Of all the cataclysmic events I have ever experienced, October 7 affected me like no other. The videos of hateful protests and bloody or charred bodies unearthed memories I’d long kept buried. In one, I am a girl standing in the doorway of our home in Tehran, staring at graffiti that appeared overnight on a neighbor’s wall. Punctuated by a Swastika—something I had never seen before—were three words, scrawled in black paint on red brick: Kikes get lost.

This was in January 1979, just a few weeks before Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and nothing was as it had been. The rest of the world saw the revolution embodied in the figure of the ascetic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seated cross-legged on a cot in a spartan room in the suburbs of Paris. But for those of us in Iran, its signs were uncomfortably close, ubiquitous, and inescapable. “Allahu akbar!” was its soundtrack—an all-purpose call that was at times a plea, at other times a call to arms. The streets were ablaze with bonfires that winter, tires and much else set aflame. Whatever harm the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, had allegedly inflicted on the nation before, at least in those few weeks of a nationwide oil shortage, those countries’ burning flags kept the protesters warm.

Finally came the revolution’s most indelible sign of all: the Islamic dress code forced on women, who could wear only black, gray, brown, or navy blue. The mandatory hijab drained a once-colorful capital of its vibrant hues, casting half of the population into shadow. Women demonstrated in opposition to the order, but they had few allies. Even the secular intelligentsia banded with the ayatollah, dismissing the protests and the blatant anti-Semitic and anti-feminist character of the new leadership as a few minor quirks upon which the great revolution could not afford to dwell.

What brought these memories back on October 7 was a single video on social media. In it, a Hamas terrorist dragged a battered Israeli woman, the 19-year-old peace activist Naama Levi, by the hair out of a pickup truck, chanting “Allahu akbar!”—that ominous, familiar call, as yet another woman suffered at the hands of men who bore an uncanny resemblance to their Iranian precursors. Levi’s blood-soaked pants suggested that she had been assaulted—a tragedy that would bond her to women prisoners in Iran, where, in the aftermath of the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, many women who had been arrested for violating the Islamic morality code were raped by their captors.

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Experts have pontificated over whether Iran had a hand in planning the October 7 attack. But perhaps more significant is the common ideology that Tehran’s rulers and Hamas share, composed of equal parts misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamism. Death, to them, is an aspiration rather than a destiny to forestall. And so their subjects become expendable pawns whose demise is never a loss. Sadegh Khalkhali, the Islamic Republic’s Sharia judge from the early revolutionary era, was once asked how he had so swiftly issued orders to execute so many political prisoners. He breezily replied that either the prisoners were guilty, in which case they’d received their due punishment, or they were innocent, in which case he had simply hastened their ascent to paradise.

Both Hamas and the Iranian regime are at war with the West and, as such, with all the laws devised in the West, including the laws of war. The most brutal of the Islamic Republic’s anti-riot thugs do not come to the scene of demonstrations dressed in the uniforms of the police or the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They come as what the protesters call “civilian dressers,” just as Hamas terrorists have done throughout this war to blend in with the public. Both use ambulances to penetrate the ranks of their opponents, to snatch prisoners, or to get away from hostile crowds. They share not a secret manual but a playbook of the lawless, in which nothing is forbidden if it advances the cause of the “righteous,” among whom Tehran and Hamas count themselves.

And yet, what Iran’s regime has done for more than four decades to create a new crop of zealots in its own image has backfired. Iran’s younger generations show a moral clarity that other nations in the region, and even the throngs on the streets of London and New York, do not demonstrate with regard to Hamas’s malevolent program. If Iranians have always been distinct from their predominantly Arab neighbors by virtue of race, religion, and language, now they are distinct in a new way: They are the only people in the region among whom such a large number reject the call for Israel’s destruction. Even a host on one of Iran’s official television broadcasts had to make this admission last week: “The people of Iran have been the greatest supporters of the Zionist regime in the world and by a large margin.”

Diasporic Iranians have been marching alongside supporters of Israel throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada, and a few have been physically attacked while doing so. In Iran, students refuse to stomp on the flags of the United States and Israel that have been painted on the ground at the entrances of their schools. When a Palestinian flag was raised at a soccer stadium in Tehran last month, the spectators began chanting profanities to express their indignation.

Iranians began distancing themselves from the regime’s propaganda nearly two decades ago, when the revolution’s fever had cooled and its promises remained undelivered. The distance only grew as the regime invested more and more in proxy groups throughout the region. The crowds at the annual Qods Day rallies began to thin, and protesters at various demonstrations chanted: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon. I sacrifice my life for Iran.”

The significance of this shift in attitude among Iranians transcends Iran. If Ukrainians’ fight against Russia is about the future of democracy in Europe, then the struggle of Iranians against their regime is about the future of the Middle East without radicalism. For 44 years, Iran has been the region’s political laboratory for Islamist governance. The country gave theocracy a try, and it failed: A country with immense promise only 50 years ago is now a menace to people within its borders and beyond them. The narrative that the regime has peddled about itself—a religious utopia fighting for the well-being of downtrodden Muslims—has no currency among its own subjects. What Iranians have learned the hard way is what others around the world who dream of living under an Islamic state have yet to discover.

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One of the most poignant moments of Iran’s 2022 protests came when a Palestinian woman named Rasha, moved by the uprising, recorded a statement saying that the demonstrations had made her see through the lies she had been told since childhood about Iran’s regime: “I now see that a government that kills its own people, oppresses its own people, cannot help liberate my people, cannot help liberate me.”

In 1978, Iranians euphorically followed a Shiite cleric in pursuit of what they thought was a noble cause and staged a popular resistance that was to deliver greater freedom and democracy to them. But he quickly led them into war, chaos, global isolation, and economic ruin. This is the dark legacy of Hamas’s chief patron. Those who have embraced Hamas have yet to know this truth—that their heroes are not liberators but brutal tyrants detested by their people.

Three people arrested as Iranian involvement is eyed in the attack on far-right politician Alejandro Vidal-Quadras.