Peyvand Khorsandi was only four years old when he and his family left Iran for the United Kingdom in 1976, three years before the Islamic revolution. His father, Hadi, a well-known Iranian satirist and poet, was the target of a failed assassination attempt, allegedly orchestrated by the Iranian government in 1984. The attack was foiled by London’s Metropolitan Police following a tip-off from a senior Iranian official, who soon went into self-imposed exile.
Despite that history, Khorsandi still opposes the US-Israel war on Iran and says it has granted the government a new lease of life while delivering a serious setback to pro-democracy Iranians. Khorsandi is one of many Iranians in the diaspora caught in the paradox of opposing both the government and the war on Iran. The conflict, which began six months ago on February 28 when the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran, has upended the global economy, caused energy prices to spiral and killed thousands of civilians, mostly in Iran and Lebanon.
The region is stuck at a crossroads of continued uncertainty, and the war has left the Iranian diaspora divided, with many in Western countries supporting the attacks on their ancestral homeland, and others opposing the war. Supporters of the strikes have mostly rallied around Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah, or king. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled in 1979 following decades of rule.
Others, like Khorsandi, reject Pahlavi’s politics. I think he [Pahlavi] is a willing servant of the Israeli government,” Khorsandi told Al Jazeera. The lives of Global South people are expendable.
We are as expendable to them [the US and Israel] as Palestinians. It’s a war fought for colonial sensibilities. Some diaspora Iranians made the mistake of thinking that the West sees them as equals.” The US-Israel war on Iran is widely seen as a one-off choice.
US intelligence had already concluded that Tehran was not trying to weaponise its nuclear programme before the conflict was launched. Nevertheless, US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to justify the conflict at the outset on human rights grounds, suggesting that they sought to help common Iranians. However, that argument began to unravel just a few hours into the war when an elementary school for girls in the southern city of Minab was bombed.
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