Israel Can’t Win if It Loses the Iranian People
Israeli and American officials can’t threaten the Iranian people into friendship.
Editor’s Note: This is a bit of a non-traditional editor’s note, because I’ve known Kylie for over a decade. We studied at a summer program together as college students. We lost touch over the years, so I was genuinely shocked when I heard that she had been released from an Iranian prison in a prisoner exchange. I hadn’t even known that someone I counted as a friend had spent over two years as a hostage of a dictatorial regime. We reconnected and met in person when she was visiting DC. What struck me most was that despite having experienced something that could well have broken her, she was very much the same person I remembered: less carefree, but still brilliant, driven, and empathetic. Most importantly, she spoke of the Iranian people as her brothers and sisters, held hostage much the same way she was, by the same power-hungry leaders. So in The Next Move, she offers a unique and compelling perspective about people she views as allies in the fight against authoritarianism.
— Uriel Epshtein, CEO, Renew Democracy Initiative
By Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert
Iranians are scared right now. Really scared. A friend described to me how all the windows blew out in her north Tehran apartment a few nights ago, the walls shaking as a missile met its mark just one block away. Another told me of her terror, not knowing whether top regime officials in Israel’s crosshairs might also live in her suburb. Not knowing which parts of the city host secret military or intelligence installations, not knowing where would be hit next—and who would be the collateral damage.
Israel has made striking progress toward its goal of neutralizing the security threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear program. However, both the United States and Israel are now sending mixed signals about taking this one step further, and attempting to remove the Islamic Republic along with it.
The dangers in going for regime change are considerable. Israel can’t possibly win without keeping the Iranian people on side—and right now, it’s at risk of losing them.
The Iranian street reacted to the first waves of Israeli strikes with a mixture of fear, apprehension, and, in some quarters, cautious celebration. Social media clips initially circulated showing young Tehranis partying as the IDF bombed regime targets, with some residents chanting from the rooftops “death to Khamenei”—a reference to Iran’s supreme leader. Recent surveys of public opinion ( by necessity conducted from abroad) show that more than 80% of the Iranian population no longer supports the Islamic Republic and would prefer some form of secular democracy. Among my friends and contacts within Iran it was widely lamented that the country’s octogenarian dictator wasn’t among those first assassinated.
However, as the regime embarked on its inevitable retaliation, there emerged worrying signs that Israel’s early efforts to distinguish between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people were starting to wear thin. The IDF’s decimation of Iran’s air defences and missile launching facilities appears to have been more successful than hoped for, yet the Islamic Republic was still able to cause significant damage to a number of Israeli towns and cities. This included direct hits on apartment complexes and civilian homes, with more than two dozen killed and hundreds wounded.
Israel has responded with further strikes and assassinations of regime figures, including the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence wing, an institution responsible for imprisoning and torturing thousands of innocent Iranians and foreign visitors—including, for 804 days, me. Few are shedding tears over the demise of evil men like these.
For many ordinary Iranians however, the escalation in both attacks and rhetoric of recent days has been nothing short of terrifying. The United States has only compounded the fear on the streets. President Donald Trump’s unrealistic and inhumane demand that ten million residents of Tehran—a population larger than New York’s—evacuate their city was poorly received by even the most hardened veterans of the Iranian opposition. Hastily-typed and poorly-considered Truth Social posts are no substitute for the levers of true public diplomacy, like Voice of America. VOA’s Farsi service was popular inside Iran, but the Trump administration recently gutted it. “Your enemy is Khamenei,” Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad admonished the US president on Twitter, “not…the innocent civilians caught in [the Islamic Republic’s] grip.”
It did not—and still doesn’t—have to end this way.
So far, the trend within the large segment of the Iranian population that broadly opposes the regime has been to blame Ayatollah Khamenei and his fanatical IRGC henchmen for bringing this calamity upon Iran through their nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorist proxies and increasingly bellicose rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map once and for all. Following last year’s Iranian missile and drone attacks against Israel, that rhetoric was seeming less like ideological posturing and more like an actionable plan.
The feeling initially was that in brutally suppressing the Iranian people’s overwhelming call for greater civil freedoms, including a refusal to countenance changes to compulsory hijab laws, the regime had sowed the seeds of its own demise. Iranians are a patriotic people who are rightly proud of their deep civilizational roots, yet there was no rallying around the flag of the Islamic Republic following these attacks.
All the same, many anti-regime Iranians are not especially enthusiastic fans of Israel. Views on Israel’s war in Gaza vary considerably both on the Iranian street and within diaspora groups outside the country. Some activists have declared their steadfast support for Israel, apparently following the logic that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Iranians espousing this perspective frame both Hamas and the Palestinian cause as mere extensions of the Islamic Republic’s apparatus of repression. Followers of the son of the ousted shah, Reza Pahlavi, for example tend to be more positively inclined toward Israel due to Pahlavi’s own supportive stance and visits to the Jewish state.
It is also common to see anti-Israel views expressed on Iranian social media, including by prominent dissidents both inside and outside the country. Many Iranians sympathize with the suffering of ordinary Palestinians and view Israel’s war from a human rights perspective, arguing that the tactics employed by the IDF in Gaza are no better than those of the Iranian regime.
Nevertheless, there exists considerable alignment between Israelis and ordinary Iranians, who both can agree that they would like to see Iran’s revolutionary theocracy fall.
This was why Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s recent threat that “Tehran will burn” should Iran fire missiles at civilian areas was idiotic in the extreme. Katz doubled down on this rhetoric in a tweet on Monday, warning that “the residents of Tehran will pay the price” for Iran’s continued bombardment.
The Iranian people should be natural allies to anyone seeking the downfall of their oppressors. Recklessly suggesting that they could become collateral damage in response to Iranian counterattacks undermines all of Israel’s war aims, not least because it risks pushing the Iranian people back into the arms of a widely-loathed regime in the face of real, existential threats to their beloved homeland.
Tehranis aren’t waiting to learn whether Katz will make good on his fiery pronouncements. Where Iranian social media used to be full of posts gleefully counting the names of senior regime officials assassinated, now it shows miles of vehicles backed up along all of the major thoroughfares out of the capital city, as desperate families try to get out of harm’s way. Homemade survival guides are circulating online, with instructions about how to board up windows and where to take cover in the event of a blast.
Israel should be doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties and keep the Iranian people—the most immediate victims of the Islamic Republic—out of the line of fire. This makes sense not only from a humanitarian perspective, but strategically too. If regime change is indeed Israel and America’s objective, then they should heed the lesson of the past three decades of military intervention in the Middle East: a change in government cannot be imposed from outside. It must come from within, and Israel, along with its US partners, risks alienating the very constituency it needs most to get the job done.
Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an expert on Middle East affairs and the author of An Uncaged Sky. She was held hostage by Iran from 2020-2022 until she was traded in a prisoner exchange for three convicted Iranian terrorists.
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You're right on the button. But Trump, Netanyahu & Khamenei all think rationality is weakness. Maybe some adjacent cells at the Hague would make them realise otherwise.
Whoever leads the next Iranian government will know what happened to his predecessor.