My mother missed her flight out of Tehran on a Wednesday, the same week that Israel launched its war against Iran on a Friday. The conflict ended 12 days later, following a Sunday bombardment of the underground nuclear sites of Fordow and Natanz by the United States. From Los Angeles, a city occupied at the time by federal troops in support of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, all we could do was wait for news of a cease-fire, and for her safe return. We endured as dual nationals caught between Tehran and the United States, between the city of my mother’s birth and the country of our citizenship, under siege by the same man and the same regime.
Now the drums of war are beating again in the Middle East, orchestrated by the conductor of the ongoing mayhem in the Midwest. The arrival of a second American aircraft carrier in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf signals that Trump intends to go all the way, to finally come to the “rescue” of Iran’s protesters, albeit belatedly for the scores already buried. Missile strikes under the banner of freedom, the inevitable massacres justified by humanitarianism. It is a measure of their desperation that at least some Iranians are willing to take that risk. Better to be devoured by a beautiful lion than to be torn apart by a horde of foul wolves.
The calculus for those of us living outside of Iran is different; the equation does not hold. We live our lives as Iranians and Americans between existing and emerging autocracies, unrepentant regimes devoted to violence at home and abroad. Our circumstances position us, perhaps uniquely, to see the convergence of these two long-standing geopolitical rivals. When hooded men drag women out of cars or shoot them where they sit, when masked and unnamed agents pull children into unmarked vehicles in front of their terrified families, when the course of events renders Chicago, New Orleans, or Minneapolis indistinguishable from Mashhad, Karaj, or Tabriz, then our reward is perspective. We know that Iran anticipates what may happen in the United States, that the pair of murders by the equivalent of roving basijis in the Twin Cities are a dress rehearsal for the brutality yet to come.
I’ve devoted much of my writing and teaching in recent years to the proposition that Americans have much to learn from the brave efforts of on-the-ground activists and organizers in Iran who demonstrate the power of persistence at the ballot box and in peaceful gatherings in the streets and squares, who know that the struggle for democracy begins with accepting protests not as an alternative to voting but as its extension. As Narges Bajoghli recently highlighted, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement secured de facto abandonment of mandatory veiling “through years of outreach, patient organizing, and persistent civil disobedience.” The Islamic Republic’s greatest defeat since 1979 came because of collective action from below, not foreign intervention from above.
That Iran presents a source of knowledge for democratic activists may seem like an unlikely premise. There is a persistent belief that isolation and ideological rule render Iran a hidden and unknowable land, an Islamic Hermit Kingdom in the Middle East. Even before the current blackout, accurate knowledge of Iran seemed beyond reach. I can think of no other country where analysts and journalists alike routinely turn to tropes and clichés to fill in the gaps of their knowledge: a wall, a veil, ayatollahs on parade.
In fact, Iran has remained accessible for the members of its far-flung expatriate communities since 1979. There has been a steady exchange of culture and information across borders, carried back and forth by diaspora and native Iranians, producing threads that stretch across the generations, interlacing lives and memories. Family trips that begin as summer exchanges tied to the school calendar become more intentional and frequent as children get older. Years go by and now there are the weddings of nieces and nephews to celebrate with dance, a brother, a sister, a parent who has fallen ill, graves to attend to. My mother was on such a trip last June when the war broke out.
These exchanges, which continued even during the worst years of war and conflict, have had the notable effect of making us more devoted to our adopted country. Iran is always a temporary destination, a reminder of what we chose to leave behind. As I have noted elsewhere, we don’t go to Iran to find our “real” or lost identities. Our truer selves are produced here in the United States, across the generations. We become better Iranians by becoming Americans.
Americans have much to learn from the brave efforts of on-the-ground activists and organizers in Iran.
In seeking new beginnings, immigrants bring much to the United States in return, not least of all the knowledge of how things end. We know that foreign adventures are a predicate for the consolidation of power at home. We understand firsthand that the aspiring autocrat begins, always, by picking on the weakest, the most exposed. (It was not by accident that even before last June’s war ended, Iran and the United States targeted their Afghan and Iranian refugees, respectively.) To be an Iranian-American immigrant is to be aware of what is happening before our very eyes, to be reminded constantly of imminent danger from both sides of the hyphen, of the malice that resides within.
The war last summer was the culmination of decades of rattling sabers and near misses, of 47 years of confrontation and cold war between the United States and Iran. It doesn’t have to be this way. Certainly for my mother, the affair was less a matter of fate than unhappy coincidence, the residue of getting to Imam Khomeini Airport half an hour late. Forced to race American missiles in Iran only to face the threat of detention and military occupation back home in the U.S., those dozen days in June were as much farce as they were tragedy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Thirteen years ago, I described the special relief that so many of us experienced with the emerging rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran, how an unprecedented phone call between Presidents Obama and Rouhani made it possible to imagine a better future, the groundwork laid down not by politicians but by voting publics eager for peace. That path ended five years later with the abandonment of the JCPOA by Trump halfway through his first term. The same artful administration, now in its second iteration, is threatening a new war against Iran in part because of its failure to replicate what the Obama administration painstakingly constructed over years of patient negotiations. History repeats itself, this time exclusively as farce.
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