What Hamas Promises, Iranians Know Too Well

Of all the cataclysmic events I have ever experienced, October 7 affected me like no other. The videos of hateful protests and bloody or charred bodies unearthed memories I’d long kept buried. In one, I am a girl standing in the doorway of our home in Tehran, staring at graffiti that appeared overnight on a neighbor’s wall. Punctuated by a swastika—something I had never seen before—were three words, scrawled in black paint on red brick: Kikes get lost.

This was in January 1979, just a few weeks before Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and nothing was as it had been. The rest of the world saw the revolution embodied in the figure of the ascetic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seated cross-legged on a cot in a spartan” was its soundtrack—an all-purpose call that was at times a plea, at other times a call to arms. The streets were ablaze with bonfires that winter, tires and much else set aflame. Whatever harm the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, had allegedly inflicted on the nation before, at least in those few weeks of a nationwide oil shortage, those countries’ burning flags kept the protesters warm.