If US President Donald Trump reaches a deal with Iran that doesn’t include some kind of domestic concessions on behalf of the Iranian people, trust will be irreparably broken, and the masses would be reluctant to take to the streets again, Jewish Iranian-American journalist and author Roya Hakakian told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Hakakian, who fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution as a teenager in 1984, has spent much of her life confronting the human rights violations and atrocities committed by the regime against its own people. She was a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, published a book on the 1992 murders of four Iranian-Kurdish leaders in Germany, and has released a personal memoir detailing the struggle of women during the Islamist takeover of Iran.
Recounting some of her memories of Iran, Hakakian described watching the introduction of the mandatory hijab dress code at her Jewish day school, the installation of an Islamic head teacher who spent her days trying to convert the pupils, and learning that her aunt’s home and shop were burned to the ground in an arson attack by pro-regime protesters.
Israeli, American war achievements inspired hope
Witnessing the war has been an emotional journey for Hakakian, who said that Israeli and American achievements in the early days of the war left her feeling excited and hopeful.
“It was exciting for everybody. Everybody wants to see these characters who have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and 1000s of injustices go,” she said, adding that seeing them held accountable in a court of law would have been preferred but less likely. “It was an exciting period.”
As the war continued, Trump’s changing goals for the war and the targeting of infrastructure made the reality more “distressing.” Combined with the trauma of the Iraq-Iran war still in living memory for many, the perception of the conflict became more “fuzzy.”
“People started to look at things as being very distressing,” she explained, highlighting that many in Iran were still looking at this conflict as a measure of whether the regime can be defeated
“If the war gets resolved with only an agreement over Iran’s nuclear capabilities or missile capabilities and or proxies without any other [domestic] consideration, it means that the regime remains intact… then it will be very hard internally for people to believe that they can get out and protest,” she continued. ”What that will really mean is that, in my view, two great militaries bombed the regime for two months plus, and they couldn’t defeat them, so how can a nation that is unarmed defeat them?”
Hakakian said that a potential agreement should see guarantees on the return of internet access, the release of those arbitrarily detained during the January economy protests, and a moratorium on executions.
“If there are no civilian considerations in the negotiations, then it seems that the nation was thrown under the bus,” she warned.
While the war hasn’t played out so far as she hoped, Hakakian acknowledged there were other factors at play and suggested that European nations had allowed their “antipathy” for Trump to cloud their sense of responsibility to “do the right thing.”
“This should have been a perfect moment for the United States to bomb Iran, or to deliver some punishment to the officials within the regime, on moral grounds, in the same way that Bill Clinton in 1990 bombed Yugoslavia because of what Milosevic had done in Bosnia against the Muslim population. This was an equal, if not far more heinous, crime that had happened in Iran, especially given the short window during which it had happened,” she commented.
“I think Europe and the United States should have spoken with one voice, and attacked Iran together as NATO, as allies… I think the misfortune here was that the President in America was not Clinton, but Trump. And there has been so much political conflict and mistrust between Europe and the United States in the last year and a half that it was impossible to hope for that.”
Regime’s approach to the Jewish community evolves over 47 years
Speaking more about the Jewish community in Iran, and asked specifically about Tehran’s tours given to visiting sympathetic Western figures like George Galloway to the Jewish community’s sites, Hakakian said that the regime’s approach to the community had evolved in the past 47 years.
“It’s very important to the regime to keep a semblance of the Jewish community inside the country because of its propaganda usage,” she explained, adding that in recent years, Tehran had given the dwindling community extra land endowments for a community center.
“[Iran] didn’t have that in 1980 when I was still in Iran, when the population of Iran was only, say, 40 million, and the Jewish community was in the 10s of 1000s. But now that the population of Iran is 92 million and the Jewish community is less than 10,000, they’re working very hard to keep the Jews in the country, as a showcase to prove that they are only anti-Israel, but they’re not antisemitic.”
While Hakakian’s experience in her Jewish school involved Israeli dancing and other facets culturally oriented towards a modern Judaism that embraces Israel, she explained that Hebrew conversational classes were quickly canceled after the regime took over. Faith-based education started and stopped with religious texts.
The Jewish community in Iran has little choice but to continue accepting the rules and whims of the Islamic regime, Hakakian said. While she had fled with her mother to the US, where she was reunited with her brothers, with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Trump administration placed new restrictions on HIAS in early 2026.
Ethnic minorities, including Jews, have found it difficult under the current administration to find safety in the West. However, the general attitude towards Iranians is notably better than in the 1980s, which was largely colored by the 1979 hostage crisis, she said.
Eight US servicemen were killed in 1980 in an attempt to save 66 Americans taken hostage in the former US embassy in November 1979. The hostages were eventually released after months of negotiations, which led to a large district of Iranian refugees, she said.
With the Bahai, Kurds, and Iranian people increasingly targeted in Iran, and with the possibility that many will abandon the hope that the regime will fall, restricting immigration for Iranians could prove devastating, she concluded.
Source:
www.jpost.com
