Iran International
Conflicting voices in Tehran on the competing prospects of war and diplomacy with Washington may be deliberate, but they more likely reflect an absence of consensus at the top.
A quick look at the main headlines on the IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency on Monday captured the mood in Tehran: “Possibility of Iran–US Negotiations Confirmed,” “Implications for America if War Spreads Across the Region,” and “With Trump’s Conditions, There Will Be No Negotiations.”
Together, they betray a system simultaneously preparing for talks, threatening escalation, and insisting negotiations are impossible.
Despite the government’s efforts to project calm beneath Tehran’s smog-covered skyline, a speech on Sunday by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei only deepened the sense of foreboding.
Khamenei recounted a joke from his native province of Khorasan about a man boasting of how close he was to marrying the woman he loved. “Only two steps remain,” the man says. “I ask her father for her hand, and he replies: ‘How dare you!’”
Those seated around Khamenei, including his financial confidant Mohammad Mokhber, smiled uncertainly—perhaps only gradually realizing that, in Khamenei’s telling, the hopeful suitor was US President Donald Trump, and the disapproving father was Khamenei himself.
‘American graveyard’
For opportunistic politicians and commentators in Tehran, the message was unmistakable: recent claims by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and security chief Ali Larijani about ongoing negotiations with Washington mattered far less than the Supreme Leader’s evident reluctance to engage.
On the central question—whether Iran is prepared to make concessions—Khamenei remains firmly unwilling to yield.
Hardliners, who had briefly lowered their volume in anticipation of a possible diplomatic opening, appeared to have received the memo and quickly returned to form.
In parliament, the cleric Mohammad Taghi Naghdali declared that Iran should not only close the Strait of Hormuz but also disrupt Europe’s shipping routes and gas export networks, while calling for reduced cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The rhetoric soon veered into the absurd. The managing director of Tehran’s main cemetery, Behesht-e Zahra, claimed he had prepared 5,000 graves for US soldiers he believed would be killed on the first day of a war with Iran.
The statement was swiftly refuted by Tehran city councillor Jafar Tashakori, who warned that reckless remarks could trigger crises “far beyond domestic politics.”
Vested interests
Even seasoned analysts struggled to impose coherence on the moment. Political commentator Ali Bigdeli said no one could say with certainty whether war was coming, arguing that Iran’s only viable path forward lay in direct talks with the United States.
While Iran’s official position, articulated by Araghchi, is that any talks must be confined to the nuclear file, Bigdeli cautioned that Washington’s ambitions extend to Tehran’s missile program and its regional allies.
“Trump is not interested in a direct war with Iran,” Bigdeli told the moderate outlet Khabar Online. “But he is unlikely to leave the region with his armada without achieving something.”
Ebrahim Rezai, spokesperson for parliament’s National Security Committee, cited a briefing by IRGC Aerospace Force commanders to assert that any US attack would trap American forces in a regional war.
Yet another conservative figure, Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, cautioned that those beating the drums of war in Tehran were playing into Israel’s hands.
Taken together, the cacophony points less to confidence than to paralysis: a system torn between waiting for a signal from the top and being pulled in opposing directions by vested interests, each pressing for the outcome it prefers.
In late September 2022, when a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini was killed for showing her hair, Iran erupted. Millions of brave Iranians, women and men, young and old, took to the streets.
What followed was not just a protest against compulsory hijab laws, but one of the clearest rejections of the Islamic Republic since 1979: Woman. Life. Freedom.
At the time, I was head of digital operations at the Israel ministry of foreign affairs, leading Israel’s public diplomacy online in six languages, including Persian.
From the start, we distinguished between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. That distinction guided everything we did. We launched one of the only official digital campaigns anywhere in direct solidarity with Mahsa Amini and the protesters, including a filter viewed more than a million times.
Our Israel in Persian accounts exploded. Posts expressing support reached millions. Every day, we received thousands of messages from inside Iran: “Thank you for seeing us,” they said, “be our voice.”
In January 2026, they did the same.
For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has insisted that hatred of Israel is central to Iranian identity. But millions of Iranians have told us otherwise.
A GAMAAN survey published in 2025 found that roughly two thirds of Iranians said the government should stop its “destroy Israel” rhetoric, and a similar majority viewed the recent 12 day conflict as between the Iranian regime and Israel, not between Israel and ordinary Iranians.
Loyal supporters of Iran's theocratic rule, the same voices that celebrated October 7, want you to believe Iranians hate Israel and that the protests are foreign engineered fantasies.
They flood social media with trolls, lies, and fake AI videos. But the people have already spoken. Across ideology and geography, they are saying the same thing: Not death to Israel. Not death to America. Death to the Islamic Republic.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian Jews live around the world today, many still speaking Persian, cooking Iranian food, and aching for the country they were forced to leave.
Israel is home to about 200,000 Iranian Jews. Long before modern politics, Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem, an event recorded in both Jewish and Persian history.
That shared past still lives between our peoples. And it lives in everyday encounters.
Every Iranian I have ever met has responded to me as a Jewish Israeli with warmth, curiosity, and respect. Never hatred.
Israelis are taught that Iran wants them wiped off the map. Iranians are taught that Israel is satanic and responsible for their suffering. But we both know the truth. It is the Islamic Republic that threatens both of us.
The rulers in Tehran have destroyed Iran’s economy, murdered teenagers for defying religious rule, and crushed dissent. They send money to their armed allies in the region while ordinary Iranians struggle to afford food and medicine.
Inside Iran, protesters chant, “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran.”
For Israelis, the danger is existential. The same regime that brutalizes its citizens openly calls for Israel’s destruction and races toward nuclear capability.
Israelis and Iranians do not need permission to recognize each other. Beneath decades of forced slogans lies something older and stronger than propaganda.
When Iranians rose up, Israelis didn’t see enemies in the streets of Tehran. We saw courage. And just as Iranians amplified Israeli voices after October 7, we understand that now it is our turn to speak for them.
This is not a Zionist conspiracy. It is human beings standing up for human beings.
The Islamic Republic fears that if Israelis and Iranians ever meet as people rather than caricatures, its mythology would collapse. So we stand with our Iranian brothers and sisters as allies, determined to answer their call for help.
For Jews, “Next year in Jerusalem” is a prayer for freedom. Today, that prayer has an echo: Next year in Tehran.
Variations of this message have surfaced across pro-government platforms, from seminarians presenting bloodshed as “righteous” to well-connected insiders arguing that killing protesters in the street is cheaper than arresting and executing them one by one.
A week after Iran killed more than 36,500 people, a state-affiliated analyst, Hesamoddin Haerizadeh, framed the protests not as civic dissent but as a divinely charged war, wrapping state violence in religious and moral language.
Opening his remarks, Haerizadeh cast the uprising as an externally orchestrated assault, describing the unrest as foreign backed riots and part of a broader confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the "non-believers front."
From there, he moved beyond political framing into a religious logic that treats street protests as a battlefield where killing is not a crime but an inevitable feature of a sacred struggle.
Haerizadeh branded the protests as “armed rebellion,” insisting that what had taken place was not peaceful protest but organized violence.
Haerizadeh then introduced an explicitly theological lens, portraying the crackdown as part of what he described as a divine process of purification.
“These events are meant to separate the impure from the pure,” he said, adding that turmoil is necessary so that “the impure are distinguished from the pure.”
In one of the starkest passages, he cited a Quranic verse often used to legitimize violence against perceived enemies: “And fight them until there is no more fitna,” he said, quoting scripture, “until religion is entirely for God.”
Critics say the effect of this framing is to turn the killing of protesters into something sacred: not a state decision, but a divine sorting mechanism—a form of moral cleansing.
Haerizadeh’s rhetoric relied heavily on dehumanization, dividing society into moral categories rather than citizens with rights.
“Kill, but with a ‘pure heart,’” activist Ahmad Batebi wrote, arguing that the lecture was designed to allow perpetrators to believe: “I didn’t kill; God sifted.”
The civic technology group TavaanaTech described the session as “workshops for killing and murder,” warning that such religious framing lowers the moral barrier to atrocity.
“This language is the language of genocide,” the group wrote, “a language that first makes the victim worthless so killing becomes easier.”
Killing as bureaucratic efficiency
A separate set of remarks, contained in an audio file attributed to Ahmad Ghadiri Abyaneh – the son of a former senior Iranian diplomat – moves beyond ideology into blunt cost-benefit logic.
In an online session on Thursday, January 29, he argued that killing protesters in the street could spare the Islamic Republic the international pressure that follows formal executions.
He minimized the scale of the deaths, reducing reported killings from tens of thousands to just over 3,000, and said the cost of killing protesters on the streets was far lower than arresting and executing them one by one.
“Why didn’t you kill them on the streets?” he asked, addressing the authorities. “You know that if they had been eliminated on the spot, the cost to the system would have been far, far lower than if you tried to execute them one by one.”
“Each one becomes a case file and a source of pressure on the Islamic Republic,” he continued. “By any logic—by any religious reasoning—it would have been right to show an iron fist with a decisive strike and wipe them out on the scene.”
Mockery on state television
The narrative hardened further when a host on Ofogh TV, an IRIB channel affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, mocked reports that thousands of bodies had been transported in refrigerated trailers.
“What type of refrigerator do you think the Islamic Republic keeps the bodies in?” he asked sarcastically, offering joking options including an “ice cream machine” and a “supermarket freezer.”
The remarks sparked outrage across Iran’s political spectrum. IRIB later removed Ofogh TV’s director, Sadegh Yazdani, and pulled the program, though many critics said deeper accountability was unlikely.
'Enemies of God'
The same logic resurfaced on Sunday, when Tehran City Council head Mehdi Chamran denied protest deaths while labeling victims with one of the Islamic Republic’s harshest religious-legal categories.
“In these protests we had no deaths, and only moharebs were present with guns and knives,” Chamran said.
The term mohareb –used for those accused of waging war against God – has long been associated with the harshest punishments, including execution. Critics say it functions as a rhetorical weapon, transforming civilians into divine enemies.
Taken together, these remarks point to a single through-line: Tehran's effort to frame violence as either sacred duty or bureaucratic convenience.