By Andrea Tucci,
Now, as Israel’s new war against Iran shows being stopped, the country, after initially declaring that its main objective was to hinder the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, openly expressed its ambition to bring down the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, the Iranian regime has not collapsed as hoped, and the Supreme Leader remains in power, defying all expectations.
According to reports by the Wall Street Journal, seems there was a flow of “light weapons suitable for urban warfare” possibly entering Iran from Azerbaijan borders. Israeli Mossad agents have allegedly smuggled hundreds of explosive-laden quadcopter drone parts into the country, hidden in suitcases, trucks, and containers. This would have been part of a strategy that would try to “triggering a civil war and internally dividing Iran.” Actually a shift in Israel’s approach, that tries to weaken the enemy from within by exploiting internal instability to achieve objectives it has not been able to reach on the battlefield.
The notion that the Iranian opposition, with Israeli support, could seize this moment to overthrow the regime and free the country from the ayatollahs’ grip is, according to Professor Lior Sternfeld, a modern Iranian history scholar at Penn State University, a true illusion. It stems from a distorted perception of the real political weight of the Iranian opposition in exile. “In Israel, the loudest voices are those of Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the late Shah and heir to the Iranian throne in exile (widely seen as a lazy man in his sixties), and his supporters,” says Sternfeld. “These are people without any real credibility or influence in Iran.”
This narrative is mainly spread in ‘Tehrangeles,’ a nickname for an area of Los Angeles with a large community of Iranian exiles, on the margins of the current U.S. administration, it seems to constitute the only voice the Israelis are listening to.
The official Israeli narrative about Iran, that the regime is a fragile coalition of tribes ready to collapse, is absurd to anyone with even a basic understanding of Iranian history. This kind of delusional thinking is dominant among the Iranian diaspora, still haunted by the events of the 1979 revolution.
While some Iranians may quietly celebrate Israeli strikes and the exposure of regime officials, this sentiment has no meaningful popular support. “We’re against this attack… yes, we definitely hate the mullahs, but the REAL enemy now is Israel.”
Just as the 1979 revolution came from outside with Khomeini, today a counter-revolution is imagined as coming from outside with Pahlavi with the potential Israeli support. But the truth is that there is currently no organized opposition capable of confronting Iran’s power structures without causing complete chaos, something that Iranians desperately want to avoid. Moreover, the regime enjoys a strong base that extends well beyond its security apparatus.
For many progressive Iranians, even a repressive Islamic Republic is preferable to chaos or the rise of ISIS-style anarchy, as seen in Iraq’s past.
Iran has long been viewed as a rational regime, but now, feeling betrayed by the United States and targeted by Israel — especially after attacks on civilian areas in Tehran — it faces a shaken national sense of security.
And if, in order to ensure its survival, Iran’s leadership were to view a nuclear bomb as the only way to protect itself from the nuclear power that attacked it — who could truly blame them?
Iranian citizens are now issuing a clear demand to the Ayatollah’s regime: “Show us you can defend our homeland.”
