This is the map published by the IDF on June 24th, ordering an emergency evacuation for everyone within the red circle, district 7 in Tehran. It is a map of my old neighbourhood in Tehran, a mixed area of working and middle-class families. The place where I was born, grew up, and went to school. I remember everything from the smallest alleys to the largest thoroughfares by heart. Has the Islamic Republic built a nuclear facility in my childhood neighbourhood in my absence? I began writing on the first day of the war far from the city where I was born. Missiles, planes and drones were hovering in the air, civilians were dying; this war has been terrorising people.
I felt and still feel hopeless and disappointed. The night before the ceasefire, Tehran witnessed its most severe attacks in the past eleven days. Even the news of a ceasefire cannot ease the fear of what lies ahead. Is there any cure for the simultaneous weight of sadness, anger, and fear? I should ask my Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Afghan friends. I’m sure my Palestinian friends are the masters of this feeling. They must know better than anyone else. Will this become a permanent state of being? A continuous overlap of sorrow and rage, always with profound disappointment?
Propaganda machines operate at full capacity. The challenge for me is finding the words to define the condition; the first step is learning how to describe the situation itself, that this war is not just about dismantling Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It has been a constant back-and-forth, shifting from calls for regime change to reinforcing their own power calculations. Despite the main agenda, the act of regime change is designed to replay the Hollywood fantasy of a liberation uprising. As in V for Vendetta, assassinate top-ranking generals and hope that the people, exhausted by structural inequality, will rise up and take over. As Netanyahu stated on the first day of war, “ Our military action is to clear the path for you to freedom. Now is the time for you to free yourself. This is being justified with the usual whitewashed language of “liberation,” “humanitarian intervention,” or the fatal logic that “things cannot get worse, so what is there to lose?” Western politicians often fail to distinguish between their cinematic fantasies and the brutal realities of politics.
On the other side, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Supreme Leader, the government, and the IRGC generals not only lied to the people about the defence capability, but they lied to themselves. They became blind after losing their radar capabilities in Syria following the collapse of the Assad regime. Their access to the Mediterranean Sea was also cut off. Meanwhile, Israel successfully undermined Hezbullah in South Lebanon, Iran’s primary proxy in the region. One after another, they are being killed. They are dying even as I write these words. Iranians suffer from profound naivety, ignorance, and structural corruption, a system so broken it brands any form of criticism or dissent (including my own) as Zionist sympathising. Today, we are suffering due to a fundamental failure to distinguish between those who have long fought for social justice, equality, and peaceful coexistence, and Mossad agents operating from the heart of Tehran, producing deadly drones, terrorising the public, and assassinating high-ranking officials.
Meanwhile, the police and intelligence are preoccupied with violently suppressing women protesting in the streets of Iran for their most basic rights. They fail to recognise those in the streets who are not agents of a foreign enemy but ordinary Iranians, who have been sabotaged, beaten, and killed during the most powerful social justice movement in our contemporary history.
The movement, which was triggered by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of the Moral Security in September 2022, resulted in national uprisings and international demonstrations against compulsory Hijab and a lack of gender equality. And when these protesters screamed “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the regime accused them of being Israeli agents and gave them the bowed head of surrender to Israel. In the middle of the war, after Netanyahu in his war speech mentioned Woman, Life, Freedom in Farsi, he formulated a pretext for the Islamic Republic to begin targeting all those who were actively engaged with the right of equality and against compulsory hijab and other forms of inequalities. Israel even symbolically attacked the entrance of Evin prisons, where the majority of political prisoners are being held, to emphasise and legitimise its military action in the name of human rights, disregarding the fact that there is no such thing as a humanitarian war. There is no such thing as a war of liberation. The parasitic legacy of colonialism can never bring emancipation.
However, I argue that equating Iran and Israel as two sides of the same evil is a historical fallacy. There is a desire to define the war between Israel and the Islamic Republic, not Iran, as if we, the people, are standing safely outside the conflict. Regardless of how sharply one may criticise the Islamic Republic, it is important to distinguish between a domestic authoritarian regime and a colonial power with imperial tendencies, along with its proxies. Authoritarianism has served as the primary pretext for colonisers to justify their interventions. It all begins with humanitarian whitewashing, a deeply colonial strategy dating back to the origins of modern imperial supremacy in July 1798. During the siege of Cairo, Napoleon Bonaparte addressed the people of Egypt with these words: “People of Egypt: You will be told that we are your enemies, but I have come to restore your rights, punish your usurpers.” This speech begins the foundation for a violent civilising mission, the first military incursion by an industrialising and aggressively expansionist Europe in the Middle East,” ushering in modern western hegemony. Divide and rule, define and rule, and liberation rhetoric backed by enlightenment discourse. History is repeating itself from 1798 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now Iran.
I distance myself from the familiar, yet deeply racist, narrative that distinguishes Aryan/Iranian and Arab/Muslim identities, especially in this moment. The narrative, which is rooted in colonial white supremacy, perpetuates the belief that Persia was "occupied" by Arab Muslims and that liberation lies in returning to some imagined, pure, pre-Islamic Aryan white identity. It is the same logic articulated by Arthur de Gobineau in his essay Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855), later absorbed into Pahlavi political ideology. It is no surprise, then, that Iranian monarchists, led by Reza Pahlavi, celebrated the Israeli attacks on Iran, dancing in the streets of Western Europe and the United States.
Here, I try to focus on how local authoritarian regimes operate outside of direct colonial rule. It will be a discursive inequality if one conflates these regimes with colonial domination. We must explore the possibilities that explicitly distinguish domestic authoritarianism (especially non-colonial, indigenous regimes such as the Islamic Republic of Iran) from colonial desire, without collapsing one into the other. Asif Bayat's work is one of the few that critically examines domestic authoritarianism as a product of internal social and religious forces, rather than as a by-product of colonialism. In Revolution Without Revolutionaries, Bayat argues that Islamic authoritarianism in Iran must be understood through the lens of local ideological and theological frameworks, not just as a continuation of colonial or imperial patterns. He introduces the concept of “post-Islamism” to describe how local authoritarian regimes appropriate revolutionary language but govern in repressive and regressive ways. He highlights how Islamist movements morph into authoritarian forms, not just as a continuation of colonial legacies, but through religion’s entanglement with power.[1]
Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in the Time of Terror and Iran: A People Interrupted, explores how postcolonial frameworks need to be expanded to understand internal repressions that are neither colonial nor externally imposed. In this book, Dabashi builds upon Edward Said’s critique of colonialism, shifting the focus toward postcolonial agency and contemporary forms of internal repression. He argues that it is insufficient to critique only how the West represents the East. Instead, we must also examine how local power structures exercise authority, including within non-colonial, modern nation-states facing “a time of terror”.[2]
Dear Ali, you are wrong, I didn’t mean that.
It is necessary to recognise the home-grown forms of tyranny that arise from within Islamic and Persianate political traditions, which historically differ from the formation of Israeli national identity, deeply intertwined with Zionism, a Jewish nationalist movement and the occupation of Palestine since 1948. We need to consider the fact that the 1979 revolution managed to mobilise people and intellectuals by interpreting Shia identity as a revolutionary faith, as advocated by Ali Shariati. He proudly described himself as the “first person in Iran who has known Fanon, translated his works and spoken of.” For Shariati, Shia identity is not a passive religious label but a revolutionary force rooted in historical defiance and social justice. Following on Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonialism and the psychology of the oppressed, Shariati reinterprets Shi'ism as an ethical and political commitment to resisting both foreign domination and domestic tyranny of the Pahlavi regime. He contrasts what he calls “Red Shi'ism”, aligned with struggle and liberation, with “Black Shi'ism”, a version co-opted by oppressive systems to pacify society. Through this synthesis, Shariati fuses Fanon’s call for revolutionary agency with the Shia legacy of martyrdom, positioning Shia identity as a project of decolonial consciousness that confronts both imperialism and authoritarianism from within its own historical and spiritual resources.[3] The position that Fanon disregarded in his letter to Shariati. In the letter first published in the volume Writings on Alienation and Freedom (2015), Fanon warns Shariati that a revival of “sectarian and religious mindsets” could potentially divert “that nation yet to come, which is at best a 'nation in becoming'” onto a more treacherous and counter-revolutionary path warning of the dangers that ensue when religious institutions attain political power amid revolutionary ferment.[4] Fanon was right. In the years following the revolution, when it transformed into the Islamic Revolution and the wave of mass executions began, the danger of sectarian tyranny became undeniable, proving Fanon’s warning correct. He could have started his letter, ‘Dear Ali, you are wrong, I didn’t mean that.’
The struggle here, perhaps, is to find a possible third position within the dichotomy of the West vs. East, which requires a politics and ethics of situated critique: one that sees clearly the violence of both without mirroring their justificatory languages. To think critically in this particular time is to refuse the trap of choosing between a bomb and a baton. It is to insist that the violence of imperial powers and the repression of domestic regimes do not cancel each other out. Rather, they converge in their mutual denial of dignity, memory, and future. Our work is to think from the wound, not for the wounding hand, foreign or native. I truly believe that "the enemy of my enemy" is not only not my friend, it is my enemy.
What is the language which could define the condition?
Mowing the Grass
The phrase “mowing the grass” was coined by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, columnists for The Jerusalem Post and strategic studies researchers[5] and it has been the bumper sticker version of Israeli strategy in Gaza for the last decade and a half. According to a study in 2017 by RAND Army Research Division, dealing with Hamas in Gaza puts Israel in a strategic quandary: It needs to exert enough force to deter Hamas from attacking, but not so much that it topples the regime. In the Los Angeles Times’s article, Raphael S. Cohen describes the act following the research from the RAND Army Research Division. It plays out in the following way: Palestinians, frustrated by the state of the enclave, in turn resist Israeli occupation and systematic terror; Israel responds by “mowing the grass”, killing the perpetrators along with some number of civilians. And so the cycle continues ad infinitum.[6] According to the RAND Army Research Division, “mowing the grass” embodies more than just strategic fatalism; at its core lies the assumption that Israel can control the rheostat. As one Israeli defence analyst said of the 2014 Gaza war, “We want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital.”[7] Call it mowing of the grass or breaking of the bones both describe of the ongoing genocide. The Israeli government and IDF in the last two years, and even now, after attacking Iran, claim that they are just targeting the military.
We are in a simultaneous war and battle of epistemology, the struggle over language and discourse. Those missiles and bombs are built from rhetoric, the most brutal form of power. The other day, Netanyahu congratulated Trump after bombing Iran and thanked him on behalf of “the forces of civilisation”.[8] The day before, the Chancellor of Germany said, “Israel is doing the West’s dirty work."[9] These are not slips of the tongue. They are indications of a mindset that either anticipates destruction or takes it upon itself to carry it out, then cloaks it in rhetoric. It is a historical Western political discourse; violence is bifurcated: one side commits it, the other justifies it. One does the "dirty work," the other shrugs it off. The violence does not end with bullets, missiles or drones. It also operates on an epistemic level, transforming people into an ‘other,’ into a blade of grass that must, from time to time, be mowed, the existence of people described as grass or, in biblical terms, Amalek or human animals. As Fanon taught us in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), colonialism “is not satisfied with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. It turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” The colonised are not just killed, they are rendered killable. Subjected to a double death: first through the erasure of their cultural and political subjectivity, and then through physical annihilation.
When the German Chancellor deliberately says that Israel is doing the dirty work, it is an admission of the crime, outsourced like a contract job. This is moral whitewashing: complicity in aggression, even with clean hands and a civilised front. And no one asks, what price will innocent people have to pay? What follows the wave of missiles and air strikes, one after another? As Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, says, “Words lead to deeds,”. Words that normalise or legitimise serious crimes against civilians create the social, political and moral basis for other people to do things like that.[10]
Physical and epistemic violence work in concert: one erases your existence, the other pulls the trigger. Your corpse holds no value because you were already murdered, made invisible, stigmatised, and dehumanised, long before the body was destroyed. In Palestine, in Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, or Iran, this structure repeats itself: extermination legitimised by the dehumanisation that preceded it. They are outside the bounds of universal humanity. Once expelled from the category of the human, the subject can be targeted, eliminated, and forgotten without consequence. The soldier follows the scholar. The drone follows the map. Thus, the discursive and epistemological apparatus and representation of imperialism function as the foot soldiers for war. Achille Mbembe, in Necropolitics (2003), extends this argument by revealing how colonial regimes govern not just through the management of life (biopower, per Foucault), but through the calculated distribution of death. The logic of “mowing the grass” is necropolitical: it reflects an ontology in which entire populations are produced as disposable. But this logic depends on a prior act of classification, a discursive practice that denies the colonised any epistemic authority, autonomy, or interiority. It is the persistent matrix of power that governs who is considered human, whose suffering is visible, and whose death matters. The colonised are subject to a “zone of non-being,” as Fanon argues, in which their reality is not simply negated but actively re-authored by the colonial order.
The Calm Before the Storm
Three days have passed since the ceasefire, the sudden agreement. No one can say for certain whether it is a genuine effort to de-escalate or merely a tactic to buy time before launching another attack. The ceasefire is in effect, but the sound of drones still lingers over mainly western Iran and other cities. From time to time, bursts of air defence machine gun fire can be heard. It is clear now that the next step for them is not regime change, but to destabilise Iran through its military doctrine of “mowing the grass.” Every dissenting voice will be branded a terrorist, legitimising the machinery of terror and systematic murder. Any individual who resists or disobeys becomes a legitimate target. The occupation, the terror, and the cycles of killing remain unchanged. This is the strategy for preserving political control over the tempo of conflict. As long as the Islamic Republic remains, Israel can justify periodic military actions in the name of deterrence and self-defence, and the whole nation remains in a state of structural instability. The condition that allows the cycles of violence to be repeated. “Mowing the grass” indicates a deeper tension in conflict management: Is it deliberate strategic manipulation, or has the state itself become entangled in an unintended trap of its own making? Fragmentation of social justice movements and any critical voices in Politics. The Islamic Republic’s continued existence weakens and undermines coherent diplomatic resistance. In effect, pressure without resolution reproduces the very conditions that make Iran a "threat." The unresolved tension between managing conflict and resolving its root causes sustains a regional architecture of controlled chaos, benefiting some actors in the short term while deepening long-term crises. The long-term conflict results in division, balkanization, and separation, which have been central to US foreign policy since the presidency of George W. Bush. The term “The New Middle East” was used to describe a strategy of ethnic division, framed as a promise of a better future for the region. But beneath the rhetoric lies a deeper agenda of fragmentation and control.
Is this what the future holds? Divide and rule? The plan to redraw the borders of the Middle East was described in 2006 by Ralph Peters, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel, author, and Fox News commentator. It was initially published in the Armed Forces Journal in an article titled Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look. In his article, he even quotes Churchill to legitimise his argument: “But the unjust borders in the Middle East to borrow from Churchill generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.”[11] The Jerusalem Post echoes this legacy, reminding Donald Trump of the old US doctrine. The so-called “blood borders” represent the very definition of racism, fascism, and ethnic supremacy, a vision of the Middle East carved up along imagined lines of ethnic purity and strategic convenience.[12]
The result? Heightened repression, more profound silence. Israel is the guarantor of instability and tyranny in this region. This war will not bring democracy. It will not bring freedom. Today, they speak of "freeing Iran"; tomorrow, they will speak of dividing it. Iran needs sustained political struggle, not savagery masquerading as salvation. The most brutal leader of the most brutal state will never deliver freedom.
What will happen next? The Iraq, Lebanon or Syrian stories yet again will be the destiny of Iran and Iranians?
The Symmetry of Oppression
What would be the Islamic Republic’s response? As strange as it sounds, instead of addressing the profound sabotage and serious security breach within the highest ranks of the IRGC, the Islamic Republic has chosen to scapegoat Afghan immigrants who have lived in Iran for generations, labelling them as Israeli spies and accusing them of collaborating with the enemy. We are witnessing the convergence of three crises in Iran: security failures, financial corruption, and political instability. Together, they have turned accusations of espionage and sabotage into a convenient excuse to target the entire Afghan migrant population. The daily average of Afghan deportations from Iran has reached 20,000 people, with 5,000 children separated from their families. This measure is not limited to deportation but is also accompanied by the confiscation of property, the sealing of homes, and the broadcasting of forced confessions. By accusing them of "espionage," the government is attempting to divert public attention from its massive intelligence failure. The Islamic Republic seems to have a short memory, forgetting how it sent Afghan Shia to Syria under the banner of Liwa Fatemiyoun. Back then, they were called brothers, defending Shia holy sites in Syria. Now, they have been turned into the "new enemy.” Alongside the actions of the Islamic Republic, Israelis are promoting ethnic divisions as the most reliable strategy for the long-term destabilisation of Iran while they are committing the act of ethic cleansing, displacement and genocide. And in the US, at least 56,000 immigrants are being held in ICE detention. It seems both sides are mirroring each other, using racism and ethnic superiority as tools of control, whether in Iran, Israel, or the United States.
This hopeless line of thought is not an attempt to predict the future. It is a way of making sense, drawing on what I know and what I have learned through reading, teaching and thinking through postcolonial theory and decolonial practice. It is no exaggeration to say that I feel in this particular moment what Walter Benjamin described: memory seized at a moment of danger. Writing these words is my act of seizing memory amid the grand narrative of historical materialist rhetoric, an attempt to locate myself once again in the incompleteness of history and repeat the question, what will happen next?
Why the world is losing its moral compass, I am not trying to find an answer here, but only by confronting this question can we begin to imagine how to resist and act in a new and more principled way. To ask why the world is losing its moral compass is therefore to confront a history that has always made certain lives illegible and inevitable deaths ungrievable. It is not enough to critique war or even imperialism; we should dismantle the epistemic infrastructures that make violence legible as security, extermination as peace, and erasure as civilisation.
[1]Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
[2]Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (London: Routledge, 2009).
[3]Ali Shariati, Red Shi'ism vs. Black Shi'ism, trans. Fatollah Marjani (Houston: Free Islamic Literature, 1980).
[4]Frantz Fanon, Writings on Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
[5]Eitan Shamir and Efraim Inbar, “Mowing the Grass in Gaza,” The Jerusalem Post, July 22, 2014, archived May 12, 2025, retrieved May 21, 2025.
[6]Raphael S. Cohen, “The Problem with Israel’s Futile Gaza Strategy, Explained,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2023.
[7]Raphael S. Cohen, David E. Johnson, David E. Thaler, Brenna Allen, Elizabeth M. Bartels, James Cahill, and Shira Efron, Lessons from Israel's Wars in Gaza (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017), accessed October 18, 2017,https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9975.html
[8]Benjamin Netanyahu, quoted in “Netanyahu Says Trump’s Decision to Strike Iran Nuke Sites Will ‘Change History’,” New York Post, June 21, 2025,https://nypost.com/2025/06/21/world-news/netanyahu-says-trumps-decision-to-strike-iran-nuke-sites-will-change-history/.
[9] Friedrich Merz, quoted in “Germany’s Merz Sees No Reason to Criticise Israeli, U.S. Attacks on Iran,”Reuters,June 23, 2025.
[10] Michael Sfard, quoted in Bethan McKernan, “Israeli Lawyer: Language that Normalises War Crimes Paves the Way for Violence,” The Guardian, May 13, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/13/israeli-lawyer-language-that-normalises-war-crimes-paves-way-for-violence
[11]Ralph Peters, "Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look,"Armed Forces Journal, 2006.
[12]The Jerusalem Post,"Trump Must Help Israel Finish the Job to Dismantle Khamenei’s Regime," June 18, 2025, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-858111
Behzad Khosravi Noori, PhD, is an artist, writer and educator. His research-based practice includes films, installations, and archival studies. His works investigate histories from the Global South, labour and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter-narration to the East-West, North-South dichotomy. Noori explores possible correspondences seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, proletarianism, subalternity, and the technology of image production. He analyses contemporary history to revisit memories beyond borders, exploring the entanglements and non/aligned memories. Through artistic research, Noori uses personal experience as a springboard to establish a hypothetical relationship between personal memories and significant world events between micro and macro histories. His works emphasise films and historical materials to bring questions such as what happens when the narration crosses the border and what the future of our collective past is. In his practice he reflects upon the marginalia of artistic explorations in relation to art, the history of transnationalism, and global politics.
