On 13 June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a surprise wave of airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, IRGC missile sites, key military leaders, scientists, and civilians, igniting a high-intensity 12-day conflict.
Iran suffered heavy losses, with official figures reporting 935 dead, including 38 children and 132 women, and thousands wounded, while Western intelligence estimated over 1,000 fatalities, including scientists, IRGC personnel, and civilians. In retaliation, Iran fired hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles, some of which penetrated Israeli defenses, killing at least 28 and injuring more than 3,000, according to official reports.
On 21 June, the United States directly entered the offence with Operation Midnight Hammer, launching stealth B-2 bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Esfahan, and Natanz. The UK, France, and Germany supported Israel by deploying naval assets and missile defense units to the region.
And on June 25, a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect, halting active hostilities for the time being. The near future remains uncertain, however. The Iranian sky is now under the occupation of Israel, as in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, with a free ticket for bombings and assassinations.
Scapegoating and Oppression
Israel’s unprecedented use of drones launched from inside Iran dealt a severe blow to the Islamic Republic’s core security narrative. For decades, Iran’s rulers justified their authoritarian control and economic shortcomings by claiming they alone could guarantee national security. Yet, when Israel smuggled armed drones—via suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers—to clear paths toward missile systems and nuclear sites inside cities like Tehran and Isfahan, it exposed deep vulnerabilities in a regime that claims omnipresent vigilance. Public trust wavered as the administration’s unshakable grip on defense began to show cracks.
To deal with this crisis, in the aftermath, the regime launched a scapegoating campaign as part of the unfolding war nationalism. It is targeting Kurds, Afghans, Jews, and Baha’is “suspected of collaborating with Israel,” according to state media and human rights reports. Among the most chilling acts were the executions of three Kurdish prisoners—publicly charged under espionage allegations linked to the Israeli attacks—even as credible evidence remains scant.
Meanwhile, large-scale deportations of Afghan migrants surged, with Iranian authorities arresting thousands—including many with valid visas—and forcing them to leave under claims of security threats, all without due process. These harsh reprisals aimed to deflect attention from the regime’s failure to prevent foreign penetration, a shameful blow to its masculine guardian image, while reviving old narratives of an internal “fifth column.” By stigmatizing minority groups, the government sought to reassert its authority without ever confronting its own intelligence lapses.
The Blessings of Bombs
Right before the 12-day war, there was one of the largest labor protests in Iran, with almost a month of nationwide strike by drivers that spread to 163 cities. The strike, sparked by plummeting freight rates, rising insurance and fuel costs, and deteriorating working conditions, has garnered widespread public backing, as well as support from many activists and political prisoners. The war, at least temporarily, put an end not only to this strike, a reaction to the massive neoliberalization in the past decades, but also to civil resistance against the regime inside Iran.
Instead, since the war, two masculine, campist, passifying, nihilistic, and death-driven hopes have gained influence in the Iranian political scene, relying on fantasies of heroic men saving a threatened motherland. They stand in sharp contrast to the Jina revolution’s politics of care and solidarity, rooted in reclaiming life (زندگی) instead of domination, exclusion, or the glorification of death.
The first death-driven hope centers on foreign saviors—mainly Israel and the United States—imagined as powerful forces who will humiliate the regime and “liberate” Iran. Many monarchist supporters, who openly align with Israel, promote this vision. The exiled crown prince, hoping to return after 46 years, quickly held a conference in Paris, calling the war “our Berlin Wall moment.” The war is seen as only between the regime and foreign liberators—not involving Iran or its people—so “all Iranians are happy.” Civilian deaths are dismissed as “collateral damage,” a necessary cost of freedom. The war is presented as part of a larger plan for a “new Middle East,” a fascist utopia that, among others, justifies genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Israel and the U.S. framed their attacks as necessary to stop an imminent nuclear threat. Yet ironically, Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, refuses to join international treaties, and is currently committing genocide and other war crimes in Gaza. The U.S., the only nation to have ever used nuclear bombs, continues to attack others without facing consequences. Together, they form a disturbing pair, claiming to protect the world while enforcing a global regime of war and domination.
The second death-driven hope envisions the Islamic Republic as the defender of Iran. A broad group—comprising regime supporters and nationalists from both the left and right—embraces this idea. In their view, all Iranians, even critics of the regime, should support it during wartime. But this supposed temporary unity is used to delay demands for justice and freedom. Martyrdom is glorified, life is devalued, and death becomes a sacred price for independence. War is used to justify more repression, surveillance, exclusion, and the quest to find traitors. However, it has a history that extends beyond the last war.
When Ayatollah Khomeini said “war is a blessing,” it wasn’t just a slogan—it was a strategy. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the new Islamic regime used war to strengthen its power, silence dissent, execute political prisoners, and invade Kurdistan (Rojhelat), all under the banner of defending the homeland. Over forty years later, the war with Israel follows the same pattern. Despite its military cost, it gave the regime a political advantage—fueling nationalism and briefly covering up the deep legitimacy crisis caused by the Jina uprising in 2022.
Beyond domestic consolidation, the war also served as an international PR campaign. The Islamic regime, long tarnished by its alliances with repressive regimes like Syria’s Assad, gained symbolic capital by standing toe-to-toe with Israel, an occupying force that is committing genocide. In the eyes of some domestic and even international observers, Tehran repositioned itself as a legitimate actor of resistance, masking authoritarian violence under the guise of anti-imperial struggle.
Care for Life
Against these two death-driven hopes in Iran, a quiet yet powerful reminder of another kind of resistance has emerged, challenging them by emphasizing life and care. In the shadow of airstrikes and state crackdowns, the spirit of the Jina Revolution resurfaced—not in mass protests this time, but through the reactivation of care networks that had once sustained a revolutionary horizon in 2022.
These networks, built around mutual aid, grassroots organizing, and solidarity, have reawakened under wartime pressures to meet urgent needs: sharing food, housing the displaced, finding the missing, supporting the repair of buildings, and helping the elderly and vulnerable survive the war. The care networks, as in the case of the revolutionary momentum, expand beyond Iranians, as for example Balochi activists organized to provide food and water to the Afghans who are suffering in the deportation camps and on the borders.
This is more than improvisational charity—it is the continuation of a “politics of care” that has long underpinned dissent in Iran, especially among women, gender dissidents, students, and marginalized communities. These reproductive and survival initiatives—community kitchens, informal health networks, Telegram-based aid channels, and transportation facilitation collectives—represent an alternative infrastructure that emerged before the 2022 uprising but were politicized by the repression they faced.
During the Jina Revolution, these same networks helped coordinate protests and protect demonstrators. Now, under the pressure of war, they once again step into the breach—this time to preserve life itself in the broadest sense: biological, social, and political.
In a moment when the regime seeks to monopolize narratives of survival and sovereignty, these autonomous practices of care tell a different story of concurrent resistance against war and dictatorship. Unlike the official masculine praise for the martyrs of the war and the justification of intensified oppression, care practices concentrate on people’s pains and sufferings to reclaim life, highlighting what unites us as “we” in opposition to both the necro hopes of the oppressive regime nationalism, and those of imperialist genocidal “saviors”.
**A shorter version of this article was published in German here.
