Now there is a reflex on the left that writes off the struggle for democracy in Iran because of “anti-imperialism” or because Israel and the Jewish right in Israel back the fall of the IRI or because of Trump. For its part, the Jewish left should know better. To write off Iran is bad for human rights; above all bad for the people of Iran; and also bad for the people of Israel and Palestine whose fate has been inextricably locked to this nefarious regime since the revolution in 1979. Bad, in particular, for the Jewish left is to have its political and moral horizons always determined and dominated by the Jewish right.

Let’s put into an uncompromising bracket the hypocrisy of the Jewish right in Israel and in the United States. Let’s do the exact same to the radical anti-Zionist left. A Jewish social left should care about a secure peace and justice in Israel and Palestine and for the fate of the entire region, including the people of Iran. This, then, is the right time to connect Netanyahu and the radical Jewish right in Israel with the Iran regime.

The people of Iran deserve our solidarity in their struggle for democracy against the Islamic Republic of Iran. To not see is a betrayal. After October 7, the global left turned their back on the people of Israel, including the left in Israel. It is doing the same thing today to the people of Iran.

One can complain that the Jewish right is weaponizing against Palestine the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran. But, in the end, this shameful argument reflects a myopic Palestine First and Israel First point of view. The deflection is a match with the argument that the Jewish right is weaponizing the struggle against anti-Semitism, also in the name of Israel and against Palestine. But this is how one should see it. There are, indeed, two sides to the same coin. On one side is Hamas and the rest of the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance.” On the other side is Netanyahu and the religious right in Israel. There is no common future for Israel and Palestine inside the self-perpetuation of this vicious circle.

It is not on “the left” to organize protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even regarding Palestine, “the left” is not so much active as much as it has let itself be led by the nose by malignant leadership cadre in the Palestine Solidarity movement. But when Iranians and Iranians in the diaspora protest, is it wrong to wonder where we are? Don’t all democratic, republican, leftist, and progressive Iranians deserve our sympathy and support? The argument from the left is that the United States has nothing to do with their oppression. But in the 1930s, the American left supported the Spanish Republic during the Civil War against fascism. In the 1970s, the human rights community supported prisoners of conscience and other dissidents in the Soviet Union. And the United States intervened in support of the Bosnian people during that civil war. As the leading voice of the radical left in the United States, has the DSA said anything about Iran? Weird at a moment of slaughter (whose dimension is still unclear) is the lack of solidarity and even hostility expressed against the protesters in Iran by parts on the left –because of Israel and Palestine.

Like the DSA, Jewish Currents, the most prominent voice on the Jewish anti-Zionist left, has also said nothing. But we saw the point a couple years ago when Peter Beinart wrote a piece there insisting that the regime in Iran is “not uniquely malevolent.” Beinart puts “the specter of Iranian aggression” in the region under scare quotes. He rejects the view that Iranian acts of aggression “make the Middle East more violent and less stable.” He agrees that Iran had genuine “security concerns” in Yemen and in Syria, while rejecting the claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran maintains a “menacing military arsenal.” He says that calling Iran a state sponsor of terrorist is “challenging because defining terrorism is famously contentious.” About regional aggression, he contends that “[I]n this historical perspective, Iran’s current interventions look less like a revolutionary bid to dominate the Middle East and more like a continuation of the jockeying for influence that Tehran has engaged in since the middle of the last century.” In comparison to Israel, Saudi  Arabia, and the UAE, Beinart claims that “Iranian intervention is in fact less extensive than the intervention practiced by its key competitors.” As seen by him, Iran shares comparatively little “responsibility for the immense suffering” in the region.  

I am not an Iran expert or an expert about the complex regime structure of the IRI. Neither are most of us reading this post. I personally have no thoughts about the political or geopolitical wisdom of U.S. intervention or a negotiated settlement with the IRI. All I know is that the impact of ether decision would be largely borne by the people of Iran. The Trump Administration will make its own decisions, mostly independent of what Netanyahu wants to see happen. That leaves me to follow the lead of journalists and scholars of Iran and activists –critics of the regime and critics of regime apologists from Iran and the Iranian Diaspora. They are telling us about death and repression at an unprecedented scale by the “system” that is pressured into a corner due to internal and external dynamics of its own making.

Concerning Palestine after the Islamic Republic of Iran, this is the conclusion to recent analysis from Hamza Howidy. “The fall of the Islamic Republic would be the end of the Palestinian cause as we have known it since 1979. Deprived of its most militant benefactor, the “resistance” must choose between becoming a relic of a collapsed revolutionary era or evolving into a pragmatic partner in a new, Iran-independent Middle East. In such a scenario, the road to Jerusalem would no longer run through Tehran, but through the cold, hard realities of regional diplomacy.” His view is that Iran and the Axis of Resistance have brought such misery upon the people of Palestine, and that there is no peace and no justice for Palestine as long as the IRI continues to play the role of spoiler in the region

Along the same line, it is precisely because of Israel and Palestine that the Jewish left should support the struggle for democracy in Iran against the regime. This would require critical distance from the anti-Zionist left which commits itself first and foremost to the destruction of Israel, and which is willing to sacrifice the people of Iran to that cause. Two things need to be kept in view at the same time. The first thing to see is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a murderous regime, the state sponsor of violence at home in Iran and abroad in the region, long before the election of Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendancy of the religious right in Israel. (If anything, the IRI has a lot to do with the preeminence of the right in Israeli politics. The second thing to see is that, under its current leadership, Israel is the state sponsor of occupation, annexation, and religious Jewish terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.

Put together, the struggle for human rights and democracy in Israel and Palestine is inextricably connected to that same struggle in Iran. In this interconnected regional nexus, to abandon one is to abandon the other.