People in Tehran fear the drumbeats of war with Israel

The morning Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran felt eerily similar to the morning Qasem Soleimani was assassinated. We woke up, picked up our phones, and read the news in shock. We imagined the worst—war. The anxiety was there, but not as intense as the last time.

It was unclear what had caused Haniyeh’s death. “A projectile,” they said. But how? What type? From where? We didn’t know. We weren’t even sure where his residence was. Some said it was the Saadabad Palace, adding to the creeping anxiety. What if the Palace, a historic landmark, was damaged?

It was just too much. A friend wrote that he had diarrhea from the shock and stress. The fear of war looming –again. Not as intense as the fear we had when Soleimani was killed, but a gut-churning fear nevertheless.

The difference this time was that it wasn’t the first time. We had seen it before: the cries of retaliation, the promise of Harsh Revenge. Only in April, we felt we had to brace for a full-blown war after Israel hit Iran’s consulate in Syria. But the full-blown war never came. Missiles were launched; missiles were intercepted; and life went on as ‘normal’. The utter madness that is our normal in Iran.

So now, many Iranians simply joke away the bellicosity. It’s a defense mechanism that seems to work –until it doesn’t.

"Wars start with smaller clashes., with skirmishes. We all know that.” Masoud is 49 and works as a clerk for an organization half owned by the state. He thinks the younger generation should take the wisdom of his generation more seriously. “One side strikes, the other responds, and this tit-for-tat continues until it reaches a point where it can no longer be stopped. And that would be a dark day for all of us.” Those who remember the eight-year horror of the war with Iraq are often more cautious when discussing the prospect of another one. “I don’t like this regime either, but when I hear talks of an attack overthrowing the ‘system’ but not harming the people, I dread their naivety."

This may be a common line of argument among the older generation. But it’s by no means universal. In fact, some of the more radical voices you get to hear around you are that of the ‘fed-up’ elderly: pensioners like Mahmoud, who have “seen it all”, and cannot help letting out a Persian proverb every other sentence.

“Die once, mourn once,” he says, holding up his index finger to illustrate ‘once’. "We cannot go on forever with this government. It’s been oppressing us and destabilizing the region for years. We have no effective opposition. The only option left is to target their bases and erase them from the face of earth without harming civilians."

Few speak publicly in favor of foreign military intervention. But those few may now cite the “surgical elimination” of Haniyeh –as does Mahmoud– as “evidence” that the Islamic Republic can be “taken out cleanly”, and we should therefore not fear a Syria-fication of Iran. This, as far as I can tell, is still a minority, if not fringe, view. But it also looks as if the ‘targeted assassinations’ –from Soleimani to [Iran’s nuclear mastermind Mohsen] Fakhrizadeh, and now Haniyeh– may have emboldened a few more Iranians to casually call for such actions.

The day after Haniyeh was killed, I overheard a conversation in a grocery store that illustrates this sentiment brilliantly. A middle-aged woman was complaining about the constant rise of prices. "Forty thousand tomans [$0.70] for a 100gr pack of butter?” she exclaimed. “It’s gone up because of the killing [of Haniyeh]. It’ll go higher with the next one,” the grocer said. “The next one is the main one, God willing,” the woman replied. The grocer reminded her that such words could cause her trouble. There was no need to explain further. We all knew who she meant by the ‘main one’, a term used for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The assassination, like many other events, one has to admit, has led to a wave of conspiracy theories. “It's not that they can't kill Iran’s leaders, they don’t want to,” a friend said after I told her about the exchange in the grocery store. “They need the Islamic Republic to be there as the scarecrow of the region."

And then there are those who see the Haniyeh assassination as proof that Israel could have eliminated Hamas with much less civilian casualties if it wanted to. Sohrab, a graduate student in social sciences, is one such voice. “They killed ten of thousands in Gaza under the pretext that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, claiming they had no choice,” he says.. “But we just saw how easily they can hit their target without harming a single civilian. I think the killings in Gaza are more deliberate than they’d like to admit."

The past year or two has been crazy even by Iran’s standards. The current Iranian calendar year is not even past the halfway mark, and we’ve had a president killed in a helicopter crash and a top figure in the Axis of Resistance assassinated in Tehran. After Raisi’s death, the Persian social media turned into a river of jokes. That has not been the case this time. Perhaps because the former was an entirely domestic affair. No one feared a war to break out. This time, the drum beats are constant and loud. “The world will witness our power –and soon enough,” an official just said on the state TV.

Still –and as far as I can tell– few are as scared as they were when Soleimani was killed. But it’s tense. We’re all waiting to see how the Harsh Revenge pans out this time. Most concerned are those with tickets for air travel –and those whose loved ones are supposed to fly in for a long-anticipated, short summer vacation. This shouldn’t be the ‘normal’ life for anyone. It is here, though, and there’s very little we can do about it.