Neguin Bank: “The Iranian people will not yield to either Israel or the regime”

Neguin Bank is an Iranian woman who has lived in Italy for some time and has always been active in the liberation movements launched by the Iranian people against the Ayatollahs’ Islamic regime, particularly in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. She has founded collectives to support the movement in Italy and participated in numerous initiatives, working to raise awareness and provide information. We interviewed her to better understand the current situation within Iranian society.

You have always been active in the struggle of Iranian women and men against the regime, within the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in this country. Yet, like other prominent figures, you have stated from the very beginning that it is not through this war that the Iranian people hope to free themselves from their oppressor, the Islamic regime. Can you explain the reasons behind this conviction of yours?

The reasons are primarily historical. No country has ever achieved freedom through war, nor has any fully sovereign democracy ever been established through war. In every country where a dictatorship has been overthrown through the military intervention of another nation, we have never seen freedom or democracy fully realized [Italy is a case of democracy established following military intervention, and one could debate what level of effective democratic sovereignty we have achieved as a result of this, ed.]. The other reason is that liberation processes are structural processes within the country, processes that come from below, that are sustained through struggle and sacrifice; because only in this way can one penetrate deeper into the culture and structure of a society. We are not talking about superficial changes or those imposed from above. Therefore, it seems to me a logical and rational argument to maintain that a war—especially a lightning war aimed at regime change, such as the one Israel has in mind with the United States, assuming they succeed—can never bring freedom to the people in the deepest sense of the word, namely the cultural and structural sense. This idea of freedom requires time and awareness, and thus processes of change that take root within society.

There are some voices of opposition at the moment—for example, the People’s Mujahideen, but also some Kurdish parties and Iranian far-left parties, as well as, of course, the monarchists—who are loudly proclaiming that this war should be welcomed as a means to overthrow the regime. Why do you think they say this, and what are the chances that these various groups will take concrete actions leading to such an overthrow? What role have these various groups played and continue to play within the broad social front opposing the Islamic regime in Iran?

The faction within the opposition that is most in favor of the war is by far that of Reza Pahlavi’s supporters and the monarchy. They have always had close ties to Israel and, in particular, to Netanyahu’s government; Reza Pahlavi has visited Netanyahu on several occasions, they have made agreements, and they have always presented themselves as allies. They are the faction that most explicitly expresses enthusiastic support for this war. The People’s Mujaheddin are more silent [in Europe they held a controversial event in which Leoluca Orlando of AVS also participated]. On social media, this silence has also been noted by some Iranians. It is likely due to the fact that they have already paid for their mistakes in the past. During the war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Mujaheddin sided with the latter, and their strategy was a complete failure in terms of support and consensus from Iranian society, as it earned them widespread contempt. Many Iranians who, at that juncture—as I consider entirely normal when war breaks out—had developed a patriotic sense of defending their country, viewed them as traitors. As for the Kurds and the far-left parties, if there are factions among them that welcome this war, there are two possibilities: they may in turn have agreements with Israel or the United States [the Kurds have several agreements in place with the United States in the region, ed.], or they believe the war could destroy the regime and consequently hope to be able to decide the country’s political fate. In this case, in my opinion, they are mistaken. One might think that in a moment of crisis, when a regime is struck by an external enemy, the regime’s infrastructure or centers of power are destroyed, creating openings for the opposition to take control of the situation, carrying out a sort of tactical revolution. But in reality, this is not the case. Especially in a country like Iran, where there is no organized opposition at the level of mass parties or mass movements. Decades of repression against Iranian society have led to the absence of such organizations; this is why, in 46 years of the regime, despite the various uprisings that have erupted—including the most recent “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests—even when the regime has found itself in difficulty, there has always been a lack of counter-power and counter-organization. We do not have partisans like those you had in Italy during World War II. We do not have an equivalent of the Italian Communist Party at that time. The parties that existed were all brutally eliminated and repressed. If the regime were to be overthrown, we would be faced with a political vacuum that the opposition forces would be unable to either fill or control. If they think they can take over in a democratic, organized manner after a possible overthrow, in my opinion they are mistaken.

This is not the first time in history that the Iranian people have been dragged into wars that were, in some way, instigated by the Western world. The long war against Iraq is part of your people’s historical memory, as is the memory of American interference in Iran’s internal affairs in the 1950s. How do you think this historical memory is playing out today?

The war with Iraq has made the Iranian people more aware. First and foremost, the Iranian people know what war means—what its consequences are in terms of human lives, destruction, and the economic impact on society. War prevents civil society from growing and developing. It keeps everything at a standstill. There is a reason for this: during war, people are forced to focus on survival and basic needs, and are unable to devote themselves to civil or political life. Iranians are very aware that war could lead to this: halting progress, everything they have achieved through sacrifice in these years of struggle, in their lives. Let us not forget that the Women, Life, Freedom movement brought about structural change in Iran in a very short time, as nothing else had done before: no educational program, let alone a war. The status of women and LGBTQ people has taken a leap forward during these years of struggle [as journalist Cecilia Sala also noted in recent days, facing no small amount of backlash for doing so; in fact, women have gained the freedom not to wear the veil, circumventing the impositions of the morality police, ed.]. Both in terms of their stance toward the regime and within society, in families, and in the workplace. Women, Life, Freedom has brought about a real cultural revolution in Iran. This change is entirely due to the commitment of civil society.  As for Western intervention, both during the war with Saddam Hussein and in other cases—for example, the coup organized by the CIA in the 1950s against the Prime Minister democratically elected by the Iranian Parliament—the question we should all ask ourselves is: what has this approach led to? Certainly, to a total distrust on the part of the Iranian people toward the West, toward the United States, and toward other states that have sought to take control of Iran’s political destiny for their own interests. The Iranian people are very sensitive and aware of this. They will never allow their political destiny to be decided by others.

You have speculated that the Israeli attack may have been carried out with the complicity of a faction within the regime itself, and that a potential fall of the regime could lead to the rise to power of a faction allied with Israel—perhaps paving the way for the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, whose members, from their exile in the United States, are openly and eagerly seeking to regain power.

My hypothesis stems from the observation that Iran is a police state where everyone is monitored and identified by the regime. It is truly difficult to evade this surveillance in Iran. Therefore, the only way to infiltrate the regime as deeply as Israel has done, from an intelligence standpoint, is to have the support of a faction within the regime itself. There are divisions and rivalries within the Iranian regime, so this seems to me a plausible, if not probable, hypothesis. The Israelis managed to infiltrate with their drones, which fired from within Iranian territory—a territory where any movement by autonomous opposition forces over the past 46 years has always been intercepted and suppressed. The information the Israelis were able to use for their targeted assassinations is too precise; these are the reasons that led me to hypothesize the complicity of a faction within the regime. What will happen now is truly anyone’s guess. The Israelis and Americans are certainly thinking of a regime change with one of their own at the helm, but this outcome is far from guaranteed. Iran is a complex country, and throughout history it has demonstrated this time and again. In 1979, during the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. and the West repeatedly misjudged the situation, and events unfolded very differently from what they had planned. In 1979, for example, support for the Islamic faction of the revolution—especially in the media—came largely from the United States, as well as from Britain and France, where Khomeini had taken refuge, because they feared the hard-line revolutionary communist parties, which were armed, organized, and trained in guerrilla warfare. The Americans bolstered the Islamist factions in an anti-Soviet vein, without having the slightest idea what Islamic fundamentalism was. So they created “the monster” themselves, and what was the first thing the monster did? It took the Americans hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and from then on it was one crisis after another. In that case, the West miscalculated badly. We know full well that imperialism operates according to plans, but plans do not always come to fruition and are not always based on a real understanding of the territories and the people these powers claim to control.

In recent days, we have seen statements emerging from various sectors of Iranian civil society—from labor unions to women imprisoned by the regime—that reject Israel’s war on Iranian territory while, at the same time, making no concessions to the regime’s nationalism and refusing to align themselves with it. What do you think? Do you believe this is the path to pursue to ensure that Iranian civil society does not disappear behind the shadow of the ayatollahs and continues to represent an entity independent of the Islamic Republic? Or do you think an alignment is inevitable, one that will bring even the sectors most hostile to the regime closer to it in some way? How do you think Iranian civil society would experience this regime change, and what paths do you see for Iranian society to continue along a path of genuinely popular liberation, rather than simply a change at the top of the oppressive hierarchy?

If a regime change were to occur, in my view Iranian society would go through a period of darkness and a sense of powerlessness; but then it would seek ways to reorganize itself, as it has always done. As I said before: the Iranian people have 46 years of resistance and suffering behind them. Of constant political debate, which goes on every day, in every context. Not just on social media, but even before social media exploded. Within families, among groups of friends, in a taxi—political discussions among Iranians are constant. Society is politicized. It is suffering that drives this politicization, because it is suffering that leads human beings to seek the truth about their condition. And thus to inform themselves, to try to understand. Personally, having traveled extensively and lived in various countries, I would say that Iranians are among the most politically aware people I know. And this is their fundamental weapon—perhaps their only one—since they possess neither weapons nor money. The widespread awareness within Iranian society allows them, for example, to counter and defuse propaganda—whether from the far right in the U.S., from Israel, or from internal nationalist or religious sources—as propagated by the regime. Obviously, after suffering an attack, the regime tries to stir up nationalist sentiments within Iranian society. During the war with Iraq, the Iranian people set aside their opposition to the regime to defend the country. Now, however, we have realized that we must not act that way. We must continue to challenge the regime regardless. We must fight on two fronts: against the regime and against the external enemy. That is the lesson we learned from the war with Iraq. We will not put our liberation struggle on hold to focus solely on the foreign aggressor. To sum it up in a slogan: neither with the oppressors nor with the aggressors.

Federica D'Alessio

Journalist and founder of Kritica.it. You can read her articles and essays in MicroMega, Gli Stati Generali, and Africa ExPress. She has won several awards, including the Luchetta – Italian Press Award in 2022.