There is something ironic about the fact that, of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is the one that now finds itself on the brink of war with Israel. Iran is not one of the 22 Arab states party to the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Its population, unlike those of many Arab countries, harbors little anti-Israel sentiment. During the past year, mass rallies in support of the Palestinians have taken place in cities all over the world: Baghdad, Sanaa, New York, and Madrid, to name only a few. Nothing like this has happened at scale in Tehran—when Iranians really protest en masse, they tend to do so against their own regime and its obsession with Israel.
Alas, wars are waged by governments, not peoples. And because the regime ruling Iran has long made hostility toward Israel central to its identity, Iran now faces a direct confrontation with the Jewish state, regardless of whether most Iranians want such a war. For the country’s opposition, the prospect has occasioned a divide—between those who fear that the next round of fighting will be a costly setback to their efforts and those who cautiously hope that it will shake something loose.
In the first camp are many Iranian dissidents, both inside and outside the country, who loudly protested Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in April and October. Now they are also opposed to an Israeli counterattack on Iran: All-out war between the two countries, these activists say, would be a disaster in both humanitarian and political terms, making life worse for ordinary Iranians without weakening the Islamic Republic.
Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights advocate imprisoned in Tehran, and Atena Daemi, an activist who recently fled Iran after years in prison, have issued statements decrying a potential war. Mohammad Habibi, the spokesperson for Iran’s teachers’ union, wrote on X that he opposed “any war”; he added that he considered Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. Sadegh Zibakalam, an outspoken political-science professor at the University of Tehran, has repeatedly criticized the Iranian regime’s declared goal of destroying Israel.
The position of this part of the Iranian opposition is friendly neither to Iranian aggression against Israel nor to Israeli strikes on Iran, on the grounds that such hostilities are most likely to preserve the power of the current regime. An Israeli attack on the Iranian oil industry would just collapse the country’s infrastructure and immiserate its people, Hossein Yazdi, a social-democratic activist and former political prisoner in Tehran, told me, and attacking the country’s nuclear sites could bring about a humanitarian disaster. Politically, Yazdi said, an Iran-Israel war would have terrible consequences. “Iranians are the least Islamist people in this region,” Yazdi says. “They are mostly secular and friendly to the West. But a war can make fanatics out of people and give a new lease on life to the Islamic Republic.”
[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]
Many of the regime’s most vociferous opponents in exile think along similar lines. Hamed Esmaeilion, a 47-year-old novelist based in Toronto, has emerged as a major voice for Iran’s secular democratic opposition in recent years. His wife and 9-year-old daughter were among the passengers on PS752, the Ukrainian airliner downed by the Iranian regime under suspicious circumstances in January 2020. Esmaeilion became renowned for his advocacy on behalf of those victims’ families. He published a statement on October 5, a few days after Iran’s latest missile attacks on Israel, calling for opposition both to the Iranian regime and to the “fundamentalist government of Israel, which ignores international treaties and kills many civilians.”
By spelling this out, Esmaeilion was speaking to another group of Iranians who oppose their government: those who favor a war with Israel, or at least regard it as a potentially useful lever for toppling the regime. I encountered such sentiments among many Iranians I talked with—and sometimes in surprising quarters. A mid-level manager at a government ministry told me, “We are in limbo now. If Israel attacks, things can be done with the regime once and for all.” I spoke with some Iranians who said they just hoped that an Israeli attack would hurt the regime leaders and not ordinary people, and some who fantasized that a military confrontation with Israel would lead to a mass uprising that would finally end the regime.
Some in this camp, though not all, support the leadership aspirations of Reza Pahlavi, who was Iran’s crown prince before his father was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi and his supporters have drawn close to Donald Trump and other elements of the international right. In April 2023, the Iranian royal visited Israel and met with Netanyahu. Some of Pahlavi’s supporters work for hawkish Washington, D.C., outfits, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Pahlavi spoke at the National Conservatism conference, held in July in Washington. Last month, he was a keynote speaker at the Israeli American Council’s annual summit in D.C., alongside Trump.
Pahlavi has long vocally opposed military attacks on Iran. But in the days after Iran’s October 1 missile barrage against Israel, when an Israeli retaliation seemed imminent, Pahlavi published a video message that some took to be an implicit invitation. He called on the people of the region not to fear chaos if Iran’s regime should collapse. “We will not allow a power vacuum,” he promised, pledging that “patriotic Iranians” would replace the regime.
In the days that followed, Pahlavi clarified that he still opposed war. “We have seen diplomacy fail, and war is not a solution,” he told Fox News on October 16. The West must “invest in the Iranian people,” Pahlavi added, meaning that it should “abandon the policy of appeasement” and exert “maximum pressure on the regime” while also giving “maximum support” to the Iranian people to organize themselves.
Cameron Khansarinia is a well-known Pahlavi supporter and the vice president of a Washington-based Iranian American organization that backs the Iranian royal. I asked Khansarinia whether he supported an Israeli attack on Iran. He said that he disagreed with the “framing of the question.” He told me that he hoped “no innocent Iranians are injured in Israel’s inevitable retaliation,” and that he supported Pahlavi’s policy of “maximum pressure” alongside “maximum support” for Iranians. Khansarinia pointed to Israel’s killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in recent weeks as an effective means of putting pressure on the Iranian regime while supporting the people.
[Read: War is coming. Will our next president be ready?]
I even spoke with an Iranian socialist activist in Washington who has come to support both Pahlavi and Israel’s war (a very unusual stance within his corner of the opposition): Farhad Moradi, who arrived in the United States as a refugee a few years ago, told me that Israel should avoid attacking Iran’s nuclear sites or port infrastructure, because doing so wouldn’t help ordinary Iranians or weaken the regime politically. But he did support Israel hitting military sites or assassinating regime figures.
Esmaeilion, the novelist and spokesperson for the passengers killed on the Ukraine-bound flight, worries that those who embrace the possibility of war with Israel do so based on delusions about what both war and regime change really entail. Iranians need a “revolution” to bring down their regime, he said in his statement—not a foreign conflict. And doing battle with Israel could be terribly costly. “The current Israeli government has shown that it’s not really committed to international law,” he told me. “Many innocent people have died. If a broad war breaks out between Iran and Israel, many more innocents will die. The regime will also use people as human shields and cannon fodder.”
Esmaeilion is of the generation that can vividly remember the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Many of his novels are set during that conflict, which killed as many as half a million people. The talk of potential Israeli attacks on Iranian infrastructure recalls very specific traumas. “My father worked at the Kermanshah refinery when it was bombed on July 24, 1986,” he said. “He lost six of his colleagues there. Three days later, my uncle was killed when Iraq bombed the aluminum works in Arak. Many of my relatives died at the front in that war. What remained was pain and suffering for many years to follow. War can be terrible.”
Esmaeilion agrees with Hossein Yazdi, the activist in Tehran, that a war with Israel risks strengthening the regime. The opposition is fractious, and the Islamic Republic could use war as a pretext to clamp down on fragile networks that need shoring up: “We must organize our forces, bring about strikes and uprisings and finish this nightmare of a regime once and for all,” he told me. “A war will hurt this process.”
[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]
The divisions within the Iranian opposition are deep and often rancorous. Yazdi told me that he found Pahlavi’s intervention ominous. “It’s very scary for the prime minister of Israel to meet with a fugitive Iranian prince,” he told me. Many Iranians will even back the current regime if the alternative is an Israeli-backed restoration of the fallen monarchy, he said. Last year, Esmaeilion joined an anti-regime coalition that included Pahlavi and others, including the U.S.-based women’s-rights activist Masih Alinejad—but the effort collapsed in less than a month over disagreements about Iran’s future.
In the end, debates among Iranian dissidents over the desirability of an Israeli attack matter only so much. The Iranian opposition does not get to decide what Israel will do. It is watching events, not shaping them—and until and unless it gets organized, that will be true within Iran as well.
theatlantic.com