The Regime Broke Her. Israel Hit Back
The first time I went to an Iranian protest in Stuttgart, one of the organizers spotted me, lit up, and said she wanted to introduce me to someone. I caught the word “Israelis,” or thought I did. She waved a few people over, and through the small crowd came an elderly German couple, each holding two flags — Iran’s and Israel’s, side by side.
I should not have been surprised, but I was. At these modest gatherings, a handful of Israeli flags are always in the air, carried by Iranians, next to the Lion and Sun of the old monarchy and the occasional German one. If you have only ever seen the other kind of demonstration — the ones where the Israeli flag is laid on the ground to be walked over — the sight rearranges something in your head. Why would Iranians, of all people, wave the flag of the country whose jets had been bombing their homeland?
The honest answer I keep hearing is the oldest one in politics: the enemy of my enemy. But a slogan is thin, so let me tell you about the woman I met instead, because she is the answer with a face.
She is from Abadan. When the Iraqi shells began falling on the city, her family fled to Tehran. She was still in high school when the Revolutionary Guards came for her and a classmate. At the interrogation she did what a schoolgirl does before she has learned better — she asked why she had been arrested. The guards were not amused. For that question, they told her, you will sit.
She sat for two years in Evin. Two years, no charge but the question itself. Her parents were never let in. In that time they broke the bones of her skull, damaged her internal organs, and tortured her in the ways that place is known for. When they finally let her out, she had a series of surgeries, and then she left Iran for good.
I listened with my mouth open. There were other things she told me that do not belong on a public page. And then she told me one more.
When Israeli jets hit the gate of Evin last June, she did not stop to think. That same minute, from a bank in the country that had taken her in, she sent money to the Israeli embassy — a few quiet taps, no announcement, no crowd. Within minutes, she says, a message reached her from inside Iran: she would die for the help she had given Israel. How they knew so fast, she cannot say, and I will not pretend to. Decades gone, a continent away, and the men who broke her as a girl were still close enough to answer one private gesture with a death threat.
That is the heart of it. For her, an Israeli strike on a Tehran prison was not strategy or headlines. It was the first time in her adult life that someone hit the men who had broken her skull. The flag she carries is not a foreign-policy position. It is gratitude, and it is defiance, and it is the simplest sentence she has: whoever is hurting that regime is on my side.
She showed me the symbols around us — the Lion and Sun, and the Faravahar, the winged Zoroastrian figure that opposition Iranians wear at the throat and on their shirts as a pledge to a Persia older than the mullahs. Two or three years ago, she said, we would not have dared carry any of it. For these symbols in a European city you could be killed in broad daylight. Now they carry them, and the reason is no mystery. It began when Israel started driving Hamas and Hezbollah back after October 7, and it jumped after last June, after Rising Lion. It has only grown louder since — through this past winter’s uprising and the strikes that finally killed Khamenei himself. Something in the air moved, and the people who had spent forty years afraid were the first to feel it.
I should be honest that the diaspora is not of one mind. Plenty of Iranians abroad want no part of any war, and a few still march for the regime; the Israeli flags fly at the anti-regime rallies, not at all of them. But among those who have run out of patience — who tried protesting and were answered with fresh graves — the logic is brutally plain. As one of them told a reporter not long ago, no country acts out of charity, and they do not pretend otherwise; it is simply that, for now, their interest and Israel’s point the same way. Their exiled prince, Reza Pahlavi, has made peace with Israel an open plank of his platform. The flag is the shorthand.
At the end she glanced over her shoulder, leaned in, and whispered something to me about Germany and the mullahs. I will leave her words where she put them, in my ear. As we say: v’hamevin yavin. The one who understands, understands.
