‘This War Is Not Helping Us’

Sepideh Qolian, a 30-year-old Iranian labor activist, spent two years in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she wrote two books, one of them a celebrated prison memoir in the form of a baking cookbook. Just last week, Qolian was released—and three days later, Israeli missiles and drones began striking targets inside Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has addressed the Iranian people, telling them that his war can help them free themselves from their oppressive government. “This is your opportunity to stand up,” he said. Curious how Iranian opposition activists were responding to this message, I called Qolian.

“I know that war won’t bring democracy,” she told me. She was active in the Women, Life, Freedom movement against compulsory veiling in 2022–23, and she told me that Netanyahu is no champion of the movement’s values. “The life that we wanted is the mirror opposite of the terrible events that are now happening,” she said. But the war hadn’t endeared Iran’s leadership to her, either—she blames its aggressive policies for the country’s predicament.

That Iran has a substantial population opposed to its system of government is well known and has been oft-proved through cycles of protest and repression. The Women, Life, Freedom movement was one dramatic iteration. It followed economically motivated protests in 2017–19, the sweeping pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009–10, a student uprising in 1999, and an electorally based movement for reform covering nearly all the years since 1997. Iranians have been outspoken inside the country and across an ever-growing diaspora against the Islamic Republic’s human-rights abuses, constriction of personal freedoms, economic mismanagement, and belligerent foreign policy.

For years, the debate outside Iran was theoretical: Would a military strike on the country help its people topple a hated regime, or would it cause even oppositionists to rally ’round the flag in their nation’s defense? Now the answer to this question is being determined by the hour, and it is neither binary nor simple. Even ardent anti-regime activists I spoke with were hard-pressed to support Israeli attacks that have already killed almost 200 civilians, according to Iran’s health ministry. Some had cheered the killings of certain repressive military figures in the early hours of the strikes, but the mood has since turned to terror, the priority simple survival.

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Tehran is a dense city of 9.8 million. As Israel strikes targets across the Iranian capital as well as in other cities, it hits civil-society figures associated with the country’s protest movement alongside officials and nuclear scientists. Parnia Abbasi, 23, a poet and an English teacher, was killed together with her parents and brother on the first day of the air campaign; the target of the strike that killed them was a regime official in a nearby building. Zahra Shams, 35, was a devout Muslim who wore the hijab by choice but vocally opposed its enforcement on others, even tweeting in support of the anti-hijab protests in 2022. She was killed in a strike intended for a regime official who lived in her apartment building.

Most of the activists I spoke with—about a dozen—blamed the war largely on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and evinced no political support for his regime. Nor were they supportive of Iran’s attacks on Israel, which have already killed at least 23 Israeli civilians, injured hundreds more, and sent thousands of people to bomb shelters every night. But they in no way welcomed the Israeli strikes on their country. They worried about their own safety—and also about societal collapse and the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure.

“I oppose the Islamic Republic and Khamenei with all my being,” a 24-year-old activist, who asked that I withhold her name out of concern for her safety, told me from Tehran. “I took part in many demonstrations during the Women, Life, Freedom movement. But now I can’t even think about the regime or overthrowing it. I am scared. I am worried. I fear for the life of myself and everyone around me.”

A 26-year-old activist who was arrested during the 2022–23 protests told me that she was emphatically opposed to the Israeli strikes. “The war goes beyond the regime,” she said in a phone call. “It has massive negative consequences for our country. It is destroying the economy. It can lead to hunger, shortage of medicine, cutting connections with abroad. It is a total disaster. It is killing innocent people in both Israel and Iran.”

One young activist was busy trying to escape the capital with her elderly and sick mother when I called. They were heading north, to the coast of Caspian Sea, an area thought to be safer from attacks. “I can’t think about activism under the sound of drones and missiles, can I?” she asked me rhetorically. “I don’t support the targeting of civilians anywhere, whether in Iran or Israel.”

Alireza Ghadimi, a sociology student and activist at the University of Tehran, was still in his dorm when I caught up with him. His campus has a long history as an epicenter of protest, both against the Shah during the revolution and against the Islamic Republic, which crushed student protests there in 1999. “I carry this history with me,” Ghadimi said, “and it now feels terrifyingly alive.” He described the sounds of explosions, the shaking of walls, frightened voices outside. “I am one of many young Iranians who want change,” he said. “But this war is not helping us. It is destroying us. It is silencing the very people it claims to save.”

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Prominent figures in Iran’s movement for democracy have also come out against both the war and the regime. From his prison cell in Evin, former Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh condemned the Israeli attacks and called for an immediate cease-fire. But he also called for “a peaceful transition to democracy” in Iran. The Nobel peace laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi were joined by five other activists (including the director Jafar Panahi, who last month won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival) in issuing a call for an immediate end to the war and condemning the attacks on civilians by both Iran and Israel. They also called for an end to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and for a democratic transition.

The Islamic Republic has decades of protest movements and crackdowns behind it, and with those, a globe-spanning diaspora of opposition exiles. Most of the people I spoke with were of a fairly like mind with their counterparts inside Iran. A young activist in Europe, who asked that I withhold her name because she frequently visits Iran, told me that she understood the glee that greeted the first killings of regime military figures. Still, she said, “anybody who’s seen what Israel has done in Gaza, Lebanon, and even Syria recently would know that Netanyahu is not seeking stability in the region. He is hitting Iran’s refineries and power stations, so he is clearly not thinking about our people.”

For a more seasoned opinion, I spoke with one of my political heroes, the 80-year-old human-rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar. She helped organize the fight against the mandatory hijab right at the Islamic Republic’s inception in 1979 and has been a voice for democracy and the rule of law ever since. She was hounded out of Iran about 20 years ago and now lives in Washington, D.C.  

“When I see the Israeli strikes on Iran today, I feel like I am seeing the burning of my very own house,” she told me. “They are targeting my homeland. This isn’t acceptable, no matter who is doing the attacks. No such attack is acceptable under international law.”

Kar told me she blames Khamenei for having made an enemy out of Israel for decades. But she made clear that Netanyahu is no friend to Iran’s freedom fighters. “Nobody I spoke to in Iran supports these attacks,” she said. “People are angry, and they hate the Islamic Republic. But they now probably hate Mr. Netanyahu and his military policies even more.”

Israel’s campaign could yet rattle the Iranian regime into some kind of change in behavior or composition. But the notion that air strikes will lead to a popular uprising, or that Iranian activists for freedom will support a devastating war on their homeland, appears to be little more than a fantasy.