Ever since US President Donald Trump dubbed the June Israeli-American military strikes against Iran “the 12-day war”, the phrase has been widely used to mark this international act of global terrorism by two nuclear powers.
It is, however, a flawed phrase. Israel has been at war with Iran for far longer than 12 days, assassinating state officials, nuclear scientists and military officers, and targeting industrial sites for espionage and sabotage. It has been murdering foreign dignitaries for decades.
Outlets that parrot Israeli propaganda, like the New York Times and the BBC, alongside lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (a truly Orwellian newspeak title), have contributed to the engineering of severe and crippling economic sanctions against Iran for decades.
This was not a 12-day war. It is an open-ended war – one the genocidal settler-colony has waged for decades against everyone in its immediate and distant neighbourhood, to facilitate what warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, calls “Greater Israel”.
The exact military balance of the June escalation of Israeli-American aggression against Iran has been a matter of both Zionist and Iranian propaganda and counter-propaganda. Each aspect of the unending wars Israel has declared on the civilised world, centred on its brutish savageries in Palestine, must be assessed individually.
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One of Israel’s key accomplishments in its war on Iran has been to destroy, once and for all, any semblance of legitimacy that expat opposition groups might have had in the past – exactly the opposite of what the garrison state hoped to achieve, in all its gaudy and delusional fantasies.
Israel and its fifth column inside the US deluded themselves into believing that the June attacks would instigate a widespread revolt and topple Iran’s ruling elite, dividing the country along ethnic lines and dismantling the nation.
They were dead wrong. The aggression achieved exactly the opposite: it united all Iranians in the goal of defending their homeland.
Fading into ignominy
Indeed, the Israeli-American war against Iran utterly destroyed the so-called expat opposition – especially those barefaced monarchists who actively sided with Israel and the US against their own homeland. These corrupt cowards have forever lost any shred of legitimacy, as they fade into ignominy.
If regime change was a goal of the US-Israeli state terrorism against Iran, it miserably failed, resulting in precisely the opposite. With all their Orientalist gibberish in Tel Aviv and Washington think-tanks, the “intelligence” officers of Israel and the US clearly have no clue how Iranian anti-colonial nationalism works.
Like other countries around the world, Iran’s ruling Islamists have seen their share of internal and external opposition, ranging from reformists, to those with more radical ideas about how a more democratic form of government must overcome the theocratic apparatus and clerical rule of the Islamic Republic – particularly the thorny cornerstone of velayat-e faqih, manifested in Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s absolute authority.
With all their Orientalist gibberish in Tel Aviv and Washington, the ‘intelligence’ officers of Israel and the US clearly have no clue how Iranian anti-colonial nationalism works
Internally, the roots of this opposition go back to the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s, when a constellation of forces – ranging from radical left, to liberal middle, to Islamist militants – came together to dismantle the Pahlavi regime.
Islamist rule triumphed over its internal opposition and consolidated power. It survived periodic revolts against its rule, intact for almost half a century now.
Soon after the 1979 revolution, a major oppositional force left Iran and became external, led by the reactionary Pahlavi monarchists; the treacherous Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), who sided with Saddam Hussein against their own homeland in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War; and an assortment of riffraff regime-change enthusiasts who were actively financed by American, Israeli and Saudi interests.
Neither the ruling elite, nor its internal or external opposition, have had a monopoly on truth or falsehood. The funding that the US and Israel allocated to weaken or topple the Islamic republic in Iran kept these useless people in circulation, but they merely chased their own tails, proving no match for the ruling regime.
Enter the Israeli-American military strikes against Iran this past June, which became a game changer. All expat opposition forces, except the most loudly vulgar and treacherous, were silenced, or else actively sided against Israel. Those opposition figures who placed their own pathetic self-interest over the best interests of the Iranian homeland shot themselves in the foot, contributing to Zionist media or advocating online for Tehran’s sworn enemies.
In short, the opposition began to devour itself.
Standing up to Zionist aggression
A key factor at work here is the nature of Iranian anti-colonial nationalism. While the Pahlavis represent the last gasps of a discredited colonial nationalism, and the MEK presents itself as an outdated militant Islamism, Iran’s ruling regime has suddenly assumed the posture of anti-colonial nationalism, relying on the outrage of an entire nation.
There has always been legitimate opposition inside Iran, ranging from mild to radical. The dungeons of the Islamic Republic – some of which, in its insanity, Israel bombed – are filled with such opposition figures. But recipients of the Nobel “Peace Prize”, like Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi – who have actively worked to discredit Iran’s ruling elite, while failing to condemn Israeli savageries in their own homeland – have lost all credibility.
The echoes of the women’s rights uprising of 2022, led by serious women inside their homeland, have made a mockery of the myriad fake, made-in-the-US Zionist operatives. The manufactured sweetheart of American Zionists, Masih Alinejad, has inadvertently exposed her vicious advocates for the frauds they are.
In one of his gaudy messages to Iranians, Netanyahu placed the books of a number of Iranian expats on his desk, referencing them as signs of growing opposition to the ruling regime. That gesture was not only a kiss of death for every single author on this mass murderer’s desk; it was a coup de grace for the entire expat opposition, which chose one of two paths – either setting aside their differences with the Iranian regime and uniting in defence of their homeland, or hiding behind the Israeli flag, to their everlasting shame and final demise.
The most serious person whose book was on Netanyahu’s desk, the famous dissident Akbar Ganji – now a tireless advocate for Palestinian rights – swiftly distanced himself from this genocidaire’s propaganda, while the rest shamefully remained silent.
Meanwhile, a gang of guns for hire and morally compromised keyboard vigilantes recruited by Israel, the US and their allies to do the “dirty work”, to borrow a phrase from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have been lurking around the internet, writing gibberish in bad Persian and even worse English, trying to make themselves useful to their patrons – and looking utterly pathetic in the process.
For Iranians inside and outside of their homeland today, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – more urgent and sacred than defending the nation’s sanctity against a vicious, genocidal Zionism on steroids. There is nothing legitimate in any criticism of Iran’s ruling elite if it does not begin and build on the ruins of Gaza.
For all its faults, the Islamic Republic is today the only country that has stood up to Israeli and US warmongering. Arab peoples are comparing that to the cowardice and complicity of their own ruling regimes, which have either stood by or helped Israel slaughter more Palestinians.
Above all, the credit goes to the Iranian people – and to the brief, passing moment when defending their homeland against pernicious US-Israeli aggression became the chief responsibility of those ruling over them.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.