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In this episode, the guest is Iran expert Dr. Tamar Eilam Gindin. The conversation, scheduled months in advance, naturally turned to the wave of protests and violence that has swept Iran. According to Dr. Eilam Gindin, Iran’s mythology and ancient history are surprisingly intertwined with current events and provide a key to understanding them. The conversation examines the nature of the regime’s violent oppression, the West’s fear of its collapse, the emerging governing alternative, the issue of ethnic minorities, and the connection between the Book of Esther and current American policy.
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Mythology as a key to understanding the present
In response to a listener’s question about what she would do in President Trump’s place to topple the regime, Dr. Eilam Gindin explains that she is not a strategist, but can offer lines of thought from Iranian mythology. According to these stories, a monster must be killed from the inside. For example, the historical king Ardashir killed a giant, mythological worm by disguising himself as one of its believers and pouring molten lead into it. The mythological prince Zahhak, from whose shoulders two snakes grew, was also defeated only from within. Therefore, she believes that any action to overthrow the regime must come from the inside out, not from the outside in.
According to her, the current situation is different from the past for two reasons. First, the Iranian people themselves are asking for external intervention and help. Second, the Islamic Republic itself is using foreign forces, mercenaries, to suppress its citizens.
Suppression of the protest and bloodshed
Dr. Eilam Gindin describes how in the first week and a half of the demonstrations, local riot police forces were unable to handle the protesters. Following this, the regime imported forces from its proxy network: members of Hashd al-Shaabi from Iraq, Afghans and Pakistanis from the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun militias, and even mercenaries from Sudan. Testimonies from doctors in hospitals, who were forced to treat only wounded security forces, confirm that they treated Iraqis and Sudanese. These forces, who are not trained in crowd control but in field combat, used battlefield weapons against the protesters.
The result, she says, was an ocean of blood. While the regime reports about 3,000 dead, most of them security forces personnel, other estimates speak of tens of thousands of deaths, many of them in a single night. She argues that if the regime’s narrative were true, it would not have shut down the internet. Now, with its partial reopening, horrific videos and photos documenting the scale of the massacre are beginning to emerge.
The fear of the regime’s collapse
Boris raises the argument that the major powers might prefer a weak but stable Iranian regime over the chaos that could ensue from its fall, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Eilam Gindin agrees that the Iranians themselves fear this, having seen what happened in the Arab Spring and remembering their own experience from 1979, when they replaced the Shah’s dictatorship with a much more murderous regime.
She finds a parallel to this in the myth of King Jamshid, who was a good ruler until power corrupted him. The people grew tired of him and called on the monster, Prince Zahhak, to rule in his place, only to discover that the new situation was much worse. Eventually, the people rose up and crowned a descendant of Jamshid. Similarly, today, after being disillusioned by the Islamic Revolution, protesters are calling for the return of the crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, and shouting Long live the King in the streets.
The alternative: Pahlavi’s reconstruction plan
According to Dr. Eilam Gindin, Reza Pahlavi states that he does not want to be a dictator like his father, but rather to lead Iran in an orderly transition from dictatorship to democracy, while avoiding the chaos that accompanied other revolutions. He has a team of advisors already working on a reconstruction plan for Iran, which is currently a failed state in all areas of infrastructure and economy, even before any change of government. She estimates that such a move would require support and advice from the West.
Is the Iranian public ready for democracy?
She presents a 2011 study by students from the Interdisciplinary Center, which compared Professor Shalom Schwartz’s value index with Freedom House’s democracy index. The study found a high correlation between a people’s degree of conservatism and their regime’s degree of dictatorship. Iran, along with China, was a notable exception: the values of the Iranian people are much more liberal than the dictatorial nature of the regime, which suggests a potential for democracy.
Ethnic minorities and Iran’s integrity
Ethnic identity is very important in Iran, and the regime uses the claim that the protests are driven by separatist desires of minorities to delegitimize them. Dr. Eilam Gindin argues that this is mostly propaganda, pointing to government Twitter accounts posing as separatists. In the recent protests, she emphasizes, ethnic minorities like the Baloch and Azeris are calling for unity under the king, not for the breakup of the state. They are demanding equal rights within a united or federal Iran.
The Book of Esther and Trump’s strategy
Dr. Eilam Gindin, who is writing a historical novel titled “The Advisor” set in the period of the Book of Esther, sees a connection between the story of the scroll and the current situation. She recounts how Queen Vashti was faced with an impossible choice by King Ahasuerus: if she had complied with his demand to appear at the drunken banquet, she would have disgraced herself and been deposed. Because she refused, she was deposed anyway. Similarly, she believes the Trump administration is putting the Iranian regime in a similar situation: if it stops funding its proxies and killing protesters, it will collapse. If it continues, it will be attacked. In either case, its fate is sealed.
The original episode, in Hebrew: איראן שוב על סף הרתיחה