International Affairs
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Presented To: Shahbod Noori Tehran Magazine
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In an editorial for Tehran Magazin, Shahbod Noori says of the brief Iran–Israel conflict that erupted and abruptly ended in early 2025: What many Iranians had seen as a possible turning point—the fall of the Islamic Republic—became instead a “peace that came too soon,” leaving both exiled and domestic Iranians disillusioned and heartbroken.
Noori writes that for exiles who have lived through forty years of dictatorship and exile, this fleeting conflict felt like their “Soviet collapse moment,” a historical chance for the regime’s downfall, but after the ceasefire it never came.He asks: Why didn’t the Iranian people rise up during the war? and answers: The public spirit has been broken and survival-focused afterr decades of censorship, economic ruin and brutal state crackdowns, including 2019’s gas protests and the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising.
“Maybe our mistake was thinking the U.S. or Israel wanted to free Iran. They only seek to protect their interests,” Noor writes. “We cannot ask people to die for change when they see no outcome … But we can give them hope, we can educate them, and we can show a different path.”