The left and right are spinning Iran’s story for their own ends, while its people suffer

The courage of the Iranian protesters has been awe-inspiring, much of the discussion about the uprising deeply dispiriting. On both left and right, the question of the freedom of the Iranian people has become sublimated to sectarian or partisan desires.

Some on the left view the Islamic Republic of Iran as a necessary buttress against Israel and imperialism, and protesters as the patsies of Mossad and the CIA. Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi has described the uprising as “an attempted disinformation coup crudely masterminded by the US and Israel”.

Tehran University researcher Helyeh Doutaghi, writing for Progressive International, a leftwing network whose leadership includes Yanis Varoufakis, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, distinguished between policing in “imperial countries”, which serves to “suppress dissent, criminalise resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence”, and in Iran, where the police are not “suppressors of the people” but “guarantors of public order for the people”. It takes extraordinary self-deception to insist that a theocratic state butchering its own citizens is merely maintaining “public order for the people”.

The fact is, there has barely been a liberation movement or democracy struggle within which the CIA has not intervened. Where the success of those movements has been inconvenient for the west, it has often sought to thwart democracy. Iran itself is a classic case study.

In August 1953, the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was deposed by a coup after he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA acknowledged 60 years later that it had been carried out “under CIA direction” and “as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”. After the coup, the shah became effectively a dictatorial ruler.

Israel spent decades providing covert support for Hamas, to help enfeeble the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation and sow discord within Palestinian ranks. The Times of Israel noted the day after the murderous Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, that the strategy “of indirectly strengthening Hamas… went up in smoke”. In the two years since, Israel has obliterated Gaza supposedly to hunt down a monster it helped nurture.

This is a history that those who back Israel conveniently ignore. It is ignored, too, by those who support the Palestinian struggle but deem the Iranian protests illegitimate for being “polluted by Mossad”.

Some on the right have fuelled distrust of Iranian protesters by making incendiary claims about American and Israeli action. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them...”, former US secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo tweeted at the beginning of the month. Last week, Israel’s Channel 14 claimed that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms”. Those who would normally be suspicious of unverified assertions on what is in essence a propaganda channel for Benjamin Netanyahu, nevertheless eagerly seized upon this to try to discredit the protests.

Claims such as those of Pompeo and Channel 14 are designed not to help the people of Iran but to inflame the debate and claim credit for external actors. They aim to increase western leverage in shaping post-theocratic Iran and to diminish the voice and agency of the Iranian people; helping, for instance, push the claims of Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed shah, a deeply divisive figure in Iran but favoured by western powers for his fealty to America and Israel. Especially at a time when information from inside Iran is so limited, we should not accept bombastic propaganda as gospel truth without evidence.

The CIA, Mossad and many other covert forces are undoubtedly attempting to shape the Iranian uprising. History gives us many reasons to object to foreign interference in popular struggles. There is, though, no reason to view the Iranian protests as anything but genuine. They are the latest and most potent expression of decades of struggle against the theocratic regime, from the thousands of women who took to the streets within weeks of the Ayatollah Khomeini seizing power in 1979 to oppose his mandatory hijab decree, to the millions who participated in the “Woman, life, freedom” revolt in 2022 and 2023, after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, arrested for wearing a hijab “improperly”, was killed in police custody, and who were met, as so many times before, with bullets, prisons and executions. This is the story not of “Israeli-instigated protests” but of a people willing, again and again, to make extraordinary sacrifices to gain freedom.

“Why are those who support Palestinians silent about Iran?” has become a common question posed by many on the right. As it happens, many on the left have been vocal in support of Iranian freedom, even if others have inexcusably backed the theocratic state.

One reason for the strength of the Gaza protests has been the desire to change western policy towards Israel and Palestine, whereas no western government supports the Iranian regime or opposes the protesters.

In any case, the same question could be asked in reverse of conservatives and supporters of Israel. Why do so many who support freedom for Iranians refuse to apply that principle to Palestinians? Why have they cheered on the destruction of Gaza and the brutality of Israeli forces? Rightwing discussions of “freedom” are steeped in double standards.

Iranians and Palestinians both deserve freedom: freedom from theocratic tyranny, whether in the form of Hamas or the ayatollahs; freedom from Israeli occupation and repression and from American intervention; freedom collectively to rule their own lives. Not to understand that is not to understand the meaning of freedom.

Photograph by Bettmann Archive