Words from Arang Keshavarzian, a professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University, to Equator

 

A new war in the Middle East On Saturday morning (28 Feb. 2026), Israel and the US launched air strikes on Iran as Donald Trump – wearing a baseball cap emblazoned “USA” – announced “major combat operations”. Iran retaliated with strikes on US assets in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.  The violent suppression of recent protests in Iran has become a part of the rhetorical justification for this attack – but the question of American and Israeli support for the uprising has been a controversial one, as Arang Keshavarzian, a professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University, told Equator.  “It's evident that an Israel that continues to be unencumbered by international law and unconditionally backed by the United States seeks to stoke tensions and create a chaotic, falling-apart Iran,” Keshavarzian said. “We should be able to hold this reality alongside the fact that there is a grassroots political movement that is at the core of this uprising. Both things are true.” Through weeks of protest, the Iranian government cut off the internet, plunging its population into silence. When service was restored patchily, a young man in Tehran shared, on a frail WhatsApp connection, his sense of the situation.  “What unsettles many inside Iran is not only the regime or the repression, but the spectacle unfolding beyond the borders,” he wrote:  ­

­ The behaviour of the opposition abroad, and of the Iranian diaspora more broadly, has taken on an almost manic quality. There’s a sense of disconnection so severe that it borders on hallucination: maximalist rhetoric untethered from lived reality, feverish certainty detached from consequence. From inside the country, this external discourse often feels less like solidarity and more like noise. Or worse, like projection. A politics of fantasy, conducted at a safe distance, treating those still here as symbols rather than living breathing bodies. For many of us, this is perhaps the most alienating realisation of all: that the loudest voices claiming to speak for Iran often seem unable – or unwilling – to listen to it.  ­

­ The Iranian novelist Salar Abdoh, who was in Tehran and Bushehr during the most violent days of the protests, wrote a powerful piece about his experience for Equator.  No one knew how many people had been killed, how vast the bloodbath was. His friends seemed weary and spent. One wished out aloud that Donald Trump would “hurry up already and get here. Or at least send in the Israelis to finish the job.” “What was there to say to that?” Abdoh wondered. “While her stance was not pervasive, neither was it uncommon. I had heard variations of this wish for deliverance from a number of people, sometimes out of sheer frustration and sometimes with a blind single-mindedness and total disregard for what would happen on the day after.”

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