. It is way more than 10% on both sides, David. However, one of those sides is occupied and the other side is an occupier. Animosity is to be expected from the Palestinians on account of the fact that they are the occupied, the dis-possessed. Settlers and the state and military institutions that abet them in their dispossession of the Palestinians are in breach of any number of UNSC resolutions and numerous rulings of the ICJ and have no justification. There are no both sides to this.
Palestinians fight for what is morally and legally theirs. Israelis also fight for what morally and legally belongs to the Palestinians.
They have been offered a state of their own numerous times and declined. Why is that gringo and ngb1066?
By Nazenin Ansari
I was born in Iran. But the abhorrent regime ruling my homeland, which sponsors and supports Hezbollah, does not speak or act for me – nor most Iranians.
When the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, calls Israel a “vampire” and fires hundreds of missiles at the Jewish state, people watching the news thousands of miles away may get the impression – consciously or subconsciously – that most Iranians also support the Lebanese militants, given the decades of violent antisemitism spewing from Tehran.
I myself can only watch from a distance, having fled to the UK long ago and found freedom here as a refugee. I know the only images that most people here ever see of Iranians come from state TV footage of anti-Israeli street protests, perhaps where the Star of David is being burnt.
To think that all of us, or even most of us, feel this way is wrong.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian people have been held captive by a militant cult of Shia Islam. We should never see the regime as representative of them.
It is a theocracy in which all laws are based on a fundamentalist interpretation of this religion. The clergy prosecute and silence dissenters, even in their own circles.
Their barbarity can sometimes be overlooked by people who are angered by Israel’s military actions, first in Gaza and now in Lebanon. When they read that Iran is fighting back, some may instinctively feel that all views on the Middle East are binary, that any enemy of Israel is their friend, and that the regime should be supported.
The truth is, people who feel sympathy for innocent Palestinians being bombed by Israel should feel the same towards innocent Iranians who have suffered or perished under dictatorship.
The regime’s existence is dedicated purely to its survival and spreading the revolution beyond its borders. It is not about the survival of Islam, nor the survival of Shi’ism. It is about the survival of this fundamentalist militant cult.
For those in power in Tehran, that involves trying to impose their extremist form of Islam upon millions more people. That means all women become second-class citizens, and all gay people potentially face the death penalty; peaceful protesters being locked up, shot, or hanged in the streets, a constant fear of being arrested that permeates everyday life.
This is what life is like in Iran. It’s a never-ending nightmare. This is what they want for the rest of the Middle East, while enriching themselves in the process.
We have learned from defectors that some Hezbollah fighters even guard the country’s nuclear facilities, because the regime would rather trust people from their borderless “umma” – roughly their equivalent of a caliphate – than ordinary Iranians.
Hezbollah are the henchmen of bullies, who are against anything that this modern world is based on. I can never celebrate any death, but many Iranians were pleased by the elimination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an Israeli air strike last month.
The regime in Iran also trains and sponsors Hamas, despite the group being Sunni (this is a marriage of convenience). My heart goes out to the ordinary Palestinians who are being killed in Gaza, but not to the Hamas fighters who dig their tunnels under schools and hospitals and who raped and massacred innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023.
One slogan being used on the streets of Iran is: “Neither for Lebanon nor for Gaza, my life is for Iran.”
Tehran’s support for these groups comes at the expense of the Iranian people. Money should be invested in Iran for better schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Instead, it pays for weapons to be shipped to Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, too. While Iranian teachers, nurses, labourers and pensioners face high inflation with meagre salaries, their money is used for a terrorist battle they don’t believe in.
