit of whiteness, and instinctive embrace of Western hegemony. Remove dislocative nationalism from the equation, and their attitudes become inexplicable. Factor it in, and their conduct—however deplorable—appears as following predictable logic.

The Mirage of Alliance

There is also a pragmatic argument for Iranian monarchist Zionism: Israel's demonstrated capabilities inside Iran. The assassinations of nuclear scientists, IRGC commanders, and the devastating attacks of June 2025 reveal deep Israeli infiltration of the regime. For monarchists, Israel appears as a deus ex machina—capable of delivering regime change from the sky at no cost to themselves. When Israeli bombs land on Iranian territory, monarchists applaud while echoing Israeli propaganda about “surgical strikes”, supposedly aimed at regime targets exclusively. The hundreds of civilian casualties are conveniently erased from this narrative to maintain Israeli innocence. In this context, Reza Pahlavi himself, “crown prince” of an imaginary pro-West kingdom that exists only in AI-generated videos, has long courted Israeli lobby groups, hoping they would champion his cause. What his Zionist partners never mention is that the assumption that “Jewish influence” can control superpower policies to serve your interests follows classical antisemitic logic. The same antisemitic assumptions motivated the infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration. 

Israeli propagandists actively cultivate the mirage of a natural alliance against the Islamic Republic by positioning themselves as solidarity partners with the Iranian opposition, particularly the women’s movement, and by repeating old Pahlavi tropes of Iranian-Jewish friendship. Yet the idea that Iran and Israel share common interests represents a fundamental delusion rooted in the dislocative nationalist logic that racialises Arabs as Iran’s eternal enemy and therefore casts their oppressor as Iran’s natural friend. The reality is starkly different. Israel serves no one’s interests but its own agenda of Palestinian genocide and regional domination. Israeli strategic thinking—far from embracing Iranian partnership—is characterised by what Israeli scholar Haggai Ram terms “Iranophobia.”[6] Its worldview, rooted in Islamophobia and supremacist ideology, demands US-Israeli hegemony over all Middle Eastern states. This can be achieved through capitalist integration, as in the case of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. However, in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as previously in the case of Assad’s Syria, it needs to be imposed by force. 

In this context, Israeli objectives in Iran extend far beyond regime change or nuclear disarmament. Israeli policymakers seek an Iran fundamentally incapable of challenging US-Israeli domination. While an allied Iran might theoretically serve this purpose, Israeli strategists recognise this as a fantasy. Iran’s complex, diverse society offers no guarantee that dislocative nationalism would triumph in a post-Islamic Republic order. Therefore, Israel’s preferred solution, supported by US neoconservatives, mirrors its Syrian success: balkanisation. A failed state, fragmented into competing ethnic militias and political factions, posing no threat to Israel. Each fragment would be too weak to resist, too divided to unite, too dependent to rebel. As Eskandar Sadeghi-Borujerdi analysed it, “the logical culmination of a decades-long consensus in Washington and Tel Aviv” is that “no independent power in the Middle East should be able to escape the architecture of subordination”. This is the objective that monarchists are sleepwalking into. 

Why Palestinian Liberation is Iranian Liberation

Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is the greatest crime of our time. But for us Iranians, it is also our own genocide. Those Iranian monarchists cheering Israel's assault fail to grasp a fundamental truth—that in the Western racial imagination, Palestinian and Iranian lives carry identical value: zero. 

Let me explain why our fates are intertwined. Palestinian extermination operates not only through Israel’s monstrous citizen-soldiers, but through the Western world's unwavering state, corporate and media support for Zionism. This support, in turn, is partly rooted in Islamophobia, a form of racism that dehumanises the people of the Middle East. It is Islamophobia that makes sections of Euro-American public opinion so attuned to Israeli suffering and so impervious to Palestinian. Don’t get me wrong, many Westerners oppose the genocide, and some even take serious risks by exposing themselves to police violence and media demonisation. However, the numbers are not sufficient to stop the genocide or even slow it down. The reality is that beyond street protests, large sections of the Western public, particularly its elites, continue to watch Palestinian children be incinerated with complete indifference, if not out-and-out support. 

My point is that this pathological, Islamophobic lack of empathy makes no distinction between Middle Eastern peoples. It is the same Islamophobia that enabled Western complicity during the Iran-Iraq War, when a million civilians perished whilst Western powers armed Saddam Hussein. When he gassed scores of Iranian and Iraqi soldiers and civilians, the same Western powers who would later topple him for possessing weapons of mass destruction simply looked the other way. Chemical weapons posed no problem—so long as they were used against us. It is the same Islamophobic mindset that explains the general Western shrug when USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air flight 655, gratuitously murdering 290 Iranian civilians in 1988. Iranian blood is as disposable as Palestinian blood.

This is system, not coincidence. Islamophobia racialises all Middle Eastern peoples as inherently violent and expendable. Whether you speak Arabic or Persian, pray five times a day or drink wine with your dinner, support the Islamic Republic or oppose it—none matters when Western interests demand regional subjugation. The sanctions strangling Iranian families, while not remotely comparable in human cost to the deliberate starvation of Gazans, follow the same logic: Middle Eastern suffering is acceptable collateral damage for Western hegemony. The same frameworks justifying Palestinian subjugation rationalised Israel's bombing of Iranian cities. Western politicians deployed identical language: human shields, necessary collateral damage, and of course Israel's “right to defend itself.” The German chancellor Friedrich Merz even “thanked” Israel for doing the “dirty work” for all of Europe. 

For too long, dislocative nationalism has convinced Iranians we can escape our Middle Eastern condition through proximity to whiteness. This is why Iranian monarchists imagine their Islamophobia and chest-beating Zionism can purchase Western acceptance. This is self-defeating delusion. The Palestinian genocide and the attacks against Iran exposed this strategy's bankruptcy. No Islamophobic performance or Zionist enthusiasm will grant entry into the white world that bombs our cities and sanctions our families. 

The struggles across our region are inseparable. Palestinian liberation from genocide connects to Iranian liberation from sanctions and military attacks, and Syrian, Yemenite and Sudanese liberation from colonial wars, aerial bombing and proxy conflicts. All emerge from the same imperial logic, treating our lives as expendable. When we stand with Palestinian resistance, we challenge Western domination over our entire region. When we cheer their destruction, we strengthen the forces oppressing us all. The Palestinian flag represents our common struggle for dignity and sovereignty. We are attacked as one people—therefore we must respond as one people. Rarely in history has a rallying cry connected local, regional, and universal experiences of oppression with such clarity. From indigenous lands to sanctioned economies, from surveillance states to bombed cities, wherever the powerful crush the powerless, where colonial logic dehumanises entire peoples, where resistance faces overwhelming force, one slogan unites our common struggle for dignity and sovereignty:

Free Palestine.

The author would like to thank Sara Mashayekh, Khodadad Rezakhani and Eskandar Sadeghi-Borujerdi for extensive comments on an earlier draft.