‘Die Once, Mourn Once’

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My parents live in the northwest of Tehran, in a residential complex nestled against the mountains. Just north of them sits the Shahran oil depot. In the early hours of June 15 Israel bombed it. There was a deafening blast, then flames lit up the night sky. In the reports I saw hours later, they were visible from miles away.

I called my dad. “Yes,” he said in a numb voice, “we can see it out the window.” I urged them to drive away—reports warned that any further explosions could be larger than the first. He mumbled something about how they’ll probably stay as long as their neighbors were sticking around, about how it wasn’t that bad. I insisted, enumerated the risks, proposed places he and my mom—both of whom are in their seventies—could go. “I don’t know,” he said when I finished. “We’re just tired.”

Eventually I got my brother to drive my parents out of their neighborhood. Then I went for a walk so my young children wouldn’t see me cry. It was a beautiful June day. I live in Ithaca, New York, on a quiet, leafy street with big houses and lush trees. A breeze rustled through the leaves; cardinals and blue jays hopped between branches.

I walk this street every day, but now nothing felt real. I couldn’t grasp that my body was here while the bodies that created me sat under a burning sky, waiting for the next bomb to fall. It was as if I had found myself in a parallel time. How, as an immense fire burned away right behind their house, could my dad have said that they were just tired—too tired to leave?

*

On June 13, 2025, Israel, with no opposition from the US, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran. They started by targeting military commanders and nuclear scientists living in densely populated Tehran, fully aware that many civilians would die. Iranian state media reported seventy-eight deaths in the first hours, at least half of them civilians. Images of victims—a twenty-four-year-old poet, a twenty-seven-year-old paddle tennis player, a young girl dancing her way to the dentist’s chair—spread around social media. The toll has continued to rise as Israel carries out nonstop bombing campaigns all over Iran, targeting not just military facilities but gas and oil infrastructure and the state broadcasting headquarters, all while it pursues its genocidal war in Gaza. According to The New York Times, as of this writing 224 Iranians have been killed, though one Washington-based rights group has reported that the casualties could be as high as 585.

We are, as we say, in times of war—the plural is significant. For the people caught in one, the start of every war is an assault on the fabric of time. The first missiles strike bricks and flesh but also the coherence of daily experience, splitting it into countless pieces.

Since the first hour of the war I’ve been speaking with my friends and family in Iran, as I always do when something erupts there, trying to align my understanding with theirs. My friends are mostly middle- and lower-class journalists and writers. All have suffered the violence of the state in some form or fashion over the course of their careers. Most of my eight uncles, seven aunts, and fifty-six first cousins are still in Iran; politically they range from staunch regime supporters to devoted monarchists, a microcosm of the country’s fractured public opinion.  

This time, during the first few hours of the war, I had trouble understanding them. This crowd, usually unable to find any common ground, was suddenly united in a chorus of fatalism. They all agreed, echoing my father’s sentiment, that they’d come to the ends of their ropes.

One uncle, who used to be fairly sympathetic to the Islamic Republic, sent me a meme about Muammar Gaddafi, wishing the same fate on the leaders of Iran. When I mentioned the chaos that ensued in Libya after Gaddafi’s fall, he said he’d prefer that to his current life. One cousin, adding multiple laughter emojis, shared a video of a house party in a wealthy neighborhood in north Tehran: the guests keep dancing and drinking even as, out the window, air defense installations shoot away at incoming missiles. On the first day of the war a friend went out to get a birthday cake for his son and found himself waiting in a long line at the bakery: many others had come to buy sweets and pastries in preparation to celebrate.

Another friend had gone to stay with his ninety-year-old grandmother. They were close to one of the bombed buildings, and the smoke was so thick in her apartment that they had to wear masks. As he recounted what he had witnessed so far, I heard his grandmother in the background: “Now that they’ve started this, they should finish them off.” I asked her what she meant. She replied with a Persian expression: “Marg ye baar, sheevan ye baar.” Literally, “Die once, mourn once.” If the catastrophe is inevitable, she was saying, it’s better to get it over with.

Now that the sheer, depressing reality of war has settled in and images of the killed children and pulverized residential buildings are circulating, that initial mania has dissipated. No one sounds excited or even fatalistic anymore. People are living minute by minute, searching for food and water, looking for ways to escape Tehran, checking on their friends, struggling to survive. The first hours of the war already feel like a distant memory.

But I want to pause over them. Those first hours matter if we want to understand what’s happening in Iran. And to understand them, in turn, we need to get back to the country Iran was on June 12, the day not a single soul there suspected that Israel was about to wreak havoc.

*

Over the past decade most people who didn’t have ties with the corrupt oligarchy in charge of Iran retreated into a fatalistic state of mind. They were pushed there by a brutal, incompetent government but also by the senseless economic sanctions imposed by the US and Western Europe, which severely affected oil revenue, dramatically increased inflation, and weakened the currency, damaging all the country’s industries and decimating the job market. As poverty spread and deepened, the children and in-laws of government officials looted whatever remained after the sanctions, transferring abroad everything they could get their hands on.

This unholy alliance between the regime’s military and political oligarchs and the Western powers seeking to punish Iran has inflicted a profound social and psychological damage on ordinary Iranians, deeper than outside observers have appreciated. Almost everyone I know has been trying to leave, and those who cannot leave feel trapped. Unemployment is through the roof. I’m in my forties, and many of my peers don’t have jobs; they live with their parents or share tiny apartments with other middle-aged single people, often suffering from poor health and seeing no path to financial security.

Water and electricity have been cut off routinely, especially in big cities like Tehran and Isfahan. The water situation is particularly dire, and the authorities have warned that severe shortages may be coming this summer. The air in most big cities is so polluted that schools and offices are regularly closed, sometimes for weeks on end. Iranians have risen up many times over the last three decades to demand change. Every few years the pent-up frustration has exploded, often in the form of peaceful protests. They have been met by bullets.

All this economic precarity, environmental degradation, and oppression have chipped away at the agency of the Iranian people, diminishing their power to decide their own fates. There wasn’t much hope left. Die once, mourn once. I don’t know, we’re just tired.

This, I think, is what lay behind the apocalyptic mania I witnessed on June 13, in the first hours of the attack. Many people, languishing and feeling trapped, found a kind of sad catharsis in seeing their captors humiliated, even though they knew the lashes would be too indiscriminate to spare them and that their cage would only be replaced with large-scale devastation.

*

The Israelis know all this, too. In the video messages he seems to enjoy sending the Iranian people, Benjamin Netanyahu laments the decline of the great Iranian nation in the grip of its reactionary rulers, the oppression of women and youth, and the country’s economic decay and rampant corruption. Iranians will have a bright free future, he promises, once Israel steps up to help.

I doubt that anyone who knows a thing or two about the world ever took these promises seriously. Nor, for that matter, have Netanyahu’s warnings about Iran’s nuclear program ever been terribly serious. In 1992 he claimed that Iran was three to five years away from building a bomb. That interval has remained more or less the same in the ensuing three decades—a kind of Zeno’s paradox. Netanyahu launched his attack on the grounds that Iran could be “within a few months” of producing a nuclear weapon, less than three months after Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, testified before Congress that Iran was not building one. Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CNN on June 17 that his organization had not found “any proof” to contradict that assessment. 

It is hard to imagine that Israel knew anything that the US and IAEA did not. But the facts hardly mattered. At least since the end of the cold war, if not earlier, successive Israeli and American leaders have made every attempt to turn Israel’s neighbors into either subservient allies or failed states. This effort dramatically intensified after October 7. Iran is the biggest target, and now it’s our turn. To justify his war Netanyahu weaponized decades of reckless rhetoric out of Iran, apocalyptic bravado about their military might and their supreme ability to annihilate Israel—all of which turns out to have been empty bragging. 

On June 13 perhaps more of one side’s top commanders were killed in a matter of hours than at any other point in modern military history. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, quickly appointed new commanders, released a statement filled with platitudes, and went underground. He emerged again one week into the war, offering more useless platitudes, taking his time praising his own supporters.

More state officials are hiding, occasionally surfacing with garbled, nonsensical statements. On the battlefield the Revolutionary Guards have been shooting missiles every night into Israel, hitting a building or parking lot here and there. The New York Times reports that so far twenty-four Israelis have been killed. The damage these strikes cause is hardly enough to reestablish deterrence; it does, on the other hand, give Israel a fresh excuse to hit harder. Iran’s air defense has been destroyed all the way from the western border to Tehran. Now millions of unprotected people in the Iranian capital are exposed to Israeli air raids and missile and drone attacks. The officials who long presented themselves as a bulwark against Armageddon have failed to build a single publicly accessible bomb shelter in Tehran. There’s not even an air raid system.

By now the Internet is cut off in most neighborhoods and the ATMs have run out of cash. Tehran is an open city, its residents either on the run or sitting in their homes, bracing for the next bomb, for the pending food and water shortages, betrayed by their astonishingly incompetent leaders, caught in the clutches of an army lavishly funded and armed to the teeth by the US, a force that has already shown it has no compunction about turning densely populated cities into scorched earth.

Iran has no good options. Some say it should ride out this wave of attacks and continue launching missiles into Israel to wear them out. Given the asymmetrical nature of the war, this sounds like a recipe for ensuring mass casualties in Iran without making a dent in the Israeli war machine. Some suggest overthrowing the regime and replacing it with a pro-West transition government. But history has made it abundantly clear that regime change carried out by a foreign army has never brought a nation to prosperity. Many Iraqis remember feeling jubilation and relief over the fall of Saddam Hussein, only to see all that hope dashed against imperialist reality. In the unlikely event that the regime somehow survives this war, meanwhile, they will first try to appropriate it, presenting a catastrophe as their victory, then close ranks still further, turning into a hyper-militaristic state compared to which the current regime could look like a liberal haven. None of these plausible scenarios give me hope.

Coming back from my walk on our street in Ithaca, I called my brother again. About an hour had passed since I convinced him and my parents to leave the house. I asked what they were doing.

“We’re back home,” he said.

I ranted again about the dangers of sitting right by a burning oil depot and the possibility of catastrophic explosions, and suggested a few places they could spend the night.

“We’re fine,” he said. “Mom and dad are already back to sleep.”

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