I Am You Tomorrow, or not.

They’ve opened a clinic for the “sick” women who dared to strip off their veils. A “treatment clinic,” they call it—a sanctum of “healing” supervised by the Department of Virtue and the Holy Mission to Restrain Sin. The words come off their tongues with the bite of scalpels, slicing through the meaning until it bleeds to death. Scientific, they say, “psychological,” as if the spirit itself were diseased. As if the will were an infection that needed to be isolated, a virus only they knew how to carve out.

I can see the entrance now: walls as cold as the faces of the men who guard them. Women sit on metal chairs that press down like punishment. Even the air there seems to learn to hold its breath. And what kind of cure do they offer? A conversation turned interrogation, a “diagnosis” to teach you how to amputate your own desires. The chill of the room wraps itself around the skin like a reminder of who controls this place. They sit, they listen, they submit, pretending to believe. And maybe the cruelest part of it is that some of them, exhausted of their own bodies, really do feel sick—sick of a freedom that has nowhere to breathe.

But the horror is not in these walls alone; it’s in the architecture of the place itself, the way it pretends to offer something “good” while it sells control by the pound. Obedience, gift-wrapped and hand-delivered. Dissidence, recast as illness. This is the new trick of power: repression in the mask of virtue, and there’s no exit for anyone who steps inside. The final, most exquisite cruelty is that they call it “voluntary.” As if the hand that steers them merely rests on their shoulders—lightly, gently, not pushing, not breaking.

And here it is, the question that Iran’s reflection throws back at us, a mirror no one wants to face: How far does a society go when it surrenders itself so completely to moral control that even the smallest freedom is pathologised? Could we, too, cross that invisible line, trading what’s diverse and alive for the numbed silence of obedience?

I’ve always looked at Iran’s extremism and seen in it Israel’s future—a “I am you tomorrow” that grows nearer with every breath. I see it in the spread of a religious conviction that pushes forward with a blind duty to shape the other, where any idea that drifts off course becomes an error, a crime, or worse, insanity. Between these worlds, the distance is nothing at all. When “virtue” is enshrined, the language may shift, the faces may wear different costumes, but the core remains.

Religious extremism—whether it wears the face of a sheikh or a rabbi—feeds on the same poison: everything outside the rule is a threat; any choice out of line, a wound to be cauterised. Whether it’s the veil they enforce in Iran or the restrictions and surveillance creeping over here, it’s the same iron fist closing over what should be open. To the fanatic, the world beyond his law is an infection to be stamped out, a battlefield where every freedom is the enemy.

What should be a space of multiplicity and plurality becomes a minefield, where any step out of line detonates correction. In Iran, it’s the veil; here, tomorrow, it could be the school, the street, the home. I feel we’re moving toward a place where we’ll be judged by the exact measure of our faith, by the degree of our conformity to those who speak the loudest. Little by little, we are trading freedom for the fear of becoming the next victim. Who scrutinises the woman who dares to question the veil? And who will scrutinise us when we dare to question what they demand we keep silent?

This reflection is a warning: the morality of control knows no borders. Today it’s them, but the lust for absolute power—that hand that holds another’s desire hostage, that marks another’s body as conquered territory—is the same, whether it grips prayer beads or a prayer book. In the end, they’re just two sides of the same coin, each staring down the other, waiting for the moment to impose its rule.

Or is this a terrible vision of what we could become if Israeli society fails to understand what is truly at stake?