Bombs over Tehran: a fathers day reflection

To pre-game Father's Day, my friend Paymun and I took our sons to Climb Zone yesterday, a family entertainment center in Chicago. It was a surreal experience watching our children - Sasan, Hafez, Azad, and Kian - scale the mini climbing walls, dart between laser tag and bumper cars, sucking down their very American slushies without a care in the world - while thousands of miles away, bombs lit up the Iranian skies like Fourth of July fireworks. Like every other Iranian, we were glued to our phones. Scanning WhatsApp messages for videos from family members, and checking for news updates. Watching in suspended disbelief as dozens and dozens of missiles traveled back and forth between Israel and Iran. And we continue to watch in shock, horror, and disbelief.

And so are many of you. To my concerned readers, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who have sent me very caring and thoughtful messages in the last 48 hours. I genuinely appreciate each of you. Many of you have conveyed solidarity, and your outrage: How freaking insane is it that Israel is now simultaneously "finishing the job" in Palestine, and has now launched yet another act of illegal aggression, this time directed at Iran. Our families are terrified, fearful, and watching in real-time as their lives and their country go up in smoke and flames.

Although it’s also important to say, and this might surprise some of you, the range of emotions and reactions to the bombing swirling across Iranian communities is far more complicated and complex. I must remind readers that I'm not an expert on Middle East politics. These are my observations as someone with family and friends in Iran. This essay is my attempt to reflect some of it back, and process it for myself.

Some Iranians. Dare I say many, are celebrating the Israeli bombardment of Iran. Yes, you read that correctly. It stings even as I write it. It's uncomfortable, distressful, confusing, embarrassing, even. Mainly, it’s just deeply sad. It's all rooted in trauma and desperation, in my opinion. Of a yearning to break free from the terror of the mullahs and ayatollahs. A yearning that, if I'm being honest with myself, I don't know shit about. The pain, loss, and suffering that Iranian people have endured over the past decades are vast and profound. I know that intellectually, but not intimately. It's where epistemology and ethics collide, but I won't digress there for now...

However, I do know war in a profoundly personal way. I don't bring it up often, and it’s not a story I share commonly or even revisit in my mind on any regular basis. But it is my origin story. I was born in Tehran in 1983, smack dab in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. A war that shapes memories I don't have access to, and defines my immigration story to the United States. A brutal and gruesome war that claimed over a million lives, and fundamentally altered the geopolitics of the Middle East. For me, I was lucky, I guess. My parents secured student visas, and we left Iran before I turned 3. However, how that war lives on in our memories, our sense of the world, our subconscious, our dreams, and nightmares is not easy to comprehend. And inside the belly of any war, lies all kinds of contradictions and mysteries. Like how my dad, when I was 1 or 2 years old, used to take me up on the roof of our Tehran flat to watch enemy missiles light up the night sky. It doesn't make any sense. How could an Iranian father and son find any semblance of joy in military projectiles tearing up their homeland? There are many such mysteries in life. How's that for a Father's Day memory?

For me personally, I will never endorse war, much less an Israeli war against Iran, backed by Trump's America and a military-industrial complex driven by greed and racism. For some Iranians, though, given a choice between life under the Islamic Republic, and Israel bombing their own country in exchange for even a glimmer of hope for a better future, for some, that’s a gamble they are willing to take. And that isn't easy to sit with and process. But in my opinion, at least for myself, it's morally required of me that I do so. If you talk to any Iranians about the conflict that continues to spiral out of control, I hope you will remember to listen first to their pain and understand the war from their point of view. We are not obligated to agree, I certainly don't with many of my own people. However, we owe people, especially those who are losing everything, a chance to share their story.