As Tehran experiences its ‘Tiananmen moment’, world must recognise what’s at stake and how entire region could benefit from an end to tyranny
December 30, 2025 16:38
This week, Tehran had its own Tiananmen moment. A lone man, head bowed and sitting cross-legged in the middle of a vast street, refuses to budge as a swarm of motorcycle-mounted security forces closes in. It’s a stark image illustrating a quiet act of defiance against a regime that has long relied on fear to rule.
Yet much of the world is being told a simpler story. Many headlines and push notifications are reducing what is unfolding in Iran to unrest triggered merely by a plunging currency. Protests, we are told, have “erupted over the rial hitting record lows”. Such framing is not only incomplete, but dangerously misleading.
The demonstrations now rippling through cities far beyond Tehran, from Mashhad and Isfahan to Shiraz and Hamadan, are not spontaneous economic outbursts. They are the latest chapter in a decades-long struggle for dignity and freedom.
Yes, the economy is in crisis. Inflation has surged past 42 percent. The rial has collapsed to historic lows. For shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, oftentimes seen as the the economic and political harbinger of the country, shuttering their stores in protest was no small act. It signalled both desperation and also defiance.
But to view these protests primarily through the lens of economics is to miss the point entirely. What we are witnessing is the culmination of 46 years of accumulated grievance. Iranians are not just protesting against soaring prices. They are protesting against a rotten system that has continued to fail them in every conceivable way.
They are protesting against the routine use of violence, arbitrary detention and lethal force against citizens who dare to dissent. They are protesting against the persecution of minorities, from Kurds and Baluchis to Baha’is and Lurs, who have borne the brunt of systematic discrimination. They are protesting against the daily war waged against women, whose bodies, hair and choices are policed as instruments of ideology rather than respected as human beings.
They are protesting against corruption so entrenched that even formal resignations at the top, like that of the central bank governor this week, appears less like accountability and more like theatre. They are protesting against environmental ruin and water bankruptcy, the result of woeful mismanagement that has left once-fertile regions parched and unlivable. And they are protesting against the plundering of a country so rich in history, culture and natural beauty that many Iranians today can scarcely imagine what life was like before 1979.
The people of Iran deserve better.
They deserve better than a regime that pours vast sums into foreign terrorist militias while its own citizens struggle to afford bread and medicine. This year alone, roughly a billion dollars was sent to Hezbollah. Those resources could have helped stabilise a collapsing economy or addressed a dire water crisis where five of Tehran’s major reservoirs supplying drinking water are at roughly 12 percent capacity.
For the shopkeepers shuttering their businesses and the struggling families watching prices skyrocket, that choice speaks volumes about where the regime’s priorities lie.
The chants echoing through the streets make clear that this is not merely an economic protest. In viral videos online, demonstrators shout “azadi” (freedom). Elsewhere, protesters chant “death to the dictator” as drivers honk in solidarity under cover of night.
Iran has been here before. In 1999 with the widespread student protests. In 2009 with the Green Revolution. In 2017 and in 2019, when fuel price hikes sparked nationwide protests met with a crackdown so violent that hundreds were killed. In 2022 and 2023, after the death of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, ignited a women-led uprising against the mandatory hijab.
Earlier this year, truck drivers protested across at least 163 cities in one of the country’s largest labor protests in recent years. And now again, in December 2025. What has changed is not the courage of the people, but the frequency and persistence of their resistance.
Recent events have only deepened public anger. The 12-day war with Israel exposed the regime’s profound intelligence failures and vulnerabilities long denied by officials. Since then, the rial has lost roughly 60 percent of its value, amplifying a sense of national humiliation alongside economic despair.
Iran’s clerical leaders now face a familiar dilemma: how to maintain control over a population of 92 million people that increasingly refuses to be ruled through fear alone.
The question is whether the rest of the world will choose to look away.
Reducing Iran’s protests to currency charts and inflation statistics offers comfortable distance. It allows governments and media alike to treat this as an economic hiccup rather than a moral reckoning. But the images from Tehran’s streets — of the lone man sitting his ground, the shopkeepers locking their doors, the voices chanting for freedom — tell a far more urgent story.
The people of Iran are not asking to be rescued. They are demanding to be seen.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations, is the award-winning author of “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt”
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