“Cyrus Freed You. Now Free Us.” – “We’re Working on It.”

In Israel, Netanyahu is a politician. In the Iranian protest imagination, he has become something else: the sound the regime’s fear makes.

There is a joke in the Persian opposition space, and it has stopped being funny: Bibi might stand a better chance of getting elected in Tehran than in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem he is trapped inside accountability. October 7. The hostages. The coalition, the courts, the price of a war that never ends. Arguing about Bibi is a national martial art, and every poll reads less like a coronation than a referendum on his entire era. That is how a democracy treats its leader. It should.

But cross into the Persian-language internet and something strange happens to the same name. Do not start with policy papers. Start with songs.

In 2024, the exiled Iranian rapper Hamed Fard released a track titled simply BIBI. “A man of action, in a region of talkers”. Then came February 28, 2026, the joint American-Israeli campaign against the regime, and the trickle became a playlist. Fard returned with Bezan Ke Khoob Mizani, and the title alone is the message. “Strike, for you strike well”: a traditional heroic formula, the kind of chant Persian culture reserves for Rostam, the invincible champion of the Shahnameh. In Fard’s version, the champion being serenaded with the tenderest formulas of Persian devotion is Bibi. “Bibi joon … Bibi joon.. May I ‘ve been sacrificied for you”. DJ Siavash Eyvari dropped two dance tracks whose titles are political statements by themselves: Bi Bi Chikaresh Mikone, roughly What Is Bibi Going to Do to It, and Bi Bi Trump Bah Bah, where the hook chants the two names like a football stadium. NikaPersia released Thank You Bibi in English, Persian and Hebrew, reaching back to Cyrus the Great and his cylinder to frame Netanyahu as the answer to an ancient call. Reza Mozaffari recorded a new version of the old Persian standard Bibi Joon. In the original, Bibi is a beloved grandmother. In his version, Bibi is the prime minister of Israel, crowned in the lyrics as a lion of Israel and a hero of Iran. There is even a country-style duet called Bibi Trump, thanking both men for freedom. Notice whose name comes first. And under the produced tracks runs the street layer: the Yalla Yalla Bibi parody, remix clips built on the phrase Bibi, my love, and graffiti that appeared on Iranian walls during the twelve-day war of 2025. Two words long. Bibi, hit them.

Here an honest analyst has to slow down, because part of this story was faked, and pretending otherwise would be a gift to the regime. In early March 2026, hours after an Israeli strike killed Ali Khamenei, a video swept Instagram: tens of thousands of people in Tehran chanting Bibi Joon from the rooftops. It was AI-generated. Fact-checkers shredded it. An Israeli TV channel that aired it as proof of Iranian love got publicly embarrassed. The regime’s defenders celebrated: see, it is all a deepfake.
Except it is not. Strip away every synthetic pixel and what remains is more remarkable than the fake. The songs are real, released under real names on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, by artists the regime knows how to find. The rallies are real: in Los Angeles and London, on the night the campaign began, Iranians danced in the streets, waved the Lion and Sun next to the Star of David, and chanted Thank You Bibi into news cameras. The flowers at Israeli consulates are real. Even Haaretz, no friend of Netanyahu, concluded that the viral fake contained a kernel of truth: parts of the Iranian opposition, above all in the diaspora, genuinely see him as an ally against their jailers.

Every Iranian action I visit as people seeing my kippa I cannot just leave, they are thanking Israel telling me their horrifying stories. Netanyahu himself told 60 Minutes, visibly astonished, that Iranians now call him Bibi Joon. Dear Bibi. The way you address a beloved elder.

Why does sincerity matter here? Because nobody on this playlist is on Likud’s payroll, and nobody on it gains a thing in Israeli politics. Nobody commissioned this. No campaign wrote a brief, no ministry cut a check – and yet the playlist keeps growing faster than anyone can catalogue it, in a language no Israeli spin doctor writes in, for an audience that cannot vote for the man it is singing about. They sing in Persian, for Persians. Take Fard’s biography. His debut album, back in 2012, was called Kourosh Kabir. Cyrus the Great. He rapped about poverty and dignity, got arrested by the Islamic Republic in 2015, fled into exile. A man who opened his career invoking Cyrus closed the circle a decade later with two songs for Bibi. That is not campaign merchandise. That is a worldview.

And the Cyrus reference is the key to the whole phenomenon. Twenty-five centuries ago, a Persian king freed the Jews from captivity in Babylon and let them go home to Jerusalem and rebuild. Jews have spoken his name with gratitude ever since; he is the only gentile the Hebrew Bible calls mashiach. Anointed. Note what the Bible does not call him: righteous. Cyrus was a conqueror with an empire to run, and the Jews sanctified him anyway – for what he did, not for what he was. The songs treat Bibi with exactly the same logic. One of Eyvari’s tracks compresses it into a single line: – Bibi, alone, sweeping the oppression away. That is not a compliment to a politician. That is the job description of Cyrus. In the Persian protest imagination of 2026, the roles have reversed: if Kourosh once redeemed the Jews, some Iranians now look at the Jewish state as the power that can help redeem them from the ayatollahs. History, offered a chance to repay a debt.

There is also a colder, strategic layer to the affection, and it explains why the gratitude attaches to Bibi personally and not as much to Trump. Iranians are not naive about great powers. American presidents come and go. Fleets deploy, fleets sail home. Israel cannot sail home. It is not an American aircraft carrier anchored off the Middle East; it is a permanent neighbor whose children will live with every decision about Iran, forever. When an Iranian dissident hears the Israeli prime minister say the regime must go, she hears something structurally different from a Washington press conference. She hears a commitment from a man with no exit. That is why, in the duets, Bibi’s name comes first.

None of this should be inflated. A diaspora is not Tehran. A song on YouTube is not a ballot box, and a nation held under surveillance, censorship and executions cannot be polled by playlist. Iranians are not sitting in the dark waiting for Israeli salvation, and Israelis should not outsource their judgment of Netanyahu to Persian streaming charts. The questions Jerusalem asks him are real and must stay real. But culture measures something polling cannot: what people dare to imagine. The Islamic Republic spent forty-seven years and rivers of money teaching Iranians to chant Death to Israel. It made anti-Zionism a school ritual, a career path and a police baton. If that indoctrination had worked, this playlist could not exist.

For Israelis, Netanyahu is a man inside the house, judged by everything broken in it. For many Iranians who hate the regime, he is the man outside the prison wall, holding a hammer. Both images are true. They do not cancel each other out. In Jerusalem he answers for the past. In Tehran’s imagination he stands for a future the regime swore its people would never be allowed to want.

I once watched an exchange in a chat between an Iranian and an Israeli, and it has stayed with me ever since. The Iranian wrote: you owe us. Cyrus freed you. Now free us. The Israeli answered with four words. We are working on it. No hashtags, no speeches. A creditor presenting a receipt, and a debtor acknowledging the debt. And it was not a one-off: scroll the comments under any of these songs and the same exchange repeats in Persian, in Hebrew, in English. Twenty-five centuries is a long time for a people to hold a receipt. The remarkable thing is that both peoples still know exactly what is written on it.

The regime tried to teach Iranians to hate Israel. Some of them learned to sing Bibi instead. And that is why the man who may struggle to win Jerusalem still echoes through Tehran’s imagination: not as a candidate asking for votes, but as the signature on the oldest debt in the Middle East, finally being honored.

Nika Persia, Thank you Bibi, for the hope. English version