On 17 June 2025, I received a video message from a woman in Tehran. Her face was hidden and her voice disguised. She said, “Even while Israel is bombing, I feel more threatened by the Islamic Republic than by Israel.”

She isn’t alone in these feelings. I run a Persian YouTube channel with viewers across Iran. I recently asked people to send in messages for Israelis. Within hours, my Telegram blew up with voice notes and video clips. People were filming their carpets, their shadows, their screens—whatever wouldn’t get them caught. They sent the videos to me so that I could translate them into English for our Israeli audience on my English YouTube channel. The messages came from schoolteachers, students, parents, couples, and even a soldier. These people were speaking directly to Israel—and they were saying “thank you.”

I’ve lived half my life in Iran. Since I left, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people still stuck living under the regime. I’ve been part of activist networks for years. In addition to my Persian and English YouTube channels, I run an active Persian Telegram channel and a Persian Discord community, all focused on activism against the Islamic Republic. I talk to Israelis on my English platforms and Iranians on the Persian ones. In addition, I have travelled to both Israel and Palestine and have a close connection to many Israelis. 

People in the West often forget that Israel didn’t start this war. The Islamic Republic has been waging war on Iranians and Israelis since 1979. There have been mass executions and public hangings. Children have been shot in the streets. Women have been raped in detention. Protesters have been blinded. And all the while, the government has been promising to annihilate Israel—unprovoked—since its founding.

One woman who messaged me thanked Israel for taking out the killers of nine-year-old Kian Pirfalak. Another woman said, “What Israel did in days, we couldn’t do in 46 years.”

Protesters in Iran have been trying to bring the regime down for decades. They’ve been gunned down in the streets for it. In 2019, the regime killed over 1,500 people in three days and yet faced no accountability and no justice. But still people kept going. Now, for the first time, they’re seeing the men who ordered the killings—the generals, the commanders—taken out. Not by hashtags or UN resolutions, but by actual airstrikes. By Israel. And they’re grateful.

The regime didn’t build a single public air raid shelter. There have been no sirens or alerts. They did nothing to warn people when the bombs started falling. Instead, they cut off internet access. Just when people needed to know where the bombs were falling, where to evacuate to, and where to find food and fuel, the government blacked out the entire country. They are so afraid of protests that they’d rather people die confused in the dark than risk another uprising. One man called my channel to say, “It’s amazing you [Israel] tell us where to evacuate before you strike. Our own rulers don’t even do that.”

Here are a few things people actually said directly, addressed to Israelis:

• “This is not a war between Israel and Iran. It’s a war between Israel and the Islamic Republic.”
• “Cyrus freed the Jews from Babylon. Now the Jews are freeing us from our own tyrants.”
• “Thank you, Bibi. Keep going.”
• “Cut the head off the snake. We’ll take care of the rest.”
• “We are your natural allies. From Tehran to Tel Aviv.”

One couple recorded a thank-you message from a blacked-out room inside Iran. They started naming the victims of the regime—girls, boys, protesters, artists—and then thanked Israel for killing their killers. 

One of the most surreal videos I got was from a man in full Artesh military uniform. His face was covered, but his voice was calm. He said: “Nothing is worse than this regime surviving.” Artesh is the remnant of Iran’s national army from before 1979—it is distinct from the IRGC, less ideological, and some members are quietly sympathetic to the Iranian people. This soldier isn’t just angry at the regime: he hopes the regime falls. He said the regime’s only skill is propaganda, and now that too is crumbling.

As multiple people pointed out in their video clips, in 2019, the regime killed 1,500 protesters in three days. They issued no warnings before the bullets began to fly. One woman said, “Israel will never kill more of us than the regime already has.” Another said, “At least Israel is targeting the heads of IRGC. They’re not bombing civilians.” Even when civilians die, these Iranians are clear about who is to blame. “The regime started this war. They hide behind us. They don’t care if we die,” one told me. “If we had toppled them earlier, we wouldn’t be dealing with this now,” another commented.

There are many reasons why I fervently hope that this regime will fall. It would mean no more terror funding, no more missiles sent to Hezbollah and drones to the Houthis and no more payouts to Hamas. Ninety million Iranians would be able to rejoin the world. There would be no more hostage diplomacy. No more brain drain, as Iran’s most talented people leave the country. The IRGC would no longer be able to take their oil money and turn it into rockets. Israel would finally get some breathing room, without this existential threat in the neighbourhood. The Middle East would no longer be held hostage by one rogue state: regime change in Tehran is a precondition for peace and prosperity in the region. As one of the people who wrote to me put it, “When the regime is gone, Israel and Iran will make the Middle East peaceful again.”

Israel is demolishing the Islamic Republic in real time. Thirty senior IRGC commanders have been wiped out. The regime’s proxy tentacles—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, the PMF (the Popular Mobilisation Forces, a Shia militia operating in Iraq)—have all been either decapitated or left scrambling. The regime’s air-defence grids have been blinded, their missile launchers are smoking, their communications systems have been hacked. Israel is systematically erasing the most dangerous state sponsor of terror on the planet, and they are doing it with a moral clarity the rest of the world outsourced to them decades ago.

Thirty senior commanders have been killed. Each of those officers ran a chunk of Iran’s global terror infrastructure: the Quds Force cells in Europe, drone workshops in Yemen, the cash pipelines to Gaza. Without them, the regime’s coordination has stalled, its paymasters have vanished, its field operatives are running blind.

Iran’s proxies are in shambles, too. Hamas has lost the men who mapped Israel’s border sensors. Hezbollah’s munitions depots are craters visible from space; their precision-guided stockpile is now precision-scattered. The Houthis can launch drones only if the Islamic Republic ships them parts—which is likely to be difficult now that so many of the shipping managers are dead and the warehouses on fire. Kataib Hezbollah tried to fill the vacuum in Iraq; instead, US and Israeli strikes turned their command posts into charcoal. Every limb of the Islamic Republic’s octopus is either cauterised or thrashing.

Inside the Islamic Republic, the regime is in even worse shape. Radar sites around Isfahan, Shiraz, and Bandar Abbas have been spoofed or fried, leaving missile crews staring at blank screens. The regime brags about their supersonic missiles, but you can’t launch what you can’t see or coordinate. Air-defence has been choked, while Israel’s drones are loitering overhead, streaming live video to pilots sipping coffee in the Negev.

While the West outsourced moral clarity to process: UN statements, EU press releases, and endless talks in Vienna, the Islamic Republic was arming militias that bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killed US Marines in Beirut, and supplied the EFPs (explosively-formed penetrators) that shredded American patrols in Iraq. Erase the regime in Iran and you erase the single largest engine of jihadist finance. Every successful Israeli sortie today prevents a bus bomb or embassy explosion tomorrow. That is the strategic trade-off: precision strikes now instead of mass-casualty funerals later. Whether you call it pre-emption or self-defence, what Israel is doing will hopefully lead to the dismantling of a theocratic mafia that has strangled the Middle East for forty-six years. 

The Islamic Republic is not a normal state that occasionally pursues aggressive policies; permanent revolution is wired into its DNA. Its own military brand—Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enqelāb-e Eslāmi, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—announces the state’s mission in its very name: it is designed to guard a revolution, not a border. Toppling the Pahlavi monarchy in 1979 was step one in a declared war against what Tehran calls “Western imperialism and Zionism.” Step two is removing Israel in order to dominate the Middle East. Step three is confronting “the head of the beast”: the United States and the liberal order that keeps global trade and security running.

That target ladder explains why Israel is on the front line of a global conflict Washington and Brussels falsely dismiss as regional. If Israel were to fall, the regime in Iran would gain strategic depth, uncontested land corridors, and the ideological momentum to push its war westward. Israel’s defence blocks the next phases of an openly declared plan to dismantle the very system of stability from which every trading nation—including America—profits.

Isolationists on the America-first Right and the progressive Left claim that staying out of the war against the Islamic Republic will help reduce the risks to the US. But this thinking fails to take into account the many attacks on American assets and capabilities attributable to the Islamic Republic and its proxies. The marginal cost of supporting Israel is near zero for the US; the strategic dividend is huge.

And we should not forget the cost in lives lost to the Islamic Republic’s aggression, including 241 Marines killed in Beirut in 1983, the 85 who died in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires, the nineteen airmen killed at the Khobar Towers in 1996, and the hundreds of US soldiers killed by IRGC-supplied EFPs in Iraq—and these are only the attacks that succeeded. Each senior IRGC planner Israel eliminates is one less architect of a future attack.

Terror networks tied to the regime tend to expand until neutralised. Ballistic missiles, drones, cyber units, and proxy militias already project the regime’s power towards the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. The two oceans that separate the US from Iran can no longer guarantee American safety. Wars arrive when the opponent chooses. Helping a front-line ally reduce the threat now reduce the probability of a later conflict that would demand direct US intervention.

When—and I believe it is a case of when not if—the regime collapses, the transition roadmap could be straightforward. In practical terms, this is what could play out. 

First, the country could hold a national referendum on the political system. Two main options should appear on the ballot—(a) a republic with no monarch or (b) a constitutional monarchy that keeps the crown as a symbolic guarantor of unity. Both models are functionally secular and democratic. A clear, internationally observed vote could then end the four-decades-long battle between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people.

Second, Iranians could elect a founding council. Once the governmental structure has been determined through majority consent, voters could pick a non-partisan drafting body comprising lawyers, academics, labour representatives, and minority leaders to write a secular constitution. Once the constitution is ratified, the country can proceed to standard elections to choose deputies for a new parliament and executive branch.

My own preference would be for a solution that combines symbolic continuity with practical governance: with Noor Pahlavi—Reza Pahlavi’s daughter—as Queen, while Reza Pahlavi serves as prime minister, where he can focus on executive duties and international diplomacy. But I’ll respect whatever the referendum determines; the point is to lead the country through a clean, credible transition.

The protestors who have been chanting “Free Palestine” seem to be oblivious to the fact that no modern army has done more to free the people of Gaza from Hamas than the IDF. Meanwhile, a literal empire of evil has been shaken to its foundations. When it falls, the global jihadi supply chain will lose its banker, its armourer, and its ideological lighthouse. Without Shia oil money and warehouses, the Sunni jihadi camp will split or dissolve. The Kremlin will lose a destabilising partner, the CCP a convenient distraction.

The right decision is obvious here. We must support Israel’s attempts to weaken the regime and provide the Iranian people with an opportunity to overthrow their hated and oppressive government. If you are reading this from a Western country where you sleep soundly, you have already benefited from a war you didn’t have to fight. The least you can do is admit who fought it for you, and why.