The
recent bombings involving Iran
, Israel and the United States have troubled many Americans, but few have as many close people to worry about as Roya Hakakian and others with loved ones in Iran, Israel or both.
Hakakian, a Tehran-born, Jewish naturalized United States citizen who came to this country as a refugee 40 years ago at age 19, still has friends in Iran and relatives in Israel.
“I’m incredibly worried … I have relatives in
Israel
, I have friends in
Iran
… and I do worry, especially about people in Iran,” said Hakakian. “The first thing the regime started once the bombing started was to send guards out into the streets.They’ve been sending their dogs out, not to take people out from under the bombings and help people find shelter,” but to make sure people weren’t protesting against their own leaders.
After two weeks of war, she said she is even more worried, not less.
“I am very, very worried immediately about what happens to Iran domestically,” Hakakian said.
The United States bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities this past Saturday, days after Israel launched an offensive attempting to destroy Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. Iran responded Monday, although all of its missiles that were sent toward a US base in Qatar were intercepted.
Hakakian is a author, journalist and poet. Her memoir, “Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran” details the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in her birth country in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.
Hakakian also has been directly involved in making sense of the current conflict for the rest of the world, both on social media, where she’s posted thoughts about the conflict on Instagram and Facebook, and as a journalist who was one of four people who shared a June 22 Time Magazine byline on the US decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Among other things, Hakakian has suggested that while full-scale regime change might not be necessary to eventually achieve peace with Iran, having Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei remain in power would make everything that has happened so far for naught.
“Actually, I don’t think we need to go and change the regime,” said Hakakian, who lives in Woodbridge and is a public scholar at the Moynihan Center at City College, part of the City University of New York. “I just think that if you want any change — nuclear change, behavioral change — you need to remove the Supreme Leader, who is standing in the way of any change in Iran.
“Without his removal, things could only get worse, and not better,” she said.
Hakakian said she’s not suggesting the US topple the entire government.
“I’m simply saying, if you take the time to remove the nuclear sites but leave the man who’s behind it all” in place, “then what’s the use of all this,” including the bombing and the waste of taxpayer resources, she said.
When Israel initially began by assassinating a series of Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders on June 13, “everybody who has been following Iran and had been rooting for change in Iran was rejoicing,” Hakakian said. “These are the people who had been engineering the executions.”
What worries her, however, is that she has yet to see any clear accounting of “what was going to be the goal of this intervention.”
One thing in particular that worried Hakakian was when Israel bombed an Iranian oil installation, she said, pointing out that “the economic infrastructure of the country is something that people wanted to see intact.”
“The point was, where was it going to go?” she asked. “Were they going to take out some military facility facility facilities … or was there more in the cards. I think the most important thing that needed to happen hasn’t happened … there has to be an admission on their part that the behavior would change.”
Since the Islamic Revolution swept Iran in 1978 and 1979, there has been a constant ring of chants of “Death to America,” and “Death to Israel” in Iran, and that hasn’t changed, Hakakian said.
Viewing the conflict from multiple sides
Alexander Taubes sees and feels all sides in this, but the New Haven attorney sees other things, as well.
He has family in Iran “and I stand with them as I stand with the ordinary people of Israel,” Taubes said.
When he says that, he’s not just paying lip service.
Taubes’ father’s side of the family is all Jewish. His mother’s side is all Muslim, and “getting to know both sides has definitely helped me become a good attorney,” he said.
“As an American with Iranian heritage, it hits close to home that there’s a war over there,” Taubes said. “As an attorney, it hits home to me that the United States lack a real War Powers Act where Congress is required to vote before bombs fall.”
In addition, “the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court” and “it seems wrong that we go out and insert ourselves … but we aren’t part of the solution,” Taubes said.
“Bombs always find living rooms, bombs always find hospitals,” Taubes said. “Bombs always find ordinary people.”
Life before and after revolution
Ramin Ahmadi came to the United States in 1983, a few years after the revolution that put Ayatollah Khomeini at the head of government. Ahmadi’s mother, sister and brother are all still there.
Before the revolution, Ahmadi, who is Hakakian’s husband, said there was a political dictatorship “to some extent.”
“If you can call it a ‘normal dictatorship,’ it was a normal dictatorship, where people had a life, and young people could think about having a future, because they could get a scholarship, they could go abroad, they could come back and have jobs,” he said.
Now, after the revolution, there is “a completely different set of circumstances.”
“Every sphere of private life is inspected and controlled and punished for lack of compliance,” he said. “There is an incredible gap between the rich and also the middle class, which has become more poor. The normalcy has gone away. You have a new religious class that is very much armed and dangerous and helps the state to control the streets.”
Ahmadi is a physician, who studied and practices at Yale, but he’s also a vocal advocate for Iran and human rights. He was in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation. He was in Chechnya with Physicians for Human Rights in 2000. He’s written extensively, documenting human rights violations in his home country.
“Iranian government newspapers frequently accuse me of being CIA so I don’t try to go back home to visit,” he said. “My mom, my sister, my brother, everyone who lives there, they have been interrogated many times, my family is used to it.”
Ahmadi said news of a ceasefire came as a disappointment to his family in Iran. The conflict, he said, offered an unrealized hope.
“From the perspective of the Iranian people, it was a disaster because it inflicted a lot of infrastructure damage and destruction, and in return, they did not get what they wanted, which was to get rid of this regime,” he said. “Iranian people want a normal life, and they can’t get it under this sort of semi-fascist regime. They just can’t.”
The conflict, Ahmadi said, was a kind of war the current Iranian regime does not prefer to fight. Leaders there, he said, learned long ago that they could not win a head-to-head battle with the US and Israel. He said the strategy has long been one of “asymmetric warfare,” which Ahmadi said, “Creates a state of conflict, a sort of a low-grade warfare.”
“They don’t like big wars. They like a low-grade warfare,” he said.
There is also a ruling class, which Ahmadi called an “economic mafia” that has figured out how to benefit from sanctions.
“If the sanctions are lifted, they will undermine it, because they make a lot of money on sanctions,” he said. “So, for example, if tomorrow President Trump decided to remove sanctions, they will attack the US Navy.. They will do something. They’ll do something so that the sanctions will come back quickly, because their livelihood, their economic livelihood, is dependent on them.”
But Ahmadi is still somewhat hopeful for the near future. He said neighborhoods in the capital city of Tehran have been flooded with sewage, the Israeli barrage destroying important pieces of infrastructure on which the regime will have to focus resources.
That, he said, will give local resistance groups a chance to organize.
“A lot of people were waiting for this war, thinking this war is going to do the job for them, and I think now, first, it’s going to be shock and anger, and then it’s going to start settling in that, look, nobody is going to do this for you. This is your country. This is your destiny. You have to take it in your hands. You have to do what is necessary. And I think that’s why I’m optimistic about the next six months,” he said.