Iranian students at UCSC said last week they felt a weary cynicism of being bystanders in a war an ocean away.
On March 10, the Iranian Student Union at UC Santa Cruz hosted a free banquet at the Merrill Cultural Center to celebrate Nowruz–the Persian New Year– to break flatbread together in the spirit of the season, in spite of the widening war in Iran. Some celebrations were canceled across the country because of the war.
The event was co-sponsored by the Asian American Pacific Islander Resource Center, so attending in solidarity were SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) students, which the official AA/PIRC website calls a “more accurate and inclusive” term than “Middle Eastern.”
“None of us has control over this situation,” said Nadia Danesh, who ran a slideshow before dinner on Nowruz’s history and traditions with senior ISU board member Ali, (most students didn’t want to share their full names). “All we can do is support each other through it.”
“It’s like trying to have a discussion about who should lead the DNC,” Ali said.
One faculty member, unable to comment because of UC policy, said it wasn’t her place to speak on the conflict anyhow.
“I prefer to let the students find their own path to outrage,” she said.
Further leading to feelings of estrangement: there are no Persian restaurants in Santa Cruz. Tonight’s catering, Isfahan Kabob Gourmet, had to be gathered in San Jose.
Students said they are wary of twin security apparatuses: ICE[1] [2] here, and more terrifying to them, the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) in Iran. Their technological formidability is able to parse locationless social media activity and digital news scraps here, and shut down the entire internet with a flick of a switch there, they said. While Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet is a lifeline that can become citizens’ only means of connectivity, rumors persist that using it paints a bullseye on your home for IRGC raids.
The day the Israeli and American bombardment began, a student named Walter’s mother called him over a messaging app saying she wanted to reach him before they were cut off, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office had been bombed. Walter predicted that when they spoke again, the Supreme Leader would be dead.
“I make really good guesses in terms of predicting this conflict,” he said. “This is one of the perks of growing up in the Middle East.”
He and his mother were both right. The IRGC pulled the plug not long after, knocking them out of contact for three days. When they could again reach each other, the Ayatollah’s death had been announced, along with others on the regime org chart, that is, according to Ali, convoluted for a reason: to be assassination-proof.
“Trump admitted their Plan B and C got killed, and not by U.S. munitions,” he said. “They are impatient, and unfortunately, they’re going against people known exclusively for their patience.”
That patience, paired with vigilance, is what makes Walter afraid to share his thoughts on the war in public, even on the campus bus.
An Iranian woman named Baran was afraid to high-five her first male friend on U.S. soil.
“‘We’re in public,’” she thought. “‘You can’t touch my hand.’”
Baran is a rarity, a child of divorce who illegally escaped with her mother before custody reverted to her father upon her first menstrual cycle. That high-five was her epiphany: every expatriate becomes secularized once they realize the IRGC corkscrews their particular radical Islamic doctrine with national law.
Generally, the further your life gets from the epicenter of IRGC dominion in Tehran, the less you feel its specter.
“I have friends from towns not even on the maps, financially more unstable than I ever was, but I also know [they] did not have to wear the hijab,” Baran said.
Contrast that with Tehran, where the surveillance feels supernatural. Many times she watched female family members, including her mother, jailed on serendipity.
“She’ll be carrying something and the wind will blow for just the perfect second for her hijab to fall down, and they’ll arrest her.”
The ISU is committed to being a safe space for discussion, making internal debates external. No one interviewed for this article regrets Khamenei’s elimination or can confirm there was public mourning on campus, and yet no one wanted it to happen this way, as part of a broader military campaign with so much collateral damage. Many say they feel queasy who the architects of his destruction were.
Baran has no patience for these reservations. For her, it’s a question of “gratitude versus admiration.”
“You don’t have to support the actions of someone to be thankful for them,” she said.
The wide-ranging fears students expressed were:
-A false flag mainland strike is engineered by the CIA to institute a full military draft. US-born Persians are sent to fight their close and distant relations.
-Homeland Security converts its numerous warehouse purchases into Iranian prison camps to rival Japanese internment during WWII.
-The regime falls, but Iran splinters. Gulf states, neighboring powers such as Turkey, or any regional country feeling bullied by the regime for too long, devour the Iranian territory through annexation.
-Israel and the US can’t dislodge the regime. Unable to accept defeat, they drop a nuclear bomb.
Afghani student Rodean Morshidi’s fears were based on memory and a concern for repetition. He was not alone in worrying Iran is a new U.S. military playground, “a larger geopolitical stage for them to win the resource war with China.”
“I saw what [the U.S.] did to my own people, my own family,” he said. “They decided to purposefully bargain with the most radical ethno-nationalistic groups. The Soviet invasion, my hot take? It would’ve been better for the country.”
His Indian girlfriend and others at the table drew henna on their hands with a blade-like applicator, using YouTube as a guide. Attendees queuing up for food snaked past an altar laid with a mirror, a book of ancient poetry, and the Haft Seen, or Seven S’s, each item representing a particular virtue to bring into the new year.
This included Senjed (a date-like olive) and Samanoo (wheat germ paste that looks like Nutella, tastes like vegan bouillon). Another table practiced a pacifist version of Tokhm-Jangi, a game where you paint hard-boiled eggs in bright colors and bump them together, competing to break your opponent’s egg while keeping yours intact.
Ali said the ISU is preparing a statement on the war to combat the University’s silence. He paraphrased a proverb to analogize an undesirable outcome: the regime topples without being accompanied by a people’s revolution.
“If an egg cracks from the inside, it turns into a new life. But if an egg is cracked from the outside, it becomes lunch.”
