In February 1984, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi lay in the infirmary of Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, cancer spreading through his young body as Iraqi missiles slammed into Iranian cities overhead. At 24, condemned to death for his involvement in a Marxist group opposed to the Islamic Republic, he had been left untreated until prison authorities believed he was terminal. The silence of the ward was broken only by distant moans from other prisoners and the echo of gunfire during nightly executions. There was nothing to do, he recalls, but wait.
Four decades later, Evin Prison itself was struck by Israeli airstrikes during last year’s 12-day war between Israel and Iran, killing dozens and turning the site into a global headline. For Ghamari-Tabrizi, now a 65-year-old historian, American citizen and former director of Princeton University’s Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, the bombing felt like a personal wound reopened. Speaking in an interview reported by Haaretz, he described the sensation as watching his own home destroyed, despite the fact that Evin had once been his cage.
Ghamari-Tabrizi’s life story, and his latest book, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, form a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant Western portrayal of Iran as a monolithic, irrational enemy. The book, a collection of essays written over two decades, weaves personal memory with political analysis, arguing that Iran is better understood as a fractured society shaped by trauma, fear and competing hopes rather than ideological fanaticism alone.
His memories of imprisonment are central to that argument. Arrested in the early 1980s, at the height of the regime’s consolidation of power, he witnessed mass executions on an almost nightly basis. Thirty, forty, sometimes fifty people were killed in a single night. Friends vanished. Gunfire echoed through the prison corridors. These experiences, he says, forged his empathy for today’s Iranian protesters but also instilled a deep caution about romanticizing revolt.
Watching recent protest waves from exile in the United States, Ghamari-Tabrizi says he was emotionally paralyzed. The images, he told Haaretz, triggered visceral memories of his own past. Yet he resists calls, common in Western political discourse, to encourage Iranians to rise up and overthrow the regime at any cost. To do so, he argues, is both irresponsible and immoral, especially for those who do not face the guns themselves.
His skepticism rests on two assessments. First, he believes the Islamic Republic still retains enough support, even if from a shrinking segment of society, to mobilize violent resistance against any mass uprising. Second, he sees no meaningful rift within the regime’s security and power structures that would make a sudden collapse likely. Together, these factors make short-term regime change improbable and potentially catastrophic. History, he notes, can turn unexpectedly, but wishful thinking is no substitute for analysis.
That insistence on context defines Ghamari-Tabrizi’s scholarship. His earlier works, including Foucault in Iran and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, challenge simplified Western readings of the 1979 revolution. In revisiting French philosopher Michel Foucault’s controversial support for the Iranian uprising, Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault never disavowed his belief in the revolutionary moment, even as the outcome descended into repression. The lesson, he suggests, is not that revolutions are illusions, but that they are perilous journeys balanced between hope and despair.
In his latest book, that framework extends to Iran’s nuclear program and its relations with the United States and Israel. Ghamari-Tabrizi contends that the Iranian nuclear crisis has been systematically manufactured, shaped as much by Western political needs as by Iranian actions. He points to intelligence assessments and International Atomic Energy Agency reports indicating that Iran halted its military nuclear ambitions in 2003 and has not since resumed a weaponization program.
This position places him at odds with repeated warnings by Israeli leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, who has argued for decades that Iran is perpetually months away from building a bomb. Ghamari-Tabrizi wryly calls these claims “the longest six months in history,” noting that similar alarms date back to the mid-1990s. According to Haaretz, even recent American intelligence estimates suggest that while Iran has expanded enrichment capacity, it has not decided to pursue a nuclear weapon and would need years to do so if it chose that path.
For Ghamari-Tabrizi, the nuclear issue is fundamentally about sovereignty and deterrence, not suicidal aggression. He rejects the image of Iran as a state willing to destroy itself in an apocalyptic confrontation. Iranian intentions, he argues, are reactive and defensive, shaped by decades of war, sanctions and external threats. Even Tehran’s network of regional allies, including Hezbollah, should be understood less as a plan for domination than as a buffer against perceived encirclement.
Sanctions, in his view, are another form of warfare that disproportionately punishes ordinary people. Drawing parallels to the Iran-Iraq War, he describes economic pressure as a strategy designed to make daily life so unbearable that citizens are driven to revolt. In practice, he says, sanctions choke banking systems, halt imports and deny access to medicines, regardless of official exemptions. Factories close, credit disappears and society slowly grinds down.
The human cost of this pressure was brought into sharp relief for him during the June 2025 airstrike on Evin Prison. At least 79 people were killed, including relatives of prisoners, lawyers and social workers. For a man who once spent nights calculating how to survive missile strikes from inside those walls, the attack felt like the fulfillment of a long-feared nightmare.
Asked what could prevent yet another cycle of war, Ghamari-Tabrizi offers no easy optimism. Stability, he says, would require mutual security guarantees and a commitment by all sides to stop interfering in one another’s internal affairs. Without that, violence will continue to reproduce itself, trapping civilians in its wake.
From a death row cell in Tehran to lecture halls in the United States, Ghamari-Tabrizi’s life embodies the contradictions of modern Iran: revolution and repression, hope and fear, defiance and restraint. As presented in Haaretz, his message is less a prescription than a warning — that misunderstanding Iran, or using its people as instruments in geopolitical games, risks repeating the tragedies that have already scarred generations.
