The WhatsApp message came at 2 a.m. My cousin in Tehran — I’ll call him Dariush — had finally gotten through on a VPN. It was the first day of the war. “The neighbors are celebrating,” he wrote, incredulous. “Playing music. I can hear them through the walls while the bombs are falling.” I stared at my phone in the dark, trying to absorb this. Bombs falling on the city where I spent years of my life, where I did fieldwork, where I learned what it means to be Iranian — and some people were throwing parties.
In the diaspora, Iranians were celebrating too. In Germany, my cousin Farhad sent me a Champagne-glasses emoji when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death was announced. Clinking, celebratory, wordless. A friend forwarded me screenshots from her local WhatsApp group for Iranians, a “Nightlife” subgroup meant for sharing party invites; someone had dropped a link to a Partiful event, a “Dictator Elimination Party.” “Come celebrate,” the invite read, “the elimination of the reason for all our pain, loss, and suffering.”
Within 20 minutes, another member of the group responded: “As a reminder, 100 Iranian children were murdered by the U.S. and Israel today. I’m not sure a party is where it’s at right now.”
What followed was not exactly a debate. It was more like a collision between people who experienced the reminder as a moral intrusion into a moment of joy and those who could not separate the joy from the bodies. Some argued that the attack that killed schoolgirls in Minab had not been confirmed. (By then, posts had spread alleging that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for the bombing, claims that were later disputed in multiple news outlets.) One person asked the group’s administrators to intervene: This was a space to talk about nightlife, not politics. Another member posted a link to the Wikipedia page explaining the definition of nightlife, a small, devastating joke.
An admin eventually stepped in with a message trying very hard to hold everyone together. “Many want to celebrate, many need to grieve,” they wrote. “Let’s allow room for the nuance, and hold each other with care and a spirit of love.” It was the kindest possible response to an irresolvable tension. And it resolved nothing.
I have been thinking about what it means that this fight happened in a nightlife group. Not in a political forum, not in a debate between activists with competing ideologies, but in a chat where people go to find out where the party is. The political has collapsed into the personal so completely that everywhere is an emotional minefield.
Over the past week, the Iranian American community has been fracturing in real time across dinner tables, in group chats, in the silence of blocked numbers. In Australia, my cousin Ali and his group of friends — many of whom I knew from childhood trips to Iran — were writing screeds against me on social media for not using my platform to back the bombings of Iran. Cousins and old friends will no longer speak to me because I will not sign on to the proposition that American and Israeli bombs will deliver liberation. Some of them I have known my whole life. Some of them, I realize now, I did not know at all.
There has always been infighting among Iranians in the diaspora. The community has never been monolithic. It spans monarchists and leftists, secular nationalists and devout Muslims, people who left last year and people who left in 1979, when a popular uprising against the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi paved the way for the Islamic Republic. But today’s divisions do not fall neatly along the old political lines. What has changed is more atmospheric: the speed of polarization, the way people whose politics you thought you knew have arrived at positions you did not see coming. It reminds me of how my Jewish American friends describe the months after October 7 — a reckoning that exposes not just political disagreements but something deeper about how people have understood themselves, their loyalties, and one another. The fault line, crudely stated, runs between those who see this war as a long-overdue liberation — the regime finally falling, whatever the cost — and those who find something perverse, even obscene, in celebrating bombs falling on the country that made you.
But to state it so crudely is already to misrepresent it because almost no one I know sits at either pole completely. What I keep encountering is a kind of anguished double consciousness: people who despise the ruling Establishment in Iran, who have lost family members to its prisons, who have spent decades dreaming of its end but who cannot bring themselves to celebrate the deaths of Iranian children.
By day three, Dariush got through to me again. The bombing campaign in Tehran had begun in earnest. “No more dancing,” he wrote.
My cousins Farhad and Ali grew up together in Iran. Both engineers, both successful by any measure that mattered there. About a decade ago, each made the decision so many Iranians of their generation did: to leave, to try somewhere else, to see if life could be bigger. Sanctions on Iran and increased repression by the state had made staying feel impossible, and the outside world had seemed like it might hold something better.
It hadn’t, exactly. The dignity they’d had at home, as professionals, as men who were good at things, as people whose credentials meant something, didn’t transfer cleanly. European and Australian societies that had been opening were closing. The anti-immigrant turn was not abstract for them; it was the daily texture of their lives. The regime change they had dreamed of in Iran had taken on a new valence — not just political liberation but the possibility of going home. Of being again in a place where they belonged.
When I think about Farhad’s Champagne emoji or Ali’s childhood best friend criticizing me online, I try to hold that whole story inside it. The years of struggle in a country that never quite accepted them. Having to start life all over again. The economic and political conditions that had made leaving feel necessary. The dream of return that had kept something alive. I don’t know what they feel now watching the city they grew up in burn. I haven’t asked. I’m not sure the question would survive the asking.
Dariush made a different choice. He got his Ph.D. in Canada, spent time in the U.K., looked hard at the life being offered to him there, and said “no.” He went back. Iran, with all of its problems — the political restrictions, the economic contractions — was still home in a way Toronto and London were not. He didn’t want to be an immigrant. He wanted to be Iranian in Iran.
My closest friend there made the same calculation. I’ll call her Sara. She studied in Europe, saw that life from the inside, and returned. Owing to my research and writing, I can no longer go back to Iran, so we’ve been exchanging voice memos: five minutes, ten minutes, sometimes longer, threading through VPNs and internet restrictions across the ocean. We joke that they’re podcasts we make for each other. They are, in truth, more than that — lifelines back to each other and back to ourselves. In the two months before the war, Sara had tried to explain to me in her voice notes that something was changing in the country faster than she could track.
It had all started in late December. After days of nationwide protest over the currency collapse and rising inflation, the government had begun talks with striking merchants. Then Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, wrote in Persian on X, “Go out together into the streets. The time has come. We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” Reza Pahlavi, son of the former monarch of Iran, called on Iranians to take over city centers on January 8 and 9. In those two evenings, the state massacred thousands of protesters.
The killings broke something. People who had been cautiously oppositional became harder and more desperate. And into that desperation came Pahlavi — long exiled in the U.S., who, with Israel’s help, positioned himself as the leader-in-waiting of a free Iran.
Inside the country, Iran International — the satellite channel beaming in from London with a pro-Pahlavi bent — was leading the discourse, shaping conversations in ways that state media could never have done, setting the terms of what was thinkable. Everyone in Sara’s social circles in Tehran wanted Pahlavi now. At parties, the talk had a quality she described as unrecognizable. Sara was always someone who loved to go out. I knew we’d be lifelong friends when we spent an entire night at one of Tehran’s legendary parties in a corner talking and laughing, barely noticing the room around us. But in those final weeks before the war, she told me she could stay only an hour before she had to leave. She didn’t know these people anymore. Or she did know them, and that was worse.
She was also getting questions about me, though she never entertained them for a moment. Since the January uprisings and massacres, I had been doing interviews and writing publicly that Pahlavi had no experience and was being positioned by Israel and the U.S. the way Ahmed Chalabi had been positioned before the invasion of Iraq: a diaspora figure of convenience, palatable to western interests, his actual relationship to the Iranian people a secondary concern. For this, I was being called pro-regime. Not by the Islamic Republic but by Iranians, some of whom I had known for years.
The people who have shunned me because I won’t get on the Pahlavi train and cheer a Trump war are not bad people. They are people who grew up hearing stories about what the Islamic Republic did to their parents, their grandparents, their aunts who’d disappeared. Their grief is real. Their desire for it to end is real. It’s rooted in years of displacement, of indignity, of a return made impossible by a political system they didn’t choose. I understand the psychological logic of all of it even as parts of it horrify me.
What I cannot make my peace with is the way that logic requires the erasure of the people still inside. The 175 killed in Minab, many of them schoolgirls, by bombs during the U.S.-Israeli air campaign. (U.S. military investigators believe it is likely the U.S. was responsible for the strike.) When the war started, I begged Sara to leave Tehran. I begged Dariush, too. I cannot let myself fully imagine what it would mean to lose either of them. Sara eventually got an expensive VPN and used it to write to me that she and her family had made it out — to their familial village, away from the city, away from the sound of the strikes that had been terrifying them. Dariush stayed. During the 12-day war this past June, he had left for the Caspian, like so many Tehranis with somewhere to go. This time was different. “I don’t want to leave Tehran,” he told me. He didn’t stay out of loyalty to the Islamic Republic. He stayed because Tehran is his home.
The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time. I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this.
There is a harder question underneath that one, about what comes next. A realized Pahlavist dream would encounter the same problems every externally imposed regime change has ever encountered. A country that has been subject to a bombing campaign does not emerge as a liberal democracy. It emerges traumatized, fragmented, furious. The scenarios being discussed among analysts include the balkanization of Iran — the deliberate fracturing of a country of 90 million along ethnic and regional lines, a project that would make Iraq look stable. State collapse is another live possibility: not regime change but the dissolution of functioning governance across one of the most geopolitically critical territories on earth. A civil war fought across those ruins. These are not fringe fears; they are the logical extension of what is being proposed.
Then there is the other possibility, the one American planners have historically refused to acknowledge: that Iran becomes what Vietnam became for the U.S. or what Afghanistan became for the Soviet Union, a country that absorbs punishment until the superpower no longer dares to come back. The Islamic Republic has survived 47 years of sanctions, war, and isolation. Iranian society for the past 150 years has organized around the desire for sovereignty and independence from outside powers. Psyops and astroturfing campaigns by foreign powers to make parts of the population desire rescue from abroad may not survive once homes come crashing down and more civilians are killed — or once pro-Pahlavi Iranians hear Trump when he says he has no plans to bring the former shah’s son to power. The assumption that Iran’s population will continue to greet its violent dismemberment with gratitude rather than resistance is the same assumption that has produced every catastrophic miscalculation of the past century.
The VPN windows are narrowing. Sara’s last message came from a village I have never seen in a country I cannot reach. I feel unmoored without our daily exchange of long voice memos. I check my phone more than I should. Trump has said the U.S. has the weapons to fight this war “forever.” Pete Hegseth has said worse. The bombs are not stopping. And somewhere in Tehran, in a high-rise in a city that a foreign government is openly discussing reducing to rubble, my cousin has stopped answering his phone.
The diaspora, meanwhile, keeps fighting, in group chats, comment sections, and the specific silence of a relationship that used to be close and is now something else. We are having, in miniature, the argument that Iranians inside are having — when they can find the words and the safety to have it at all.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 9, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.