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Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame
(JTA) — When a lawyer for Donald Trump asked E. Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream while allegedly being raped by Donald Trump, I thought of Letty Cottin Pogrebin. In her latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” she writes about being assaulted by a famous poet — and how the shadow of shame kept women like her silent about attacks on their own bodies.
That incident in 1962, she writes, was “fifty-eight years before the #MeToo movement provided the sisterhood and solidarity that made survivors of abuse and rape feel safe enough to tell their stories.”
Now 83, Pogrebin could have coasted with a memoir celebrating her six decades as a leading feminist: She co-founded Ms. magazine, its Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as president of Americans for Peace Now and in 1982 blew the whistle on antisemitism in the feminist movement.
Instead, “Shanda” is about her immigrant Jewish family and the secrets they carried through their lives. First marriages that were kept hidden. An unacknowledged half-sister. Money problems and domestic abuse. An uncle banished for sharing family dirt in public.
“My mania around secrecy and shame was sparked in 1951 by the discovery that my parents had concealed from me the truth about their personal histories, and every member of my large extended family, on both sides, was in on it,” writes Pogrebin, now 83. “Their need to avoid scandal was so compelling that, once identified, it provided the lens through which I could see my family with fresh eyes, spotlight their fears, and, in so doing, illuminate my own.”
“Shanda” (the Yiddish word describes the kind of behavior that brings shame on an entire family or even a people) is also a portrait of immigrant New York Jews in the 20th century. As her father and mother father move up in the world and leave their Yiddish-speaking, Old World families behind for new lives in the Bronx and Queens, they stand in for a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”
Pogrebin and I spoke last week ahead of the Eight Over Eighty Gala on May 31, where she will be honored with a group that includes another Jewish feminist icon, the writer Erica Jong, and musician Eve Queler, who founded her own ensemble, the Opera Orchestra of New York, when she wasn’t being given chances to conduct in the male-dominated world of classical music. The gala is a fundraiser for the New Jewish Home, a healthcare nonprofit serving older New Yorkers.
Pogrebin and I spoke about shame and how it plays out in public and private, from rape accusations against a former president to her regrets over how she wrote about her own abortions to how the Bible justifies family trickery.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I found your book very moving because my parents’ generation, who like your family were middle-class Jews who grew up or lived in the New York metropolitan area, are also all gone now. Your book brought back to me that world of aunts and uncles and cousins, and kids like us who couldn’t imagine what kinds of secrets and traumas our parents and relatives were hiding. But you went back and asked all the questions that many of us are afraid to ask.
I can’t tell you how good writing it has been. I feel as though I have no weight on my back. And people who have read it gained such comfort from the normalization that happens when you read that others have been through what you’ve been through. And my family secrets are so varied — just one right after the other. The chameleon-like behavior of that generation — they became who they wanted to be through pretense or actual accomplishment.
In my mother’s case, pretense led the way. She went and got a studio photo that made it look like she graduated from high school when she didn’t. In the eighth grade, she went up to her uncle’s house in the north Bronx and had her dates pick her up there because of the shanda of where she lived on the Lower East Side with nine people in three rooms. She had to imagine herself the child of her uncle, who didn’t have an accent or had an accent but at least spoke English.
You describe yours as “an immigrant family torn between loyalty to their own kind and longing for American acceptance.”
There was the feeling that, “If only we could measure up, we would be real Americans.” My mother was a sewing machine operator who became a designer and figured out what American women wore when she came from rags and cardboard shoes, in steerage. So I admire them. As much as I was discomforted by the lies, I ended up having compassion for them.
It’s also a story of thwarted women, and all that lost potential of a generation in which few could contemplate a college degree or a career outside the home. Your mother worked for a time as a junior designer for Hattie Carnegie, a sort of Donna Karan of her day, but abandoned that after she met your dad and became, as you write, “Mrs. Jack Cottin.”
The powerlessness of women was complicated in the 1950s by the demands of the masculine Jewish ideal. So having a wife who didn’t work was proof that you were a man who could provide. As a result women sacrificed their own aspirations and passions. She protected her husband’s image by not pursuing her life outside the home. In a way my feminism is a positive, like a photograph, to the negative of my mother’s 1950s womanhood.
“I’m not an optimist. I call myself a ‘cockeyed strategist,” said Pogrebin, who has a home on the Upper West Side. (Mike Lovett)
You write that you “think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” What were the Jewish pressures that inspired your parents to tell so many stories that weren’t true?
Think about what we did. We hid behind our names. We changed our names. We sloughed off our accents. My mother learned to make My*T*Fine pudding instead of gefilte fish. Shame and secrecy have always been intrinsically Jewish to me, because of the “sha!” factor: At every supper party, there would be the moment when somebody would say, “Sha! We don’t talk about that!” So even though we talked about what felt like everything, there were things that couldn’t be touched: illness, the C-word [cancer]. If you wanted to make a shidduch [wedding match] with another family in the insular communities in which Jews lived, you couldn’t let it be known that there was cancer in the family, or mental illness.
While I was writing this memoir, I realized that the [Torah portion] I’m listening to one Shabbat morning is all about hiding. It is Jacob finding out that he didn’t marry Rachel, after all, but married somebody he didn’t love. All of the hiding that I took for granted in the Bible stories and I was raised on like mother’s milk was formative. They justified pretense, and they justified trickery. Rebecca lied to her husband and presented her younger son Jacob for the blessing because God told her, because it was for the greater good of the future the Jewish people.
I think Jews felt that same sort of way when it came to surviving. So we can get rid of our names. We wouldn’t have survived, whether we were hiding in a forest or behind a cabinet, a name or a passport, or [pushed into hiding] with [forced] conversions. Hiding was survival.
I was reading your book just as the E. Jean Carroll verdict came down, holding Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting her during an encounter in the mid-’90s. You write how in 1962, when you were working as a book publicist, the hard-drinking Irish poet Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) tried to rape you in a hotel room and you didn’t report it. Like Carroll, you didn’t think that it was something that could be reported because the cost was too high.
Certainly in that era powerful men could get away with horrible behavior because of shanda reasons.
Carroll said in her court testimony, “It was shameful to go to the police.”
You know that it happened to so many others and nobody paid the price. The man’s reputation was intact and we kept our jobs because we sacrificed our dignity and our truth. I was in a career, and I really was supporting myself. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I would have been pilloried for having gone to his hotel room, and nobody was there when he picked up an ashtray and threatened to break the window of the Chelsea Hotel unless I went up there with him.The cards were stacked against me.
In “Shanda,” you write about another kind of shame: The shame you now feel decades later about how you described the incident in your first book. You regret “how blithely I transformed an aggravated assault by a powerful man into a ‘sticky sexual encounter.’”
I wrote about the incident in such offhand terms, and wonder why. I wrote, basically, “Okay, girls, you’re gonna have to put up with this, but you’re gonna have to find your own magical sentence like I had with Behan” to get him to stop.
You write that you said, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!” And that got him to back off.
Really painful.
I think that’s a powerful aspect of your book — how you look back at the ways you let down the movement or your family or friends and now regret. In 1991 you wrote a New York Times essay about an illegal abortion you had as a college senior in 1958, but not the second one you had only a few months later. While you were urging women to tell their stories of abortion, you note how a different shame kept you from telling the whole truth.
Jewish girls could be, you know, plain or ordinary, but they had to be smart, and I had been stupid. I could out myself as one of the many millions of women who had an abortion but not as a Jewish girl who made the same mistake [of getting pregnant] twice.
The book was written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the book you write powerfully about the shame, danger and loneliness among women when abortion was illegal, and now, after 50 years, it is happening again. Having been very much part of the generation of activists that saw Roe become the law of the land, how have you processed its demise?
Since the 1970s, we thought everything was happening in this proper linear way. We got legislation passed, we had litigation and we won, and we saw the percentage of women’s participation in the workplace all across professions and trades and everything else rise and rise. And then Ronald Reagan was elected and then there was the Moral Majority and then it was the Hyde Amendment [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion]. I was sideswiped because I think I was naive enough to imagine that once we articulated what feminism was driving at and why women’s rights were important, and how the economic reality of families and discrimination against women weren’t just women’s issues, people would internalize it and understand it and justice would be done.
In the case of Roe, we could not imagine that rights could ever be taken away. We didn’t do something that we should have done, which is to have outed ourselves in a big way. It’s not enough that abortion was legal. We allowed it to remain stigmatized. We allowed the right wing to create their own valence around it. That negated solidarity. If we had talked about abortion as healthcare, if we had had our stories published and created organizations around remembering what it was like and people telling their stories about when abortion was illegal and dangerous…. Instead we allowed the religious right to prioritize [fetal] cells over a woman’s life. We just were not truthful with each other, so we didn’t create solidarity.
Are you heartened by the backlash against restrictive new laws in red states or optimistic that the next wave of activism can reclaim the right to abortion?
I’m not an optimist. I call myself a “cockeyed strategist.” If you look at my long resume, it is all about organizing: Ms. magazine, feminist organizations, women’s foundations, Black-Jewish dialogues, Torah study groups and Palestinian-Jewish dialogues.
Number one, we have to own the data and reframe the narrative. We have to open channels for discussion for women who have either had one or know someone who has had one, even in religious Catholic families. The state-by-state strategy was really slow, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted that. She almost didn’t get on the court because she didn’t like the nationwide, right-to-privacy strategy of Roe but instead wanted it won state by state, which would have required campaigns of acceptance and consciousness-raising.
So, the irony is she hasn’t lived to see that we’re going to have to do it her way.
You share a lot of family secrets in this book. Is this a book that you waited to write until, I’ll try to put this gently, most of the people had died?
I started this book when I was 78 years old, and there’s always a connection to my major birthdays. And turning 80 – you experience that number and it is so weird. It doesn’t describe me and it probably won’t describe you. I thought, this could well be my last book, so I needed to be completely transparent, put it all out there.
My mother and father and aunts and uncles were gone, but I have 24 cousins altogether. I went to my cousins, and told them I am going to write about the secret of your parents: It’s my uncle, but it’s your father. It’s your family story even though it’s my family, but it’s yours first. And every cousin, uniformly, said, “Are you kidding? You don’t even know the half of it,” and they’d tell me the whole story. I guess people want the truth out in the end.
Is that an aspect of getting older?
I think it’s a promise of liberation, which is what I have found. It’s this experience of being free from anything that I’ve hid. I don’t have to hide. Years ago, on our 35th wedding anniversary, we took our whole family to the Tenement Museum because we wanted them to see how far we’ve come in two generations.
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An Inspiring Call for Unity Among All Jews
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, addressed congregants Friday night at Westchester Reform Temple, focusing on unity within the Jewish community and was introduced by the temple’s senior rabbi, Jonathan Blake. The tone they both struck was remarkably encouraging.
They both stressed the need for internal unity regardless of personal political beliefs and differences. This message was refreshing and paved a path towards unity among Jewish people by addressing the challenge of confronting antisemitism across the political spectrum, and not getting stuck on left-right divides.
The ADL leader said that antisemitism today appears across multiple parts of the political spectrum, and that confronting it requires responsibility from both sides of the ideological divide.
Rabbi Blake’s introduction addressed developments related to Iran and Israel, and urged congregants not to allow their personal political views about current administrations in either Israel or the United States to influence their assessment of the broader geopolitical challenges.
“The stakes are larger than partisan politics,” he said, emphasizing that moral clarity is necessary when confronting a regime that has supported terrorism, threatened nuclear breakout, and vowed the destruction of America, Israel, and supportive Gulf states.
During Greenblatt’s address, he compared the recent holiday of Purim to today’s events, and drew a contrast between the past and the present by pointing out the Jewish people’s ability to defend themselves today. He asked the audience to recognize the miracle of Israel’s existence and to not take it for granted. And it was really encouraging to hear the leader of the country’s largest antisemitism advocacy organization speak with moral clarity.
Greenblatt also spoke about Jewish identity and resilience, encouraging community members to remain engaged in Jewish life and communal institutions. He reminded the congregants that the ADL is still concerned about marginalized peoples, but must now focus on its own people, since Jewish people are being targeted.
His hopeful and positive tone is exactly what we need right now, as he urged attendees to “show up” for one another and for Jewish organizations as part of the broader effort to respond to rising antisemitism.
The event took place amid heightened concerns about antisemitic incidents globally, and ongoing conspiracy theories around Israel forcing the hand of the United States into this war. Rabbi Blake and Greenblatt delivered a warning — and also encouragement — exactly when it was needed. We must starkly confront the challenges we are facing — but also stay optimistic about the future — and both men did exactly that.
Daniel Rosen is a cofounder of Emissary4all. Emissary is a movement which seeks to utilize technology to organize individual individuals and communities to combat antisemitism online and off-line. You can follow him on Instagram at mindsandheartsunite
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How Colleges and K-12 Schools Are Marching Forward with an Anti-Israel Agenda
A pro-Hamas activist wears a keffiyeh while marching from the City University of New York to Columbia University. Photo: Eduardo Munoz via Reuters Connect
Universities continue to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to expunge DEI and rein in costs, while receiving help from Congress, which has restored funding to schools. Scientists in particular have resumed their complaints regarding Federal budget cuts and increased oversight, while the media have resumed stories about the economic and social impacts of cuts on sciences, states, and individuals.
The place of antisemitism in the priorities of the higher education industrial complex were reflected at the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting. In contrast to the many sessions on DEI and artificial intelligence, only one was devoted to antisemitism, which was paired with the topic of “Islamophobia.”
In a sign that senior university leaders have simply decided to wait out the administration regardless of appearances, Georgetown Law School appointed Elizabeth Magill, former University of Pennsylvania president, as dean. Magill resigned her position after a disastrous appearance before Congress, where she failed to stand up to hate against Jewish students. The committee that appointed her at Georgetown was comprised largely of leading Democratic donors.
University pushback against pro-Hamas students continued at a lower rate in February. American University suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which promised “resistance.” Students at Northwestern University who had rejected antisemitism training on the basis that it discriminated against them as Palestinians and Arabs — and who were subsequently suspended by the university — dropped their lawsuit.
Several court cases have challenged university efforts to discipline pro-Hamas protestors. In one, a district judge ordered the University of Massachusetts to lift the suspension of a student who organized a campus protest, arguing that his First Amendment rights had been breached. A judge also blocked the deportation of pro-Hamas activist and professional student Mohsen Madawi on procedural grounds. A Federal court also ordered the release of Tufts University graduate student and Hamas supporter Rümeysa Öztürk.
More positively, the New Jersey Superior Court has rejected Fairleigh Dickinson University’s effort to quash a lawsuit by a Jewish chaplain who had been disciplined for opposing an anti-Israel event on campus. Notably, the court rejected the university’s claim regarding precedent in a recent case involving MIT, in which a court held that antisemitic conduct motivated by “anti-Zionism” was protected as academic freedom.
Finally, a report from the Department of Education noted that Qatar had tripled its contributions to American universities in 2025. Some $1.2 billion was given to American universities, with Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Northwestern, being the largest recipients.
Faculty Support for Hamas Remains High
Faculty support for Hamas remains high despite administration efforts to persuade or force fewer expressions of enthusiasm.
There was a presentation at the CUNY Law School entitled “The Underground in Gaza,” which claimed that Hamas tunnels used for terrorism are part of “resistance to colonization” and “decolonial land use.” This will be followed by a conference at CUNY Graduate Center on “Palestinian History Between Past and Present” featuring a number of prominent anti-Israel scholar-activists.
One notable development in February was a report detailing how the Mellon Foundation has reshaped humanities and social sciences faculties towards social justice and “scholar-activism.” The report noted that as Federal funding for the humanities was reduced over the past two decades, the Mellon Foundation, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, had offered institutions funding to adapt research, courses, curriculums, and entire mission statements to comport with the foundation’s social justice emphasis. In doing so the foundation pushed scholarship which emphasized race, class, gender, and inequality, with an anti-Western bias.
The report, and another on humanities funding from the American Enterprise Institute, complements those showing how the Qatar Foundation has inserted itself into university operations including personnel decisions, particularly with respect to DEI, as a condition for grants.
Unsurprisingly, another report on the University of California found that while students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment. At UCLA alone, some 155 faculty members have publicly endorsed BDS and dozens of departments issued statements in support of pro-Hamas encampments.
Seemingly cognizant of the perception of Middle East studies as the focal point for campus anti-Israel agitation, a Columbia University provost released a report recommending adding additional faculty and courses in Israel studies. At the same time, reports indicated that the leading candidates for the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies were all scholar-activists with minimal publication records who had expressed support for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
One result of relentless antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus is a widening crisis for Jewish faculty. A new poll indicates that 40% of faculty felt compelled to hide their identities, while a similar figure were considering leaving academia.
Student Attacks Against Jews Continue, If Down Slightly
On campus, harassment of Jewish and Israeli students appears to have declined somewhat as a result of restrictions on pro-Hamas protests. Off campus protests continue, as in the case of an anti-ICE event outside of Columbia University which featured the same students and faculty who had supported Hamas in 2025 and 2024. Anti-ICE protests organized by groups such as Students for a Democratic Society and others such as SJP chapters which had been at the center of pro-Hamas protests, have been noted at many campuses including the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and Columbia.
A serious incident took place at a cafe near DePaul University where Jewish students attending a Hillel event were harassed and eventually driven out by pro-Hamas students and staff. The university president later expressed outrage at the incident, which was another in a series which have taken place at the institution.
The Princeton SJP chapter canceled the appearance of anti-Israel speaker Norman Finkelstein and stated he might appear at another time. The university noted it had not barred Finkelstein.
BDS resolutions continue to be proposed in student governments despite the fact that they are opposed almost uniformly by administrations and trustees. Examples in February include:
- The University of Maryland student government passed its fourth anti-Israel resolution of the year. Student government at Maryland has been dominated by pro-Hamas activists for several years despite the school’s large Jewish population;
- A resolution in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln student government calling for divestment from weapons manufacturers passed after language specifically naming Israel was removed.
Campus disruptions of speakers deemed insufficiently hostile to Israel continued in February. One example was the disruption of a talk by left-wing journalist Ezra Klein at Sarah Lawrence College. Klein was called a “Zionist pig” and signs held by protestors included “Nazi” and “Sarah Lawrence, we know you; you protect Zionist Jews.” Sarah Lawrence president Cristle Collins Judd sat next to Klein on stage and did not intervene, but reportedly commented to him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
Judd’s emailed condemnation of the incident elicited protests for the SJP chapter who accused her of “blatant lies wielded to vilify students and manufacture consent for disciplinary charges” and claimed Sarah Lawrence was attempting to “suppress dissent against Zionism and imperialism at any cost.” The group threatened retaliation if disciplinary procedures were taken.
A talk entitled “Being Jewish in America Today” at the University of Virginia Jewish studies program by writer Adam Kirsch was similarly disrupted by student protestors “resisting the Zionist speaker.” Neither Sarah Lawrence nor Virginia have taken disciplinary measures against students.
A new AJC/Hillel survey indicated that 42% of American Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on campus. Half reported feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, while 34% indicated they had refrained from displaying their Jewish identity. Some 69% stated that Israel was an important part of their identities and 80% of parents indicated that antisemitism was part of their decision where to send children to college.
What’s Happening in K-12 Schools
One notable development in February was the involvement of outside groups such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation in training and organizing student walkouts and anti-ICE protests. These groups have shifted from pro-Hamas to anti-ICE protests and make the explicit equation of “Gaza” with “Minneapolis.”
The same groups, along with the Sunrise Movement, Code Pink, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and others, are working with the DSA and teachers unions in cities like Dallas to celebrate Palestinian “resistance” and oppose the US government.
Teacher training remains a focal point for radicalization, particularly in connection with mandated ethnic studies curriculums. The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium was awarded a contract by San Jose (CA) schools to train teachers. Lesson materials include materials on “Stolen Land” and “Youth Incarceration and Resistance in Palestine.” The leadership of the consortium include University of California ethnic studies faculty connected with the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
The school system also paid teachers to attend the Xicanx Institute For Teaching and Organizing (XITO) Summer Institute which presented materials on “Teaching Border Imperialism From Turtle Island to Palestine: Ethnic Studies as a Tool For Liberation” and “Transformative Teaching: Interactive Read-Alouds and Art as an Entry Point For Teaching Palestine in K-5.”
The addition of Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) as a pedagogical foundation and legal enforcement mechanism in Canadian schools, effectively enshrining the Palestinian narrative as unquestionable truth and criminalizing expressions of support for Israel and even visible expressions of Jewish identity, has cemented radicalism. Canadian journalists investigating APR trainings for teachers in Hamilton (ON) have been denied access to materials on the grounds that sharing it publicly would be a “Danger to Safety or Health.”
To complete the equation, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has hired the anti-Zionist group Independent Jewish Voices to provide antisemitism training for teachers. The group “firmly rejects the use of IHRA, which distorts the definition of antisemitism to conflate political criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism” and will be “including anti-Palestinian racism tools into the training.” Unsurprisingly, antisemitic acts in Ontario schools increased dramatically after October 7th.
Individual teachers also continue to instigate dramatically antisemitic incidents. In one case a Muslim San Diego teacher was fired after posting a video in which she accused Israel of “hijacking protests in order to do the same BS that they’re always doing — which is just stealing from people. And that includes everything from goods and services all the way down to the livers and kidneys and eyeballs.”
Conversely a teacher at the elite UN International School in New York was fired after complaining about harassment from Muslim teachers who made statements regarding how “Jews are driven by money.” The school, which educates children of UN officials, received a Qatari pledge of $60 million in 2023.
A newly filed lawsuit against the State of California on behalf of Jewish parents and children accuses the state of failing to address systemic antisemitism in local school districts including Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Campbell Union, Fremont, and Oakland. The suit alleges that Jewish students were subjected to antisemitic harassment from teachers and peers with administrators taking no action or supporting their attackers. The trajectory of California schools reflected in the lawsuit appears to match that of British schools, which have been overwhelmed by horrific antisemitism towards the relatively small number of Jewish students.
Finally, a new campaign by left-wing and pro-Hamas groups in Canada has targeted Jewish summer camps for their support of “genocide.” The effort seeks to strip accreditation from at least 17 camps across Canada “because they encourage support for a genocidal, settler-colonial state.” The groups include the Palestinian Canadian Congress, Just Peace Advocates, the Ontario Palestinian Rights Association, and PAJU Montreal. Jewish groups condemned the campaign, which the Ontario Camps Association called “discriminatory and antisemitic in nature.”
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
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Iran’s ‘Missile City’: Underground Arsenal Exposes the Strategic Failure of Containment
Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, as seen from Doha, Qatar, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has released propaganda footage of an underground complex it calls “Missile City,” a vast network of tunnels packed with suicide drones and ballistic missiles.
The video, complete with a ticking clock and endless rows of Shahed drones and rockets, was released days after the US-Israeli strike that eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Far from idle boasting, this imagery constitutes hard evidence of Tehran’s long-term strategic calculus: to build an asymmetric arsenal capable of exhausting Western and Gulf defenses, while advancing toward nuclear breakout.
The footage proves, once and for all, that Iran cannot be left alone to develop its weapons programs.
The operational logic on display in the video is ruthlessly efficient. Shahed drones cost roughly $16,000–$20,000 apiece, and require minimal production time. Western interceptors, by contrast, are prohibitively expensive: a single Patriot missile reaches $3.75 million, while THAAD systems can exceed $10 million per battery.
The United Arab Emirates has already spent up to $567 million to achieve a 92 percent interception rate against 541 Iranian projectiles. Analysts warn that at current expenditure rates, Gulf stockpiles could be depleted within mere days. Tehran, meanwhile, launches more than 2,500 drones daily, deliberately flooding air-defense systems in a classic “use it or lose it” attrition strategy. A handful of these low-cost weapons have already penetrated, striking the US Consulate in Dubai and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. Israel has publicly conceded that Iran retains “significant capacity” to strike its territory.
This asymmetry is not accidental. Instead, it is the direct legacy of years of flawed Western policy.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — known as the “Iran nuclear deal” — and subsequent sanctions relief funneled billions into the IRGC’s coffers. Those funds built the very tunnels now on display — facilities that complement, rather than compete with, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
While diplomats in Washington and Europe spoke of “containment” and “diplomatic engagement,” the regime invested in cheap, mass-produced delivery systems that serve as both conventional terror weapons and potential nuclear platforms. The giant portrait of Khamenei overlooking the arsenal in the video underscores continuity: regime succession has not altered strategic intent. The new leadership is already signaling that the death of one man changes nothing.
The broader regional implications are dire. Iran’s proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — operate as forward-deployed extensions of this same doctrine. The underground city provides the logistical backbone for sustained campaigns that have already forced British nationals into desperate evacuations from Oman, and paralyzed commercial aviation across the Gulf. More than 11,000 flights canceled, 130,000 British citizens registered as stranded, and millions of dollars burned daily in defensive munitions illustrate the unsustainable cost of passive defense.
Each intercepted drone represents a strategic victory for Tehran: it drains the defender’s treasury while Iran’s own production lines continue unimpeded.
The video also demolishes the remaining arguments for strategic patience. The containment theory, advanced by the Obama administration and others, assumed that economic pressure and diplomacy could restrain Iranian adventurism. Instead, sanctions relief and nuclear negotiations bought Tehran the time and money to construct precisely the infrastructure now threatening the region.
Every drone swarm launched at US bases or Gulf ports is financed by the very restraint the West once praised as “prudent.” The Iranian regime has demonstrated that it will not negotiate away its core capabilities; it will merely hide them deeper underground.
The only viable policy response is offensive degradation of Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure. Limited strikes against missile-production facilities and underground command nodes are no longer optional; they are prerequisites for restoring deterrence. Washington and Jerusalem must reject any return to the JCPOA framework or similar half-measures. Instead, sustained pressure — targeted sanctions on IRGC-linked entities, accelerated support for Gulf air-defense replenishment, and, where necessary, direct kinetic action against “Missile City” facilities — must be paired with a clear message: the era of allowing the regime to arm itself in the shadows is over.
Iran’s underground arsenal is not a sign of strength but of strategic exposure. It reveals a regime that has gambled everything on the West’s reluctance to act decisively. The footage from “Missile City” is therefore not merely propaganda; it is a policy indictment. It proves that containment has failed, that diplomacy without enforcement is suicidal, and that the US, Israel, and their allies have no choice but to dismantle Tehran’s weapons empire before it achieves its ultimate objective. The survival of regional stability and the credibility of American power now depend on recognizing this reality and acting upon it — swiftly and without apology.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx