"I'm just calling to let you know we're okay."
Those were my mother's first words when she called me from Tehran, three weeks into the recent U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. A bomb had just hit the police station in her neighborhood. "I didn't want you to worry if you saw it on the news." I hadn't, but relief washed over me at the sound of her voice. Since the war began on Feb. 28, reaching her has become extremely difficult. The internet blackout is widespread; one-way calls out of Iran are occasionally possible, but punishingly expensive. These sporadic and frustratingly brief phone calls are precious fragments of reassurance in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.
Whenever she gets through, my mother tells me not to worry. "Are you eating well? Sleeping well?" she asks. I tell her I'm fine — but I'm lying. From the start of the war through the ceasefire announcement on April 7, I began each morning by scanning reports of strikes across Tehran and measuring their distance from her apartment. The police station struck on March 18 sits along the route she walks each day to the park. I strolled with her there during my last visit in 2017. Sometimes we ventured further to Ferdowsi Square, a bustling hub for handicraft shopping about 30 minutes from her home. That, too, has been battered. These are not abstract locations on a map; they are the geography of my childhood. Khorasani Synagogue, now reduced to rubble, stands two blocks from Mehr Hospital, where I was born.
To justify their illegitimate and illegal war of aggression, U.S. and Israeli leaders have offered a threadbare inventory of falsehoods. The claim that Iran was only weeks from a nuclear bomb — a lie that Benjamin Netanyahu has been spinning since 1992 — reads like a sequel to the 2003 saga of Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction. More preposterous yet is the idea that the war on Iran is a humanitarian mission aimed at bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people — a lie so shameless that, as the Persian saying goes, even a cooked chicken would laugh.
These phony claims operate on the same imperialist logic that drove previous U.S. wars in the Middle East: asserting dominance over an oil-rich region of unrivaled geostrategic importance. Having already left Iraq, Libya and Syria fractured by war, Washington now sees Iran as the last regional power still resisting U.S. hegemony. For that reason alone, Iran must be targeted, its infrastructure destroyed, its industries dismantled, its state degraded to collapse, its territorial integrity broken up, its natural resources seized. U.S. President Donald Trump, in the early days of the war, spoke not only of regime change but also of changing Iran's map. Later, he declared that after achieving its military objectives in Iran, the U.S. would simply "TAKE THE OIL & MAKE A FORTUNE."
In their hubris, U.S. decision-makers predicted a quick and easy victory. But as it became clear that Iran would not kneel, the rhetoric from Washington grew more sadistic. Trump spoke and wrote of "blasting Iran into oblivion," bombing it "back to the Stone Age" and making it "virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again."
On Easter Sunday, the U.S. president threatened to unleash "hell" on Iran — destroying every bridge and power plant — unless Iranians submitted to his demands by April 7. The appointed day began with a statement of raw genocidal menace: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." He eventually backed down and announced a ceasefire. But the 48 hours before that announcement were agonizing. Many in Iran said their goodbyes to loved ones. Iranians outside the country scrambled to reach family and friends back home, perhaps for a final conversation. A friend described the feeling as that of a death row prisoner counting down the last hours before execution.
But like a persistent stream wearing through rock, ordinary Iranians found ways to hold a light against the darkness of those fateful hours. As Trump's deadline drew near, thousands volunteered their bodies as the last line of defense for their historical sites, bridges and power plants. The image of hundreds forming a human chain on the old bridge in Ahvaz, and the video of Ali Ghamsari — celebrated tar player and composer — staging a solo sit-in at the Damavand power plant in Tehran, will endure as testaments to a people who chose, even in the face of madness, to affirm life.
My mother carries that same defiant spirit. Life has hurled its share of blows at her, yet she returns to a single refrain: "This, too, shall pass." After the 1979 revolution, her father — a midlevel state official under the monarchy — was imprisoned, and the apartment where the family lived was confiscated by the Revolutionary Court. As a child, I accompanied my mother and grandmother to the court, where they pleaded with a judge to overturn the order. They failed, though we were eventually permitted to buy the apartment back. Through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when many evacuated Tehran, my mother stayed. When her parents died and her friends fled into exile, she stayed still — rooted, stubborn, undefeated — in the home she refuses to stop loving.
The strike on the police station came just two days before Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. On the day itself, as I stood at an anti-war rally in Myeong-dong, central Seoul, my phone rang — my mother, her voice unmistakably bright. She proudly described her Nowruz spread, the traditional arrangement of seven symbols of renewal. She and her husband had cooked herb rice with fish, dressed for the occasion and celebrated the arrival of the new year. When I asked if any bombs had fallen near them, she brushed the question aside: "Don't worry, we're fine. Life goes on." I worry, of course — how could I not? Yet in the end, I know that her refusal to be broken is the most fertile ground from which hope dares to rise.
Source: Korea Times News
