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I will always remember the morning of Saturday October 7 and how terrible it was. I had gotten up early to start my weekend. The plan was to plant some dill in our balcony garden and start reading What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, the debut novel of the Puerto Rican writer Claire Jiménez. But then I checked the news and was filled with immediate horror: Hamas had attacked Israel. Hundreds were killed, hundreds were missing,and hundreds were taken hostage.
Based in the U.S., I'm far from the wretched conflicts of the Middle East—but they are never far from me. I am from Iran and my wife is from Turkey and Lebanon. We have many friends and family in the region. As that dark Saturday went on, the number of Israeli casualties kept climbing up. Then Israel declared war and got to striking Gaza immediately, so the number of Palestinian casualties also started growing, into the hundreds.
I immediately got on the phone, texting and calling friends in Israel and Gaza.
Are you OK?
No, of course I'm not OK, but thanks for asking.
I wanted to let them know that my heart was with them—all of them. A friend in Tel Aviv told me one of her closest friends was missing. He was an activist for peace and working-class rights. By October 8, he wasn't missing any more. He had been killed by Hamas.
A friend in Gaza joked that maybe she didn't need to worry about studying for grad school that weekend. A week later, she had several friends and family members who had been killed. As of this writing, she has had to move several times to avoid Israeli shelling, and I've lost touch with her. This friend is 32, a few years younger than me. She was 15 when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. She was 18 when the 2009 war killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
I also spoke to friends and family in the region—in Iran, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Iraq, in the UAE. All were shocked about Hamas's brutal attack. Unlike certain speakers in New York or certain commentators in London, no one was "exhilarated." No one was "celebrated." Everyone was dead worried. My wife's cousin wondered if he should go pick his olives in southern Lebanon as he always does or if it was too dangerous now. My cousin in Arak asked me to promise him there won't be war, because he really can't take any more misery.
My expertise is on the modern Middle East so, as soon as I finished checking in with friends and family, I had to get to writing, tweeting, punditry on TV. It is my life, my job, tethered to the Middle East, even if I live far away.
I wish none of this was my life. I wish I was from from a land that had never seen war. I wish I never had to call someone to know if they were killed in a airstrike or not. I wish I had never had to read long, blood-thirsty speeches by Ayatollah Khamenei or Hassan Nasrallah. I wish I never had to translate what an Israeli minister meant when he spoke of "human animals" in Gaza. I wish our Middle East could be different.
I know I am not alone in this wish. I remember growing up in Tehran under the jackboots of the Islamic Republic, never far from war and repression. When my mother was pregnant with me, she had to hide in bomb shelters, taking refuge from Saddam's bombs. My cousin was killed in that war. Almost everybody in my family has spent some time in prison. The repression in Iran meant being on the run from the police, having your friends arrested and tortured.
But we never allowed ourselves to be defined by this misery. With our daily lives, we embodied a different Middle East. We spent our time with movies, theater, poetry, and (illegally obtained) wine. Our war was the one waged between partisans of Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro, or in debates over whether Billy Wilder films were art; whether Jean-Luc Godard's cinema was the height of art or pretentious garbage and whether Nazzar Qabbani's poetry was cheesy.
Politics was woven into our lives because even our most quotidian existence—what to wear, what to watch, what to eat—was disrupted by the regime. I was a socialist activist in Tehran. Many of my friends were activists of different hues: from liberals to communists and everything in between. But our aspirations and preoccupations were similar to those of young people everywhere: We loved our football teams, we wanted to get good jobs, our hearts were broken by high school sweethearts.
Years later, when I moved to the West, I continued my socialist activism but I was shocked by the utter lack of internationalism on the part of much of the Western Left. How could they defend the Islamic Republic of Iran that had killed more socialists than almost any other government then? How could they condone the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria as he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people? This was never just ideological for me. I never understood how they could they speak of the people of our region as if they were abstract concepts or pawns on a geopolitical chessboard, not real people.
When you know the Middle East and the people there, you know the truth that is hidden from the West: Whether they live in Tel Aviv or Gaza or Tehran or Beirut, they don't want their children to wake up to the sound of sirens and rockets. They don't want their lives to be determined by checkpoints, war, sanctions, and economic destruction. They have one thing in common above all else: They want to live.
It may be hard to believe this now, in the midst of the abyss with the Israeli hostages still in Gaza, the Palestinian death toll increasing by the hour, the murderous Khamenei and Assad rule unceasing. But believe it we must.
It's not so far-fetched. In the past few years, many wars were beginning to wind down in our region, many states overcoming their past rifts.
Of course, we are a long way from having a democratic region. The regime in Iran is a particular threat to its own people and the region, for it follows a uniquely ambitious agenda of intervention in other countries. But if Turkey, Israel, and other major Arab states work together, they can help end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has taken so much from so many people.
Palestinians can achieve statehood and sovereignty and Israelis can achieve peace with their neighbors. This won't get us to Shangri La. Struggles for freedom and democracy will be ongoing, in my own Iran and elsewhere. But these struggles will have much better chances when guns fall silent and civil societies can breathe.
We can imagine another Middle East, one in which Gaza will be known for its world-class beaches, Tel Aviv for its great bookshops, Riyadh for its tantalizing dining options, and Tehran for its cinemas. If we all desire it, it won't be just a dream.
Arash Azizi is a senior lecturer in history and political science at Clemson University and author of the upcoming "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom" (2024).
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
