Iran has always been the target of invaders and has outlived them all
Iranians have a very long historical memory.
The way they talk about the Alexander invasion of Persia in 344 BC, it is as if it happened last week on Tuesday. The subsequent Arab and Mongol conquests of the seventh and 13th centuries happened just a few days ago.
With this Israeli-instigated, American cosponsored invasion of Iran on 28 February 2026 still unfolding with carpet bombing and vicious, total destruction apace, the country re-enters its sustained and prolonged history.
Iran does so in a fateful encounter with the most malicious colonial and imperial thuggery of the combined forces of Israel, the regional settler colony, and the dysfunctional US empire that it has sadistically manipulated for decades to keep itself afloat.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not an exception - a mushroom that grew out of nowhere. His diabolical designs on the world around his settler colony surface from the deepest layers of genocidal Zionism.
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Lo and behold: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran - in total ruin and utter despair. This Iranian invasion is the wet dream of Zionism, wholly interpreted.
The significance of this momentous re-entry of Iran into the bosom of its historical memories can scarcely be exaggerated.
National sovereignty
Over the course of its long and tumultuous history, Iran has been invaded multiple times. The Alexander invasion of the fourth century BC put an end to the Achaemenid Empire. The Arab conquest of the seventh century dismantled the Sassanian Empire. Turkic and Mongol invasions followed, each with their particular twists and turns, after which history unfolded apace.
The Afghan invasion of 1722 brought the Safavid Empire to an end. Russian incursions into Iran lasted from the 18th into the 19th century. The Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 followed, and then the Iraqi invasion of 1980-1988. The history is long, the memory conflated.
After each invasion and following each conquest, Iran and its Persian cosmopolis emerge stronger and more confident
These are the landmarks of Iran's long history as a target of world conquerors and imperial land grabs. And now it is the site of a bold and barefaced attack by a European settler colony wagging the dog of the US empire.
The long history and uninterrupted longevity of these successive invasions have paradoxically made Iran into a civilisational unity. Not just its own internal cultural and civilisational thrusts, but also the historic nemeses that have periodically targeted it have paradoxically secured its consistency.
After each invasion and following each conquest, Iran and its Persian cosmopolis emerge stronger and more confident.
No state has ever held any meaningful rule over the sovereignty of the nation. They are all unwanted guests. They come and they go.
The real sovereignty, the unwavering ownership of the homeland, belongs to the Iranian people in all their multicultural diversity, and not to those who rule over it today and are gone tomorrow.
The genocidal enclave Europeans have planted in the heart of Palestine, like a poisoned dagger, and called "Israel", imprisoned as it is in the banality of its evil settler colony, will never understand that simple fact.
Having occupied Jewish history and Palestinian lands alike, they are too busy plotting against their neighbours, stealing their lands, murdering their leaders and citizens alike, burning their women and children alive, bombing their oil fields and robbing them of their underground resources, to understand anything else in this world.
An enduring civilisation
Iranians have always turned the lemon of their dreadful conquests into the lemonade of their enviable civilisation.
The Alexander invasion gave rise to a glorious tapestry of Alexander romances in the hands of their master poets, Ferdowsi, Nezami, and Jami. The Arab invasion resulted in the fusion of Islam with Iranian heritage to give the world one of the most glorious manifestations of Islamic civilisation.
After the Mongol invasion, the revolt of the Iranian soul soared to splendid heights in its arts and sciences, technologies and architecture, literature and poetry.
After Russian, British and French colonialism, Iranians turned to translating Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Montesquieu and Rousseau into Persian.
Today, Netanyahu and Donald Trump are flying their fighter jets to murder Iranian schoolgirls and destroy the foundations of their civic lives, straight out of the redacted pages of the Epstein files.
This is what Israel and Trump mean to Iranians, as they do to the rest of the world.
This particular invasion is marked by the plots of a morally depraved settler colony, with a mere history of some 70-plus years of mass murder and the suffering of Palestinians, daring to destroy a civilisation with 5,000 years of recorded history.
They will be defeated and destroyed - not by the whimsical means of the ruling Islamist regime, but by the iron will of the Iranian people.
Israelis do not know what they are dealing with. They have not pissed on a hard rock yet, as a splendid Persian proverb puts it.
With each cycle of invasion and conquest, Iranians have endured massive onslaughts of death and destruction and then turned around and given birth to a renewed flourishing of their culture and civilisation, to the point of civilising their conquerors.
In the case of this particular act of savagery by Israel and Trump, there is nothing to civilise. The world is reading Israeli asset Jeffrey Epstein's files. What is there to civilise?
A gang of European settler colonialists have congregated in historic Palestine, occupied Palestinian lands and laid a false claim on Judaism as a world religion, leaving nothing to their name except a history of perfidious monstrosity.
Israel is today a museum of the global disaster that European colonial savagery has left behind.
The key objectives
This particular invasion has a number of key features. It was instigated by Israel, not by the US.
It has been an Israeli desire to attack and destroy Iran for decades, probably as early as the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979, when they lost the late shah as a key ally.
This plot against Iran was mapped out in a way that would easily seduce and trap Trump.
Both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said so in unguarded moments, when their Zionist handlers were not watching. They subsequently walked back their open admissions. But it was too late.
What is the military mission of Israel in Iran?
Israel has only one mission in bombing Iran. It is to destroy its entire civic infrastructure, and then to destroy the landscape of its art and architecture, its archaeological sites, every single sign of its 5,000-year history.
It wants to wipe out its civilisational and cultural memory, to make it as rootless an enclave of savagery and barbarism as Israel itself.
Its animosity and hatred towards Iran are not limited to its ruling regime. It is directed against the entire Iranian civilisation and culture.
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian," Israelis say today, against a prolonged and documented history.
In the same way, they want to make sure there is no such thing as Iranian.
Iranians have a notoriously long memory and will hold every single monarchist thug cheering in European, American and Canadian streets, and every single comprador intellectual rooting for Reza Pahlavi accountable for the rest of their miserable lives.
Americans and Israelis
This is an Israeli war on Iran and not an American war.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose this war. The overwhelming majority of Israelis support this war on Iran.
The pro-Israel New York Times is now leading American yellow journalism in manufacturing consent for this war. It is failing.
The Israel-first cabal of vulgar Zionists like Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss are losing the grand historical battlefield of American public opinion - and The New York Times knows it only too well.
Michelle Goldberg, a columnist at The New York Times, wrote: "It's been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel. But a Gallup poll... marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll's 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathise with the Palestinians than with the Israelis."
Like millions of other Iranians, I hold Israel and its American agents responsible for seeking to destroy the civilisational foundation of a sovereign nation
Americans are human beings, too. They cannot watch the genocide of an entire people for more than two years and still remain committed to genocidal Zionism.
Vastly popular opinion makers like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are out and about exposing Israel.
The New York Times keeps calling them "right-wing" to discredit them. Even if they were to the right of Attila the Hun, they are still telling the truth on this particular issue.
Even a broken watch tells the absolute truth twice a day.
The second set of losers in this invasion is the Pahlavi neofascists and the comprador intellectuals who promote them.
The New York Times gives them endless columns to demonise Iran and shield genocidal Israel and its American benefactors.
One of them has just published a piece about her horror under the gaze of the assassinated Ali Khamenei.
She is an American, born and raised in California, and yet she has not a word to say about the gaze of a paedophiliac tyrant like Trump. She still finds time to write about the gaze of a dead Iranian tyrant.
The third aspect of this calamity is the exposure of the government in Iran itself, its structural corruption, and its incompetence in generating and sustaining political legitimacy. So much so that a lunatic gang like Reza Pahlavi, Trump and Netanyahu can take them to task.
I have not an iota of sympathy for the ruling system in Iran, but like millions of other Iranians, I join in taking possession of the history of my homeland and hold Israel and its American agents responsible for seeking to destroy the civilisational foundation of a sovereign nation.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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