Rendering Tehran Bombardable
Notes on a Self-Targeting Subjectivity
omid mehrgan
Postscript: This piece was written after the so-called twelve-day war that took place last summer, was being edited during the protests and violence that erupted in January, and was prepared for publication prior to the fresh round of attacks on Iran that started three days ago. New vectors, and new intensities, have appeared, but the matrix of words and forces described here, I testify, remains the same.
Reporting on Israeli violence in Palestine used language that assumed sovereign power in redrawing the discursive, symbolic, and ethical lines separating life and death. It made it easier than ever to incorporate death in one’s account of this world. If we accept this as a new linguistic modality, if this is not an exaggerated, rather narcissistic interpretation of our age, then semantics tend to align with politics on a more fundamental level than any other “language matters” warnings of previous ages managed to do. And if, as in the famous Lacanian formula, the unconscious is structured like a language, then forms of subjection, or subject-formations, in an “After Gaza” world are bound to confuse senses of life and death, of surviving and perishing, as an effect of how the violence on Palestinians was represented to the world. I intend to describe discursive moments in response to a particular event in the context of that violence and outline a theory of a new subjectivity that emerged as an effect. The scene is the June 2025 war on Iran.
Israel attacked Iran in the early hours of June 13th, 2025, and targeted several high military officials in their residential buildings across Tehran. 78 people were killed as a result of a bombing campaign with over 200 aircraft in this first raid—reminiscent of the attacks that killed Hassan Nasrallah and many residents of southern Beirut in 2024. Later, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli pilots dropped leftover munitions from the subsequent aerial strikes on Iranian cities on Gaza during the ongoing genocide. For all their grave differences, Tehran tasted a bit of what Gaza had been going through for months. Living spaces have been destroyed in both cities. Civilians have been eliminated under the sign of the “human shield” narrative, displacing the responsibility for casualties in Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods. [1]
After “THE TWELVE-DAY WAR”—as the US President put it on social media after the fire between Iran and Israel ceased without written agreement—a captivating video was published by an Iranian state news agency. It showed one of the old neighborhoods in Tehran getting bombed in the broad daylight, sending cars flying into the air. This and other depictions of Israeli strikes on civilian life and labor during the war—which killed more than a thousand people and injured over five thousand across Iran—may fade behind the fog of a destroyed Gaza. Distraction, however, appears to be the point. And it cuts both ways: the war on Iran diverted attention from the genocide in Gaza, while killing with impunity in Palestine has made it easier to wage war on Iran. The same is true of Israel’s bombing of Beirut, Sanaa, Damascus, and even Doha.
Seeing all these images of ruined Middle Eastern neighborhoods superimposed one over the other creates the effect of an evolved War on Terror. The deep rift within this composite corresponds to a split subjectivity produced in the rhetorical and psycho-political universe of ongoing destruction: where living places double as terrorist sites, civilians double as terrorists, thus rendering them bombardable and placing responsibility for their death upon local governing structures. An entire ecology of human and animal life is represented as internally terror-infested, reinscribed as carrying killable elements deeply seated in its infrastructure. Donald Trump’s description of American metropolitan areas like Chicago as war zones (in the tradition of George W. Bush in the preparation for invading Iraq) that host “terror networks” shows how the logic of terrorizing life spaces returns to the core. A new subjectivity is mediating this perception of the extraordinary terror inside the ordinary. The semantics of reporting on war affords a perspective into the domain of signifiers by which the coming (civil) wars will be made compatible with the coming self-understandings of individuals and collectives.
sites of separation A few days after the sudden ceasefire between Israel, the United States, and Iran, The New York Times published an opinion piece written by a deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran about state crackdowns following the war. [2] In a tone of urgency unmatched by Persian-speaking media—“[d]issent equals death,” “[e]ntire communities are under siege”—the author reports on numerous arrests and executions. Trenchant ongoing issues like violations of due process and discrimination against minorities are presented in the piece as evidence of heightened repression by the Islamic Republic following the war. On this account, the author urges the United States and “the broader international community, especially other democratic governments,” to “strengthen sanctions targeting human rights violators, coordinate diplomatic isolation and apply pressure at the United Nations.” Targeting, isolation, and pressure suggested by a human rights expert immediately after US-Israeli bombardments comes across as augmenting the state death penalty with an international capital punishment. It is hard to resist the ironic association here: A white woman calling global cops on brown men minutes after the police brutalized them; an imperial peace-keeping reflex being triggered so that the intramural affair of a non-West country could pave the way for neo-colonial intervention. These measures, long taken in the framework of maximum pressure policy and propagated by a big sanctions industry and large parts of Iranian diaspora opposition, continue to be attractive. [3] Their narrative pushes a clear-cut socio-economic separation between the government and the people, such that attacking them by legal, financial, or military means is said to affect only the bad rulers. The discourse of smart or targeted sanctions (both are also bomb terms) exists to correct the image by splitting it into the duality of the people and their leaders.
This double view appears, spatially and geographically imagined, in an Atlantic article by an Iranian American academic, tellingly entitled “The Invisible City of Tehran.” [4] Merging decades-old memories of living in the mega city with native-informant narration of the unseen intelligence, security, and military layers of Tehran, the article plants the image of an underground network hosting extremists in Tehran. This infrastructure is “not of tunnels perhaps, but of whispered channels: mosques that doubled as surveillance nodes, schools and ministries laced with informants, entire office blocks that served the security state. A hidden circulatory system beneath the city’s surface.” The word “tunnel” surfaces to invoke the specter of Gaza despite the author knowing that such a thing does not exist there in reality (“. . . not of tunnels perhaps . .” my emphasis). Without giving comparative examples of what it means for a city to have logistical structures built in or underneath it, whether Berlin or Tel Aviv, the description of urban landscapes doubling as governmental infrastructure serves as a phantasm that simply muddles the reader’s idea of urban life itself. Hospitals, schools, libraries, fire departments, ministries, banks, social security offices, cafes, mosques, and parks suddenly appear as locations of terror, as spaces where living beings are tyrannized by forces that must be targeted “surgically.” In a sinister alignment of points in a geography, the perspective of a threat is constructed in such a way that the civilian-combatant distinction becomes indiscernible. In its early stages, Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza widely used the “human shield” to justify its once shocking strikes on a hospital. As the obscenity of the killings became more normalized, the trope fell out of usage.
In an essentially more liberal, indeed postcolonial register, the renowned scholar of Middle East studies Asef Bayat wrote a piece that was published in New Lines a week after the war ended. The doubling of the city life of Tehran is in this case more abstract and, thus, trickier to discern, but equally serving to create an imaginative rift in the ecology. Bayat writes of his and my hometown:
In the Western imagination, Tehran is often reduced to cliches: lofty minarets, echoing calls to prayer, bearded clerics and women shrouded in black—a city of mud-brick homes and narrow alleyways filled with large extended families. This is the Tehran of the 1991 movie “Not Without My Daughter.” But far from such Orientalist fantasies, the real Tehran is a modern megacity governed by a repressive religious-military regime that has long tried—and largely failed—to remake its cultural and spatial fabric. [5]
“‘Regime’ conjures the idea of an entity that exists but is wanting in popular legitimacy, a political ontology without recognition that asserts itself only by force.”
In the same breath, Bayat attempts to disactivate an Orientalist cliché and performs a more stubborn one: a lively city is trapped in the fist of a regime that is militant (therefore armed and threatening) and religious (therefore blind to secular needs of modern city-dwellers). Bayat builds on a clear distinction between secular resilience and resistance and a religious totalitarianism with a so-called anti-imperialist rhetoric, effectively reproducing the dominant account in European languages of what Iran as a society is. Resistance can never be religious, and the secular can never be totalitarian . Anti-imperialism is always rhetorical. The heartbeat of such a depiction is the idea of “regime,” a term consistently used to designate Iran’s political structure from early on in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but especially after September 11, 2001. Ubiquitous in Western media (but also the Iranian diaspora), “regime” conjures the idea of an entity that exists but is wanting in popular legitimacy, a political ontology without recognition that asserts itself only by force.
At the Sound of Mowing Machines In an X (twitter) account created immediately after the ceasefire, Mossad’s Farsi Telegram channel posted a Persian statement that sums up the core strategy of severance in selling the war: “Dear Iranian citizens, you know that we will do our best to make sure you will not be hurt. Our war is with the oppressive regime of the Islamic Republic.” The post went on to give “a few instructions to keep you safe”: staying away from what it called Islamic Republic Guardian Corps (IRGC) staff, sites, vehicles, “especially when you hear a sound lie a lawnmower from the sky’, referring to drones. In closing, the message warned: “Remain alert. The leaders are hiding in the tunnels and are protecting themselves—you are the ones in danger. Please follow the instructions they will save lives [sic].” [6] The language interpellates its recipient as a mentally stateless subject being used as a weapon of war, a human shield, by the leaders ruling over its lifeworld. Ordinary infrastructure is represented by national officials to civilians as sites of terror. The blades of a mowing machine may tear the civilian bodies into pieces, but that happens only if they do not remove themselves from those sites occupied by their tyrannical rulers. A terrorized ecology lies at the core of Israeli aggression.
It is in this context that we can see how the Israeli attack on Evin Prison—killing at least 79 people including inmates, staff, visitors, and pedestrians on the adjacent streets—could be framed as a “symbolic” attack on “oppressive institutions” of Iran’s government. [7] In an interview, Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a key figure in recent campaigns against the death penalty and solitary confinement, said Evin “can never be a legitimate target” for Israel’s strike. [8] Mohammadi has been criticized in Persian (Farsi)-speaking media for her lukewarm response to the war and near-total silence on Gaza. The term “legitimate target” originates in the language of international conventions on war, systematically violated by Israel’s manipulation of legal discourse in order to expand the scope of targeted killings. [9] In no other statements has Mohammadi addressed Israeli’s war on Iran, which speaks to the position that she, together with large parts of the opposition, has taken in the past three years. Recent research has shown to what extent the bombing of Evin was used by an Israel-sponsored network of virtual agents for inciting a revolt against the government. [10]
When Israeli strikes killed the military commanders in Tehran, opposition leaders abroad celebrated the news on the basis that some of these commanders had been named agents in the previous years’ brutal repression of street protests in Iran, lending their deaths poetic justice. Hamed Esmaeilion, a prominent activist based in Canada, called the attacks a “unique opportunity” for democratic change in Iran. [11] Esmaeilion lost his wife and young daughter in 2020 when Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down by the IRGC; Esmaeilion led an association for the families of its victims. The crash, which killed all 176 on board, was a deeply traumatizing incident for many Iranians, especially in Canada. Although not proven to be deliberate, the shooting, which took place in the heat of a probable war between Iran and the United States, only five days after the shocking Trump-sanctioned assassination of IRCG General Ghasem Soleimani, deeply affected the Iranian diaspora. [12] The narrative was that, even if not deliberate, Iran’s government does not shy away from killing its own people. Esmaeilion spoke this language in his effective public speeches and interviews, thus participating in the successful international and multi-institutional campaign to have the IRCG designated as a terrorist organization in Canada. [13] Institutions that helped the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims to make a case against the IRCG and broadened its reach within the nascent nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 had strong pro-Israel connections. [14] Just days after the end of the twelve-day war, there was talk of Iran “targeting its own people,” articulating in human rights parlance the same politicidal practice performed by the Mossad’s Farsi instructions to the Iranian people. [15]
The regime, in this account, not only oppresses, but it is also incapable of defending its own people against the aggressor. Iran’s prompt response to Israel’s surprise attack notwithstanding, the New York Review of Books published a piece by an Iranian American writer adding to his personal and familial account of the war:
By now the Internet is cut off in most neighborhoods and the ATMs have run out of cash. Tehran is an open city, its residents either on the run or sitting in their homes, bracing for the next bomb, for the pending food and water shortages, betrayed by their astonishingly incompetent leaders, caught in the clutches of an army lavishly funded and armed to the teeth by the US, a force that has already shown it has no compunction about turning densely populated cities into scorched earth. [16]
The first part describes a situation that has already turned by domestic incompetence into what the second part fears only the foreign aggressor can accomplish: scorched earth. Arian, the author, wrote a profile of Hamed Esmaeilion for Harper’s Magazine in 2023. Friends at home before they left Iran, the writer and the activist (Esmaeilion has written novels in Persian too) both work with the same image of a painfully split world in which the social and the political diverge to the point of creating a defenseless people—an identifiable image deeply relished by liberal readership in Anglo-European world. It is as if only a people incapable of defending themselves, bereft of the means to resist, deserved to belong to the class of narratable, lamentable persons; their political, military, governmental structures are all alien elements occupying them from within. It is better for this people inside the country to take their distance from those structures if they are to become mournable. The precondition for the Other being worthy of mourning is the Other showing total vulnerability.
Politicide: Mentally Stateless SubjectsWhen German chancellor Fredrich Merz remarked that by attacking Iran, Israel was only doing the “dirty work” (Drecksarbeit) “for all of us,” he simply affirmed the expression that his interviewer, a German media figure, had offered him during the interview. The Chancellor thanked her for the term. This collaboration between reporter and politician shows that bombing Iran is inscribed in the symbolic order with a moral conviction. Many of those objecting to the language stressed the obvious: that ordinary people, too, were killed as a result of the “dirty work.” What tends to be overlooked is that the rhetoric of rendering Iran bombardable has built precisely on this very dichotomy between a people and their political structures, or their “regime.” Parastou Forouhar, the respected Iranian German artist and human rights activist who initiated a campaign and a legal petition [17] against the chancellor for the dehumanizing language he used, enacted the dichotomy in the way she articulated her discontent:
Even as [Merz] rightly listed the “belligerent and deathly practices and policies of the system governing” and talked about the “regime of Mullah’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah and the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine”, he refused to mention the crimes of this regime against the people of Iran, not mentioning Iranian people’s continuous protests against the warmongerings of the regime governing Iran. [18]
Artist and politician converge in a language of depoliticizing the Iranian people. The absence of the people in the latter and its emphatic presence in the former should not obfuscate the common view of the people’s political life, however malfunctional, as alien to them, ruling over them as an occupying force.
That heads of states collude with the media to publicly justify an illegal act of aggression against another country with such an ease is made possible by a simple discursive strategy: it is the regime, not the people, that is being targeted. Academics and activists have further refined and embraced this strategy. This rhetoric produces a divided subject made incapable of defending herself against the aggressor, one that is mentally stateless, ready to self-target. The pattern of turning Palestinian populations into displaced people in their own land by forcing them to disown their forces of governance and resistance has developed into a strategy for licensing the bombardment of the rest of the region.
In TheNew York Times, an Iranian philosophy professor living abroad wrote of a “moral paralysis” suffered by Iranian people caught between a domestic oppressor and an external aggressor. Articulating this, the piece pits “self-determination” contra foreign intervention (Israel and the US) against “liberation from the Islamic Republic.”[19] Both terms are quite suggestive, semantically loaded with a material history that goes beyond inert moral philosophy. Invoking the historical trauma of the 1953 coup, the piece could have referred to independence (Istighlal) as the winning slogan of the 1979 revolution in Iran. Instead, self-determination is most frequently associated with struggles with ethnic minorities to gain autonomous status or a separate country altogether. “Liberation,” on the other hand, is usually reserved for anticolonial struggles. It thus suggests that the people in Iran are right now fighting for liberation from their own government, as if from a foreign aggressor. This language has in recent years assumed dominance in both activist and academic literature. The piece claims it deals with a dilemma, and yet its two terms, self-determination and liberation, cement the same political imagination today, one of fragmentation that only aligns with Israel’s framing of aggression against Iran.
The most progressive, and thus complex, form that this severance of a people from their government has taken belongs to a radical left. Run by exiled Iranian and Kurdish intellectuals and activists in Paris, the Roja Collective identifies itself as feminist-internationalist. Their statement, issued “against genocidal Israel and the repressive Islamic Republic,” clearly condemns Israel’s war on Iran as a war on people, showing the deceit behind the imperialist rhetoric from Afghanistan and Iraq to Gaza and Syria. But it also stresses all the repressions for which the Islamic Republic is widely known inside and outside Iran. It performs this double critique in order to distance itself from what it calls “campist” forces that lend support to “any project—no matter how authoritarian—that opposes the Western bloc, presenting it as ‘resistance.’”
In the diverse political cultures of the region, “resistance” recalls primarily popular Islamic militants fighting against Israeli settler colonial projects. Quotation marks indicate a stance against state power backing those militants, which today tends to be Iran and Yemen. In this way, the Roja Collective argues that although we oppose Israel’s genocidal wars, we are far from backing what is known as the Axis of Resistance. This is a position that some voices in the Iranian left had taken prior to the war. The idea of democratizing the resistance against US-Israeli aggression in the region emerges as an obvious necessity at a time when the prospect of states falling apart is only too real. Even the collapse of the Islamic Republic cannot mean the end of resistance. But putting “No to the Repressive Islamic Republic” on a banner in a rally in the middle of a war on the country represented and defended by that form of government, separating it from its people, falls into line with the rhetoric of the aggressor. For instance, when describing the Israeli attacks, the Roja Collective statement adopts the rhetoric of “symbolism” used by Israeli officials:
Assaults on symbols of governmental authority—ministries, official buildings, and the Islamic Republic’s main broadcasting agency in Tehran—the central hub of interrogators, torturers, and hate propagators. A media institution with a four-decade record of fabricating dossiers, spreading lies, and slandering the poor, women, Afghan migrants, and political dissidents. [20]
Augmenting the description of an attack with vilifying terms about its target creates a vision in which the reader is called on to detest the destruction of something detestable. The aggressor assaulted that which ultimately must be regarded as assailable. As the Persian saying goes: “They push away with hands what they pull back with legs.” The result is a split view corresponding to what Setareh Shohadaei calls “liberal ‘both-side-ism’”:
[W]e encounter a false equivalence between two asymmetrical parties. When one adopts a position that simply rejects both US empire and Iran, or rather both the aggressor and the resisting victim, it is akin to claiming “all lives matter” in the midst of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. It is no different from those who would condemn both Israel and Hamas. The issue is not that all lives do not matter, or that Hamas or Iran bear no responsibilities, that they cannot and must not be criticized. The issue is that inserting this into a protest against the structural injustice of imperial domination draws a false formal equivalence. It reduces all acts of violence regardless of their scale and history to the same gesture. This effectively disavows the issue at hand, erasing relations of cause and effect in histories of violence and undermining the legitimate possibility of resistance. [21]
The dissonance into which the political subject is thus interpellated, namely having to condemn the destruction of something that appears to her as worth destroying because utterly vile, has become the mark of Iranian political culture in the past decade. The task of offering a radical critique of the official media has been performed for decades in Iran. Doing so in English, however, has proven one thing: it becomes fuel for fire on a targeted country’s infrastructures of life. The false equivalence has permeated the broadest spectrum of psycho-political sensibility, systematically abused by Israeli rhetoric of just aggression. It is as if the Zionist logic of indiscriminate killing and threatening otherness is exported to the targets themselves so that the attacked populations start participating in self-targeting. In the same vein, Shohadaei goes so far as to speak of “efforts to turn Iranians into suicidal swarms.” [22] Resisting these efforts requires facing what remains colonial in the most radical accounts of breaking away from the status quo, including very intuitive strategies such as internationalism and anti-campism.
The Coloniality of PatricideIn the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the Iranian intellectual in exile Iman Ganji called for a complete exodus from all social and political institutions in the spirit of a “revolutionary fatherlessness.” [23] If the regime is so alien to us, if it kills us, we must leave it behind just as the biblical Israelites left behind Egypt en route to a new project of liberation. Ganji’s exit strategy displayed a political and philosophical self-awareness in its endorsement of abandoning the impotent state apparatuses for the sake of life (as stressed in the logan of the movement) that the textual cases I examine above lack. The act of patricide, or rather the presupposition of an undead father dethroned symbolically (which happens to be a prominent theme in recent Iranian movies), however, does not resolve the contradiction in the wildly anti-authoritarian movement: the patricidal elements have given rise to politicidal tendencies, and this has rendered the epoch-making movement most vulnerable.
“The dissonance into which the political subject is thus interpellated, namely having to condemn the destruction of something that appears to her as worth destroying because utterly vile, has become the mark of Iranian political culture in the past decade.”
A year before the twelve-day war, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, writing in the New Left Review,theorized the need for an “internationalist politics” in a “global war regime” with campism as its main obstacle—concepts that the Roja Collective adopted in its response to the war. With its central call for a transnational refusal, the article argued for why local and regional liberation projects must struggle alongside one another in “coordinated practices of desertion through which people can depart radically from the status quo.” [24] The model for this has been the global anti-genocide movement in solidarity with Palestine. We must separate ourselves, the authors demand, from the war projects conducted by our respective economic, governmental structures, joining instead the international circuits of globally organized deserters. When giving examples of a fighter in the IDF or the Russian Army or the US military, or a Ukrainian soldier, who can desert their authorities, they add the reservation: “Yet for those trapped in the Gaza Strip it is hardly an option.” They do not elaborate, but one can assume the reason, apart from the literal entrapment of Palestinians in a besieged city with nowhere to go, relates to the fact that deserting their government would mean surrendering to the aggressors. After all, such desertion sounds far more viable in the imperial cores of global domination in the West, where, for instance, ports can be occupied to prevent shipments of weapons.
Gaza became a point around which internationalism could form but itself proves an exception. The reason is simple. Under the condition of genocidal coloniality, the people in Gaza cannot make an exodus from the residual sovereignty that continues to resist the Israeli genocidal war. The authors thus realize the “[k]ey sites of [capital] circulation are being reshaped” in the abyss of Gaza, but they fail to consider the clear possibility that other cities could also turn Gaza-like. For instance, Tehran. For them, other geographies remain spaces of disruption, desertion, and blockage, terrains where one can “configure a project of liberation without assuming national sovereignty as a goal.” They rule out national sovereignty as the site of meaningful resistance while endorsing the demand for self-determination in the case of Palestine. What if the latter turns into the former? Even in the case of their other privileged example, “Kurdish liberation struggles”? What prevents a self-determination project from becoming national sovereignty in a colonialistically uneven global war machine? We now know how the long war on Gaza was discursively, legally, and symbolically facilitated by denying the Strip its chosen political structure ever since Hamas won what former U.S. president Jimmy Carter called “completely honest and fair” elections in 2006. [25] In the context of terror acts in the Second Intifada, the group was seldom recognized internationally and faced devastating sanctions from the US and EU, and, soon after, the periodical bombings on Rafah and Beit Lahia and the camps in the Strip started.
No discussion of decolonial nationalism jeopardizes the urgency of national protection against ever-present colonial forces. But this is precisely what is being demanded by some leftists. If Gaza remains the exception of internationalism, Iran turns into its example in Hardt and Mezzadra’s article. Iran is being treated as Gaza was, under the sign of fighting campism. An increasingly vague, polemical term, campism, tautologically defined as ‘reduc[ing] the political terrain to two opposed camps,” has found usage in the past-decade’s leftist literature. Hardt and Mezzadra warn:
Some advocates of the Palestinian cause will celebrate, or at least shrink from criticizing, any actor that opposes the Israeli occupation, including Iran and its allies in the region. While this is an understandable impulse in the current conjuncture, when the population of Gaza is on the brink of starvation and subject to horrific violence, campism’s binary geopolitical logic ultimately leads to identification with oppressive forces that undermine liberation. [26]
By equating the two camps in terms of power, resources, technology, access, and ethical and symbolic standing, and thereby reviving indeed a binary opposition, the authors bypass the coloniality of the political terrain on which international circuits are to be organized. There is a form of exchange at work here that creates and equates two sides with the term of comparison being the regulative idea of internationalism or that of working-class solidarity, for that matter. [27] In this way, the rhetoric that they use against national sovereignty in the case of Iran tends to traffic in the same tropes that neoconservative think tanks have long used to pit social movements against their forms of government in non-Western countries:
Rather than supporting Iran or its allies, even rhetorically, an internationalist project should instead link Palestine solidarity struggles to those such as the “woman, life, freedom” movements which challenged the Islamic Republic. In short, the struggle against the war regime must not only seek to interrupt the current constellation of wars, but also to effect broader social transformation. [28]
The choice of the verb “challenge” for describing the work of a social movement signifies an ambiguity that matches the vagueness of desertion or refusal that Hardt and Mezzadra demand from contemporary collectivities. When Assad’s government fell (or withered away), Benjamin Netanyahu made a direct address to the Iranian nation in which he said: “Well, I say to you this: don’t let your dreams die. I hear the whispers: Women, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.” [29] (The singular woman [“zan”] became the plural women.) A politics of desertion cannot overlook the lack of equivalence between spaces of sovereignty in the global war regime. There are many plateaus whose connections require revamping of many spatial and temporal visions. Without colonial forces disarming completely, there cannot be a global desertion or a complete exodus from, well, residual patriarchal structures of resistance. Otherwise, under the condition of a brutal capital movement, people will be exposed to the most brutal wars of annihilation.
Self-Targeting as a War Strategy Much has been written recently on how Woman, Life, Freedom was manipulated precisely to advance the war machine in the Middle East. [30] The profound contradictions in the historic young women’s uprising in Iran, with its dazzling social victories and their high price, are yet to be studied. One contradiction pertains to how this movement’s mediatic obsessions, its manic spectacles of transgression, myriad forms of killing the father figure, have rendered apolitical the Iranian political culture, thus paving the way for what I have dubbed self-targeting subjectivity by dissociating the social from the political. Hardt and Mezzadra work with a fantasy of a suddenly opened-up terrain of oppressed multitudes merging into a colossal global force that will deactivate the war regime. There is nothing wrong with fantasies as long as, to use a term from Adorno’s aesthetic theory, they are exact. It is asking people in non-Western societies to abandon ship, to desert their institutions, their vilified forms of governance, in order to plug into mediatically socialized circuits that are possible only in the spatial imaginary of the residents of well-connected metropoles. Why should the militants in the tunnels emerge at the call of internationalist politics when the callers are asking them to desert their only defending structures? When Google has multi-billion dollar deals with Israel, when its accounts and satellite images have been used to target military and civil infrastructure in Iran, how are we to imagine connectivity across sovereign borders without exposing our peoples to deathly blows? How to remain unseen today.
Understanding how depoliticization works as a decapacitating strategy proves pivotal for gaining insight into how, in the face of an illegal war of aggression on Iran and other countries in the region, psyches are being groomed into a sense of consent. The destruction is to be felt as profoundly irresistible. Here is the invisible domain of deep symbolic, affective acquiescence to extensive violence done unto a people precisely by making the people embrace that violence. From media’s preparatory campaigns for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, we already know how the liberation theology of imperial war works. In the case of Iran, the strategy has shown qualitative differences. The aggressors are not claiming to rescue the people whose country they are bombing; rather, they have found their task outsourced to the popular forces themselves in the targeted country through a series of what can be called internalizations of subversion. Foreign policy advisors since at least the 2009 Green Movement have stressed the significance of movements inside Iran in possible regime-toppling scenarios. [31] What is at issue here is not simply deception. This is not the colonized learning how to slavishly serve the interests of the colonizer; not the invaded, the native informant revealing epistemic mysteries of their land’s conditions of sustenance and thereby betraying their own people. Traditional conformists, all these figures can count on finding sources of survival within the imposed order of the aggressors. At issue today is a far more counterintuitive phenomenon: many forces who have been fighting around the most urgent sociopolitical issues known to our age are being invited to sabotage their very conditions of possibility. Israelis have abused most progressive movements in Iran, from suppressed ethnicities and environmental justice to women and queer movements, from abolishing the death penalty to due process campaigns, from free expression to the movement of the dispossessed and union fights, forcing them to pull the rug from under their feet.
The quasi-state of exception that emerged in Iran after the war has made it more difficult for popular self-organizing efforts. It is easier than ever to stymie activism by accusing it of aiding and abetting the enemy. The Israeli attacks aim to stifle any grassroots reformist path in order to paralyze Iran’s political life from within. More trauma for the Iranian people means a higher chance of seeing the country react violently to its own impasse generated as a result of the war. The concomitant rhetoric of severance alienates people from their political structures, social institutions, and spatial civil orders of living. In order to produce this subjectivity, it is being re-situated in a geography that makes its “regime”
targetable. [32] The intricacy of this rhetoric lies in the fact that much of it rests on deep-seated repressive procedures in place in the targeted territories. The very discourse of decolonization is being used to render the colonized incapable of resisting colonial forces. To rephrase the title of Freud’s late article on the splitting of ego in the process of defense, this new war strategy splits the ego for the process of an offense.
Re-renderingsIt has, therefore, become more difficult than ever to cultivate the political with the traditional tropes of human rights, democracy, or freedom. Every trope is exposed to the risk of being appropriated to render the subject defenseless. To be sure, this does not mean that collective grievances regarding real conditions of life cannot be articulated. Even so, I have particularly become distrustful of such articulations in English precisely because of their frequent contribution to conformist, resistance-averse outlooks. It may be the trauma of watching the recent war inflict wounds on my hometown, but I am not alone. In a piece that argues why we need to exist apart from the space of English language and reconnect with the Arabic-speaking neighbors, the London-based Iranian artist Bahar Noorizadeh sheds light on the very trauma that English can trigger:
There is a political economy to translation. In the shift toward the glamorous world of English, we enter a web of valorization that is necessarily politically-motivated. The symbolic order is not naive — recall how the 12-day Israeli invasion was framed time and again as a set of “symbolic” attacks on “symbolic” sites in Iran. A “symbolic war” so to speak. As alarming as it may sound, today’s regime of representation does not merely prophesize war (it perfected that role in Iraq); but it is etched into the very ammunition, the bombs, the rockets, the drones, and into the bodies, buildings, sites and landscapes on which it chooses to land. As a feminist comrade in Iran said a few months prior to the attack, “the first bomb dropped on us will most likely have ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ engraved on it.” [33]
It would take generations to radically reorganize the image of the (Middle Eastern) Other in the imaginary of English. Will there be any appetite or need? It would call for infinite parallax acts of seeing again, speaking again, or screaming again from streets to scholarships. It is not guaranteed, however, that any lingua franca at all will survive this unimaginable destruction happening before the eyes of impotent subjects these years. Subjects with self-inflicted wounds need self-suturing strategies. If in this article I took language, or translation for Noorizadeh, to bear the sign of injury, the healing can be signified in it, too. Rendering bombardable is a form of translation, after all.
Back at home, in the time period between the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Syrian War, I published a short monograph in Persian on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the task of the translator. I was then part of a small collective of translator-intellectuals active in rendering and annotating texts in critical theory—works by Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, as well as Agamben, Badiou, and others. My central argument in the way I interpreted Benjamin's theory of translation was that we should adopt literalness as the key tactic in introducing the Western works in order to make prosaic, and thereby capable of critical self-reflection, a deeply poetic, poeticized language as Persian has always been. Opening up to English, German, and French would shake up some ideological self-containedness that Persian showed, and this would translate to a more radical politics. This, of course, would mean making Persian vulnerable to European languages. Arabic and Turkish were not on my mind when I wrote on the practice of translation. I was criticized at that time that such a literal translation could render Persian un-intelligible, if not entirely west-toxifed. I wanted the translational odor of this toxin to befoul the wholesomeness of my mother tongue. Was this my unconscious effort to defend Persian against the avalanche of the Western words by having Persian texts “reek of translation” so that its authorial products could be discerned and protected? [34] Today I think we need the roundtrip in this linguistic exchange as well: a literal translation of political Persian or Arabic into English. The grammar and tone of reporting on popular struggles will be affected by the mode of signification of languages spoken in those struggles. This will be done without what Benjamin called “the unrestrained license of bad translators” who want to recreate the original text. The point, rather, is to let the light of the original shine through. [35]
It is important for English to receive some of the acute tensions and dichotomies that a Persian or Arabic has carried while caught, to use a common trope among the Iranian diasporic left, between two forms of oppression: domestic repression and imperialist meddling. As North American and Western European cities are becoming more and more exposed to forms of boomeranged overseas violence, an internal, maternal, identification with the dichotomies of the Global South will have therapeutic effects for both traditions, separately and within each other. This can signify a path toward a transnational solidarity among people(s) who stay together in their statelessness and state-fulness. This requires deactivating the apparatus that separates not only a people from its political structures, but a political people from others. Sanctions have been called an art for their monstrous ability to militarize, make obscure, and dissocialize the economic lives of countries. A less pessimistic future consists in devising ways of rendering sanctions ineffective as a way of letting peoples own their sociopolitical expressions. The Iranian diaspora, like the Cuban or Venezuelan one, especially in the coming storms, will have found it an ever more necessary yet paradoxical task both to fight against foreign intervention in their countries and to expose their countries to the shared problems of the planet. This cannot be done without the diaspora starting to come to terms politically with their conditions of life in Western cities, seeing to what extent asking for the lifting of sanctions goes hand in hand with demanding to defund genocides, fighting for unionization, or pushing fascist anti-immigration forces away from one’s neighborhood. Anything else looks suicidal.
[1] Khalid Elgindy, “Human shields or shielding Israel from accountability?” Middle Eastern Institute, May 10 2024.https://www.mei.edu/publications/human-shields-or-shielding-israel-accountability. For a scholarly example of affirming the human shield narrative as a war strategy against Palestinians, see Per Bauhn, “Just war, human shields, and the 2023–24 Gaza War,” Israel Affairs, 30(5), 863–878, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537121.2024.2394289.
[2] Karen Kramer, “Iran is Terrorizing Its Own Citizens. The World Needs to Respond.” The New York Times, July 4, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/opinion/iran-israel-arrests.html
[3] For context and the examination of a case in point, see Setareh Shohadaei, “Is Masih Alinejad Really the Voice of the Iranian Women’s Movement? Or is the women’s rights activist the new face of the U.S. war machine?” Public Seminar, September 13, 2023. https://publicseminar.org/2023/09/is-masih-alinejad-really-the-voice-of-the-iranian-womens-movement/
[4] Kian Tajbakhsh, “The Invisible City of Tehran,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/tehran-invisible-city/683335/
[5] Asef Bayat, “The Spirit of Tehran,” New Lines Magazine, June 30, 2025. https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/the-spirit-of-tehran/
[6] My translation; Mossad Farsi. X. June 27 2025. https://t.me/mossadinfarsi
[7] “Evin prison’s brutal legacy of electric shocks, sensory deprivation and rape – explainer,” The Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2025. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-858692
[8] Sarah Deeb, “Survivor of Israel’s attack on Iran’s Evin prison describes a ‘slow death’ after 12-day war,” Associated Press, June 30, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-prison-evin-attack-nobel-democracy-6a06ba6f26d08cdd69520e31872cf9b9
[9] For a discussion of how various legal maneuvers were employed for increasing scope of targeted killings in Israeli armed forces, see Craig Jones, The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020).
[10] Alberto Fittarelli et al, “PRISONBREAK – An AI-Enabled Influence Operation Aimed at Overthrowing the Iranian Regime,” Citizen Lab, October 2, 2025. https://citizenlab.ca/2025/10/ai-enabled-io-aimed-at-overthrowing-iranian-regime/.
[11] Hamed Esmaeilion interview by Sima Sabet, Pulse Media, YouTube, June 13, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRWZS-BKvFY
[12] For a study of how groups of Iranian Canadians were affected, see Pooya Azadi, Matin Mirramezani, and Mohsen B. Mesgaran, “Migration and brain drain from Iran,” Stanford Iran 2040 Project, April 8, 2020, https://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/news/publication-migration-and-brain-drain-iran.
[13] Government of Canada, “Government of Canada lists the IRGC as a terrorist entity,” June 14 2024. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/06/government-of-canada-lists-the-irgc-as-a-terrorist-entity.html
[14] In particular, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which conducted a detailed report on the PS752 case presentable to international courts for prosecuting the IRGC. See, “Opinion: Pathways to Justice for the Downing of Flight PS752,” Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, July 7, 2022,https://www.raoulwallenbergcentre.org/en/news/2022-02-23.
[15] Irwin Cotler, B. Silver, and M, Shafipour, “The Iranian regime's new war targets its own people,” National Post, July 7, 2025.
[16] Amir Ahmadi Arian, “Die Once, Mourn Once,” The New York Review of Books, June 19, 2025. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/06/19/die-once-mourn-once-iran/
[17] https://www.anwalt.de/rechtstipps/strafanzeige-und-berfassungsbeschwerde-und-wegen-volksverhetzung-und-beleidigung-gegen-bundeskanzler-friedrich-merz-247267.html
[18] Forouhar, Parastou. Instagram. July 9, 2025. Translation from Persian mine.
[19] Morteza Dehghani, “The Moral Paralysis Facing Iranians Right Now,” The New York Times, July 28 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/iran-israel-war-islamic-republic.html
[20] The Roja Collective, ‘“Women, Life, Freedom’ against the War: A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic,” Crimethinc, June 6, 2023, https://crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic
[21] Setareh Shohadaei et al, “Echoes of a Short War: Critical Reflections on Israel’s Attack on Iran,” Jadaliyya, September 23, 2025. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46907/Echoes-of-a-Short-War-Critical-Reflections-on-Israel%E2%80%99s-Attack-on-Iran
[22] Shohadaei, ibid.
[23] Iman Ganji, “Iran: khorouj-e dastejamee” (Iran: A Collective Exodus), Radiozamneh, October 14, 2022, https://www.radiozamaneh.com/734994/. For an English article containing the same formulations, see Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales, “Tomorrow Was Shahrivar 1401: Notes on the Iranian Uprisings,” e-flux, October, 19, 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/498605/tomorrow-was-shahrivar-1401-notes-on-the-iranian-uprisings.
[24] Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, “A Global War Machine,” Sidecar / New Left Review, May 9, 2024. https://www.radiozamaneh.com/734994/
[25] Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, University of California Press, 2017, p. 11.
[26] Hardt and Mezzadra, “A Global War Machine,” ibid.
[27] Jason Shulman and Dan La Botz, “Against Campism, for International Working-Class Solidarity,” Socialist Forum (A DSA Publication), Winter 2020. https://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2020/against-campism-for-international-working-class-solidarity/
[28] Hardt and Mezzadra, “A Global War Machine,” ibid.
[29] “Netanyahu says Iran’s government fears its people more than Israel,” Reuters, November 12, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-says-irans-government-fears-its-people-more-than-israel-2024-11-12/
[30] Alberto Fittarelli et al, “PRISONBREAK – An AI-Enabled Influence Operation Aimed at Overthrowing the Iranian Regime,” Citizen Lab, ibid. Omid Mehrgan, “Palestine the Wound: A Report in the Reception of the Cause in Iran,” focaal blog, October 6, 2025. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/10/06/omid-mehrgan-palestine-the-wound-a-report-on-the-iranian-reception-of-the-cause/
[31] Gregg Roman, “A Comprehensive Strategy for Democratic Transition in Iran” The Middle East Forum. 27 December 2024. https://www.meforum.org/mef-online/a-comprehensive-strategy-for-democratic-transition-in-iran
[32] For a pioneering study of how wars are being imagined and how imaginations mapped onto human geographies, see Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Blackwell, 2004).
[33] Bahar Noorizadeh, “Exit from English: Iran in the political economy of translation,” Mada, 14 August 2025.
[34] Later on, I reflected on that experiment in this paper: Omid Mehrgan, “The Political Modes of Translation in Iran: National Words, Right Sentences, Class Paragraphs,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, eds. Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian (Routledge, 2020).
[35] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zone, New York: Schocken, 1968.