Hope is not naivety. Hope is what survives when dread has defined your life for nearly half a century.
For 47 years, Iranians inside the country dreaded tomorrow. Tomorrow meant another execution carried out at dawn, as the morning call to prayer echoed across the city, a sound that for many Iranians has become inseparable from fear. Tomorrow meant another girl dragged into a van for violating mandatory hijab laws, another student disappearing into Evin prison, and another protest crushed. Tomorrow was a threat.
And for 47 years, Iranians abroad dreaded a different moment: the question, “Where are you from?” Because that question carried weight. It meant explaining yourself, distancing yourself from a regime you never chose, and watching people’s expressions shift — curiosity giving way to suspicion, neutrality to discomfort. It meant feeling ashamed of something that was never yours to be ashamed of. It meant carrying the burden of a regime you never chose.
Then came the operation. And the death of Ali Khamenei – a man many Iranians regarded as the godfather of Iran’s repression.
The celebrations were real — in Tehran and Shiraz, as well as in London and Los Angeles. People danced, some wept, others hugged strangers. There was relief at the news, though it took a moment to sink in: the seemingly immovable had finally fallen.
But the fear was also real. Missiles do not land gently and shockwaves do not ask who voted for whom. Parents still check their phones at 3am, and my heart still sinks when I hear the familiar name of a place that has been struck. No one serious romanticises war over their homeland. Hope in Iran today walks hand in hand with dread.
So let me tell you a story about an elderly woman in Tehran that I was told by a friend. She was driving her Peugeot 307 when the shockwave of a missile strike hit central Tehran. The blast threw her car sideways, glass shattered, and she was injured.
People ran to pull her out but she was laughing.
“It’s ending… it’s finally ending,” she said, laughing through the pain. “If I die, I die. The young people gave their lives two months ago to end this tyranny. This regime stole 47 years of my life. If what’s left of mine helps my children be free, that’s enough.”
This is exhaustion and trauma transformed into resolve. Iranians have paid a heavy price. Decades of prison cells, torture chambers, public hangings and stolen futures. The removal of Khamenei did not create suffering; it ended the man who oversaw it.
And to that end, gratitude is due. To Israeli and American forces who undertook an operation that many believed would never happen. To those who recognised that the Islamic Republic was not merely another unpleasant regime, but a structurally destabilising one – internally repressive, externally expansionist.
Gratitude, however, does not cancel grief or banish fear, it merely recognises that there are moments when rhetoric has run its course. Which brings us to legality.
International law is precious. It is one of humanity’s most civilising achievements. But we did not create it to provide tyrannies procedural shelter while their citizens are crushed and slaughtered. We created it because, without it, nations shrug and say “Your suffering is not my problem.”
But if law becomes so rigid that it cannot respond to brutal and escalating oppression and massacre, when it effectively becomes an alibi for paralysis, it ceases to function as law. It becomes theatre — a display of virtue with little connection to the consequences. The lesson of the last century is not that the world must remain passive in the face of tyranny. It is that waiting too long carries its own cost and that ethics must remain the spine of the law.
And yet, as some Iranians buried their dead and others dared to celebrate, something grotesque unfolded in Western cities, including here in the United Kingdom. Vigils were held for Khamenei and tears were staged for cameras.
Let us be clear: mourning private loss is human. But public veneration of a ruler responsible for systemic repression and crimes against humanity degrades the very idea of human dignity. If we would recoil at a vigil for architects of fascism, we should recoil here too. To sanitise such a record is to wound the memory of the regime’s victims.
Authorities who permit the public glorification of repression under the banner of tolerance should reflect carefully on what tolerance is for. A society that lights candles for the tyrant while his victims are still bleeding has lost sight of the very dignity it claims to defend.
Hope in Iran is not built on vengeance but on memory and the possibility of renewal.
In recent times, the name of Reza Pahlavi has been chanted in the streets. Not universally or uncritically, but audibly. His four principles – territorial integrity, individual freedoms, separation of religion and state, and democratic choice – have entered mainstream opposition discourse. He has spoken openly of an Iran that is at peace with its neighbours and reconciled with its Jewish brothers and sisters.
I grew up in Tehran. Jewish students sat beside me in my classroom. They were my friends, Iranian like the rest of us. Talented, ordinary, funny. But often cautious and somewhat reclusive, too. I remember our headteacher quietly allowing one Jewish student to perform his prayers in the school, not in the courtyard or the prayer room, not openly, but in his private office. A small act of accommodation, conducted discreetly so the district authorities would not cause trouble.
That was Iran under the regime. That is not the Iran we want.
The real Iran is not the regime’s propaganda, nor the caricature projected abroad for decades. It is older, deeper, more plural than the system that has governed it for nearly half a century.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once distinguished optimism from hope. “Optimism,” he said, “is the belief that things are going to get better. Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better.”
Iranians are not optimists right now. We are something harder – we are hopeful.
Hopeful enough to celebrate with care and to mourn with honesty. Hopeful enough to acknowledge the risks. Hopeful enough to insist that half a century of dread must not dictate the next — because Iranians, and those who stand with them, will not allow it.
Hope is not naivety.
It is what allows a broken-boned grandmother to laugh in the aftermath of a blast because she believes her children may yet inherit a country unrecognisable from the one that consumed her youth.
And that hope, that stubborn, disciplined, fearful hope, is stronger than the tyranny that tried to extinguish it.
Pouria Hadjibagheri is a British-Iranian data scientist and commentator based in London who left Iran in 2008 as a student. He previously served as technical lead of the UK’s Covid-19 dashboard, for which he was appointed an MBE and elected a Fellow of the British Computer Society
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