After war with Israel, will Iranians support their regime?
Both nationalism and resistance are surging. Which will endure?
Israel’s Twelve-Day War against Iran in June presented the Islamic Republic with its most challenging national security crisis since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. A week after the start of ramped-up air strikes and missile exchanges, the United States entered the conflict with bunker-busting bombs targeting Iran’s three major nuclear sites. Tel Aviv and Washington humiliated Tehran, assassinating some of its top military and nuclear scientists, threatening the life of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and causing several million Tehranis to flee to the Caspian Sea.
Ended for now by a ceasefire, the hostilities have given rise to a complex range of sentiments among Iranians, including a surge in support for Vatan (homeland)—a concept that encompasses territory, people, history, traditions and language—which can, for some, include a sacrificial ethos associated with Shia martyrology. But it also implies a willingness across generations, from internet-savvy youth to those who resisted the shah decades ago, to sacrifice themselves for the homeland rather than the power that governs Iranian society.
Will the Islamic Republic continue to receive the support of its people during this phenomenon of intense national solidarity? Or is the regime weakening its backing by opportunistically employing nationalist messages to solidify its hold on an angry public after a severe military setback?
Israel was hoping for the latter. While military strikes were the primary objective, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled that the fall of the Iranian regime “could certainly be the result because the regime is very weak.” However, as the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr argued, the objective looked more like inducing “state collapse” than regime change. “The war doesn’t go around [the Iranian people]. It goes through them,” he wrote, adding that a “majority of Iranians showed a much more…sophisticated set of emotions. In other words, those who are opposed to the Islamic Republic remain opposed,” yet many also feel “deeply disturbed with their country being violated.”
One development is clear, however: a diametrical difference between the Iranian people’s reaction to the Twelve-Day War and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War 45 years ago. That’s a long time for any society, but the transformation in wartime symbolism is striking.
When the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980, the Islamic Republic had just purged the ranks of the shah’s military and was ill-prepared to fight Iraq’s modern army. The newly minted regime turned to the cornerstone of the new order—the symbolism of Shia Islam—and almost existential pride in martyrdom, by comparing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian young men and children to the martyrdom of the sainted Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhmmad who died with members of his family and companions in the deserts of Karbala in 680 AD. The mothers of wartime casualties publicly honored their dead within that frame.
A different kind of social and even national cohesion was on display in the civic outrage from the beginning of the Twelve-Day War and especially after Israel’s June 23 strike on Evin Prison, Iran’s most notorious prison complex. Gone was the regime’s reliance on the Shia trademark as soon as the Israelis hit Evin—ironically a non-military site and, as The New York Times called it, “a singular symbol of oppression.” I was held in Evin as a hostage more than four decades ago, and a woman from California was being held there when missiles struck, according to reports. Prisoners, lawyers and doctors were present, too. The attack killed 79 people, inciting fury and condemnation from political prisoners and human rights advocates within and outside Iran.
The authorities exploited the chaos to transfer political detainees. Six men were moved to Qezelhesar’s isolation cells and now face imminent execution, part of a broader effort to break prisoner solidarity.
Israeli officials called the strike on Evin “symbolic,” but the Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi—the country’s most prominent human rights activist, who has been granted temporary medical leave from the prison—called it “a war crime.” Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman held hostage in Iran on bogus charges for eight years, is quoted as saying, “What I hear from prisoners and my friends there is that they feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors—the evil regime that imprisons and tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom.”
In working-class neighborhoods, where organized opposition movements have struggled, interviews reveal that Israel’s attempt at regime change has backfired, fanning national pride and even devotion to the Vatan. One woman, pointing at the wreckage of her home, said Israel’s attack showed “desperation, weakness and fear.” Another showed a photo of a dead child. “These are Iranian kids,” she said. “You targeted all of us. You targeted the very nation of Iran.”
But the strikes prompted something more volatile than just patriotic fervor: a widespread sense that foreign powers had crossed the line, shared even by the regime’s most vocal critics.
The most unexpected show of nationalism came from the least expected quarter—the supreme leader, Khamenei, who had not been seen since July 5, when he appeared at an Ashura ceremony, on the most significant religious day of the Shia Muslim calendar, the mourning of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom.
Khamenei didn’t compare the struggle of Imam Hussein with that of the Islamic Republic against Israel and the United States as may have been expected. Instead, he made an out-of-character request that the eulogist sing the patriotic song “Ey, Iran, Iran” (“Oh, Iran, Iran”). The original version, “Ey Iran, Ey Marz-e Por Gohar” (“O Iran, bejeweled land”), goes back to the British and Soviet occupation of Iran during World War II. Although there were clearly allusions to Islam, it was an evident attempt to accept nationalist symbols at a critical moment for the regime.
Prior to the ceremony, while the supreme leader was still out of sight, he broadcast three speeches. The third has garnered much media attention for his use of pre-Islamic vocabulary. Instead of saying “Allah” for God, he reached for “Parvadgar,” the Almighty, and even opened his remarks with both the Islamic word for hello, salam, and the pre-Islamic word dorud.
In that address, Khamenei used “the nation” and “Iran” 20 times without talking about Islam in the same paragraph. He said Iran “possesses an ‘ancient civilization,’” and declared its “cultural and civilizational wealth is hundreds of times greater than that of the US,” highly unusual words: Iranian clergy have consistently despised pre-Islamic Iran, calling it a retrograde period in history.
And all over Iran, especially in Teheran, billboards have been erected depicting the mythological pre-Islamic figure Arash the Archer (Aarash-e Kamangar), the self-sacrificing hero who fought for Iran against Turan, the foreign land mentioned by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in his 1000 AD epic Shahnameh (“The Book of Kings”). The greatest and most admired Iranian poet, Ferdowsi glorified pre-Islamic history and legends of Iran. In the southern city of Shiraz, home of the great Iranian poets Hafiz and Sa’adi, another poster depicted Netanyahu bowing in humiliation like the captive Roman emperor Valerian to Shapur, the first of the pre-Islamic Sassanians at the battle of Edessa in 260 AD.
The patriotic symbols of pre-Islamic Iran included a glorification of the powerful Iranian dynasty, the Achaemenids, and Cyrus the Great (600-530 BC), famous for freeing the Jews from Babylonian captivity. That could well be seen as a compromise by the Islamic Republic, which has spent the last 46 years ridding the country of every reference to its pre-Islamic history. It might well be seen as a secular intrusion, too, on the strict Shia display in everyday life.
The regime clearly understands that a large segment of the Iranian public has been alienated from religion and protests the authorities’ oppression. The 2022-2023 movement “Woman, Life, and Freedom” also reached back to Iranian history and the Shahnameh. The young women who led those demonstrations cut their hair in mourning and protest as the poem’s character Farangis does on learning about the unjust death of her husband Siyavash.
Where this new territory may lead remains unclear. There is much talk at home and abroad after Iran’s national humiliation in June—the latest in a long line of humiliations going back to the early 1800s—that it is time for a national debate about the dogmatic straitjacket in which the country has been living for the last 46 years. Surprisingly, there are noises that it’s time Iran rid itself of “expired methods” and find a way to bring about social and political cohesion even among regime insiders such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, known to have Khamenei’s ear.
But there are also more dismaying signs, about another wave of repression in the aftermath of the June conflict. The regime has stepped up its campaign against minorities and activists in provincial cities and dual nationals, deepening US–Iran tensions. On August 5, it executed an Iranian accused of spying for Israel, an emphatic refusal to relax its human rights violations. “Hundreds of ordinary citizens, members of religious and ethnic minorities, activists and others are being rounded up and arrested,” a recent report by the Center of Human Rights in Iran says, “as the Islamic Republic, facing its most serious challenge to date, moves to stamp out any trace of dissent and reassert control.”
Repression in provincial towns is even “deeper, darker, and more violent,” the center’s Esfandiar Aban notes—a reality that complicates any potential optimism that nationalist symbolism can open space for reform.
For now, the situation remains static. Despite its weakening, Iran is still at least the second-most influential power in the region. And notwithstanding the new talk about opening up the repressive political system after its humiliating defeat, it is highly unlikely Khamenei would ever permit that to happen.
But new crises are looming. The regime now faces the possible reimposition of crippling United Nations sanctions if it doesn’t allow UN inspectors inside the country to report on a nuclear program that has been almost certainly largely destroyed—a mounting standoff that may put the regime in direct conflict with the West.
Still, what might be more likely to affect the Islamic Republic may come not from internal or international politics but an urgent environmental situation. Iran is currently suffering through one of the worst droughts in its history, which may provoke an upheaval that spells the end of the repressive regime.
Were that to happen, everything would be up for grabs.
Barry Rosen is a survivor of the Iran Hostage Crisis and a co-founder of Hostage Aid Worldwide.
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