Tehran – The Iran-Israel war ended 40 days ago, but I don’t know I’m walking through Tehran. The capital’s crammed subways and buses are full of people living in everyday life, and it appears no one has spoken about the 12 days that he spent constantly listening to active air defense.
But outside of the Iranian border, the topic is as up-to-date as it was during the war. On podcasts and independent YouTube channels, the general question is how history remembers the opposition of post-conflict Western-based Iran with Israel. “History is very straightforward and brutal,” one podcaster commented to a guest of historian. “Do you think in the future everyone will talk about Iran’s opposition from a good perspective?” he asked. The guest simply shook his head and replied, “No.”
For the majority of the past 40 years, Western Iran’s opposition, primarily composed of aging loyalties of abdicated Shah and young journalists and activists who began their careers in Iran before working with foreign governments, have been fragmented and buried in the challenges of unity. However, it appears that a consensus has emerged between many of this opposition during the recent war. The attacks on Iran and Israeli airstrikes claimed at least 1,026 lives, but were OK as long as it meant the Islamic Republic was falling.
Naturally, this perspective did not resonate with people within Iran. The plea of the abdicated Shah’s son, carrying a presser stuffed with Western journalists during the war, was the most distant from the hearts of Iranians who were afraid of themselves and their families, calling on people to “stopping up” against the Islamic Republic. In fact, within Iran, people always give little credibility to Western-based opposition.
“I don’t know what the clown was thinking,” said Sara, an office worker in her 40s, who originally had a long-time Tehran resident from eastern Iran. “Some people say I’m too strict, but I really believe that anyone who left this country and made a life abroad has no more say. The son of Shah and many of these so-called opposition members became citizens after making a vow to protect the interests of America.
What most observers probably couldn’t foresee was the alienation of Iranians overseas by opposition parties with Israel, most of whom live in the US and Western Europe.
Germany reports show that while around 80,000 Iranians attended a rallies in Berlin in 2022 in sought to overthrow the Islamic Republic, a similar gathering in Munich last month attracted only 300 at most. I reached out to a distant relative I knew at a Berlin meeting to ask if she had also attended a Munich gathering. “I haven’t,” she texted. “I will never again be involved in what these traitors organize.”
The future of the opposition
We now know that Western Iranian opposition parties support Israel during the war and hope to replace the Islamic Republic. The Iranian government won. Opposition parties have lost public support in the West and are likely to be remembered as traitors in history. But will they be able to recover from this self-harm and regain their relevance in the near future as merely opposition? One former member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MEK) thinks that perhaps it can’t.
“The last straw of those who observed the MEK in the 1980s was the support of Saddam Hussein’s group during the invasion of Iran. Almost 40 years later, everyone still remembers the MEK as a traitor.”
MEK, the terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of more than 24,000 Iranians, was first formed to oppose the Shah regime. However, after failing to secure a post-revolutionary political foothold, they opposed the Islamic Republic and have since been run from outside Iran. MEK members are currently based in camps in Albania, but their leadership spends time in Western countries.
MEK presents itself as an opposition group, and is now recognized as such by the Western Provinces, but even critical of the Islamic Republic has been increasingly distanced from the organization over the years. Even if cooperation occurs behind closed doors, most people don’t want to be public with the group. “You’re not at least Iranian, but you can’t rebrand yourself after treason,” Khodabandeh said.