Despair is a mistake

Every morning I watch two countries grieve in two languages. On Iran International, in Persian, the talk is of betrayal. On Israeli television, in Hebrew, the word is the same one: “hifkiru” — they abandoned us, they left us to our fate. The United States and Iran are signing a memorandum of understanding this week, and on both sides of a war that has only just ended, the people who most wanted that regime gone feel that a deal was cut over their heads.

The Israeli disappointment is real, and it is justified. Israel is not a party to the agreement. The text demands nothing on its behalf, even though the fighting in the north has not fully stopped. After nearly four months of war — a war that opened with strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, that cost Israeli lives and filled Israeli shelters — Washington has chosen to end it on terms that leave Tehran’s rulers standing, their assets unfrozen, their sanctions lifting, their sheer survival rebranded as diplomacy.

But before we sink any deeper into that word, abandoned, I want Israelis to look at what this same deal means for the Iranians who dreamed of freedom. Because their blow is heavier than ours.

When the war began, the American president told them, almost in those exact words, to rise up: when we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. Many believed him. The diaspora believed him. People who had buried friends in 2022 let themselves hope that this time the regime would finally fall. Instead, the regime maneuvered, endured, and is now being handed a lifeline — money, legitimacy, an end to the pressure — at the precise moment it was weakest. Reza Pahlavi warned Washington not to sign exactly this kind of deal with exactly these rulers. He was not heeded. Inside Iran, the citizens who were waiting for a green light to fill the streets again have just watched that light go dark.

So if anyone has truly been abandoned, it is them. And here is the difference that should make every Israeli stop for a moment. We have a state. We have one of the strongest armies on earth. We have allies, a passport, a vote, a free press, the plain ability to argue out loud about our own disappointment. The Iranian who shares our enemy has none of it. He has the gallows for a song, prison for a slogan, a bullet for an uncovered head. He is trying to bring down a totalitarian regime with empty hands.

And watch what he does with those empty hands.

Not in the heat of the fighting, but just as it became clear to many Iranians that talks were underway in which they might be abandoned all over again, two men who could hardly be more different released a song together: Ebi, the patriarch of Persian pop, the voice three generations grew up on, and Shahin Najafi, the musician and dissident the regime has hunted for years as an enemy of the faith. The old master and the rebel, in one voice. The song is called Shahrah — the highway, the main road. It does not pretend the grief away. It sings of young people falling one by one in the dark of the city, of a last meal at a table the color of blood, of a son who asks that his mother be told not to wait for him, of the fallen passing their place to the next one in line. It is a song soaked in loss.

And then comes the refrain, which by now I have heard repeated across the diaspora more often than any line of political analysis: despair is a mistake. We stay on this road. We will build tomorrow’s Iran, with one voice, together.

That is what I most want Israelis to hear. A people that has nothing but its own voice, a people with every reason on earth to break, has decided that breaking is not permitted. Their most-shared answer to the worst week is not “They abandoned us.” It is “We are building tomorrow.”

We are allowed our anger at this deal. We are not allowed to mistake it for a strategy. Disappointment is an emotion; it is not a plan, and it has never deterred a single missile or won back a single ally. The memorandum rescued the regime. It did not kill the idea that the regime can fall, and it did not dissolve the simple fact that our enemy and the Iranian people’s enemy are one and the same.

“Shahrah” means the main road. Whether we chose it or not, we and the Iranians who long to be free are walking the same one. Their artists have already written the answer to this moment. We would do well to learn the words. Turn the subtitles on.