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Navigating Israel’s Nuclear ‘Samson Option’
In any rationality-based strategic calculus, the “Samson Option” — which refers to an Israeli nuclear strike — would refer not to a last-resort act of national vengeance, but to a persuasive limit on existential threats.
When taken together with Israel’s intentionally ambiguous nuclear strategy, an outdated doctrine commonly referred to as “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” or “Israel’s bomb in the basement” (amimut in Hebrew), more compelling threat postures could prove effective. To be truly promising, however, an Israeli Samson Option would need to 1) coincide with an incremental and selective end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” and 2) pertain to Iran directly, not just to terrorist proxies.
There are no conceivable circumstances in which Samson could offer Israel useful applications regarding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or any other jihadist foes.
Israeli strategists will need to consider factors beyond what is taking place right now between Israel and its jihadist adversaries. Since military crises in other parts of the world could spill over into the Middle East, strategic planners should begin to clarify Israel’s operational preparations regarding Samson. This is especially the case where a spill-over could involve the threat or actual use of nuclear weapons.
Though Iran is still “only” pre-nuclear, it already has the capacity to use radiation dispersal weapons and/or launch conventional rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Moreover, Tehran has close ties to Pyongyang, and it is not inconceivable that a nuclear North Korea might operate as a strategic stand-in for a not-yet-nuclear Iran.
For disciplined Israeli strategists, geopolitical context matters. There can be no logic-based assessment of probabilities because the events under consideration would be unprecedented. In logic and mathematics, true probabilities can never be ascertained out of nothing. They can be drawn only from the determinable frequency of pertinent past events.
These are not narrowly political or intuitive calculations. As an operationally meaningful concept, the Samson Option references a residual deterrence doctrine founded upon credible threats (whether implicit or explicit) of overwhelming nuclear retaliation or counter-retaliation. These are unconventional threats to thwart more-or-less expected enemy state aggressions. Reasonably, any such massive last-resort doctrine could enter into force only where enemy aggressions would imperil Israel’s continued existence as a viable nation-state. In the absence of expected aggressions from Iran, Israel would more prudently rely upon an “escalation ladder.”
For doctrinal clarity, Israel’s nuclear forces should always remain oriented to deterrence ex ante, never to revenge ex post. It would do Israel little good to proffer Samson-level threats in response to “ordinary” or less than massive forms of enemy attack. Even where the principal operational object for Israel would be counter-terrorist success against Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., invoking Samson could make sense only vis-à-vis Hamas state patron Iran or Iran’s nuclear patron North Korea. In such nuanced calculations, assumptions of rationality could prove problematic.
For Israel’s nuclear deterrent to work against a still non-nuclear Iran, it is virtually inconceivable that it would need to include a Samson Option. In any crisis between Israel and Iran involving jihadist terror, Israel could almost certainly achieve “escalation dominance” without employing Samson. But if Iran were already an authentic nuclear adversary, its capacity to enhance surrogate terror capabilities would exceed any pre-nuclear constraints of competitive risk-taking. In these circumstances, Samson could prove necessary.
Israel’s basis for launching a preemptive strike against Iran without Samson could be rational only before that state turned verifiably nuclear. A foreseeable non-Samson plan for preemption would involve more direct Iranian involvement in the continuing terror war against Israel on behalf of Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. By setting back Iranian nuclear efforts and infrastructures, such pre-Samson involvement could offer Israel an asymmetrical power advantage in the region. This larger opportunity would be the result of Israel’s not yet having to fear a nuclear war against Iran.
There would be related matters of intra-crisis communications. As an element of any ongoing strategic dialogue, the basic message of an Israeli Samson Option would need to remain uniform and consistent. It should signal to an adversary state the unstated promise of a counter-city (“counter value”) nuclear reprisal. Israel would also need to avoid signaling to its Iranian adversary any sequential gradations of nuclear warfighting.
Israel’s “bottom line” reasoning would likely be as follows: For Israel, exercising a Samson Option threat is not apt to deter any Iranian aggressions short of nuclear and/or massively large-scale conventional (including biological) first strikes. Therefore, Samson can do little to prevent Iran from its enthusiastic support of anti-Israel jihadists.
Whatever the Samson Option’s precise goals, its key objective should remain constant and conspicuous. This objective is to keep Israel “alive,” not (as presented in Biblical imagery) to stop the Jewish State from “dying alone.” In this peremptory objective, Israeli policy should deviate from the Biblical Samson narrative.
Ultimately, Samson, in all relevant military nuclear matters, should be about how best to manage urgent processes of strategic dissuasion. At least for now, Israel’s presumed nuclear strategy, though not yet clearly articulated, is oriented toward nuclear war avoidance and not to nuclear war fighting. From all standpoints, this represents Israel’s only correct orientation.
The Samson Option could never protect Israel as a comprehensive nuclear strategy by itself. This option should never be confused with Israel’s more generalized or “broad spectrum” nuclear strategy, one that would seek to maximize deterrence at incrementally less apocalyptic levels of military engagement.
At this point, various questions will need to be raised. Above all: How can the Samson Option best serve Israel’s general strategic requirements? Though the primary mission of Israel’s nuclear weapons should be to preserve the Jewish State — not to wreak havoc upon foes when all else has seemingly been lost — obvious preparations for a Samson Option could still improve Israel’s nuclear deterrence and preemption capabilities.
As soon as possible, even during the current Gaza war with Hamas, Jerusalem will need to shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” Among other things, this explicit shift would allow Israel to clarify that its nuclear weapons are not too large for actual operational use against Iran. In essence, this complex clarification would be the reciprocal of Israel’s Samson Option and would cover the complete spectrum of Israel’s nuclear deterrence options.
There will be corresponding legal issues. Israeli resorts to conventional and defensive first strikes could prove permissible or law-enforcing under authoritative international law. In such cases, Israeli preemptions would contain a jurisprudential counterpart to nuclear weapons use. This counterpart should be referenced formally as “anticipatory self-defense.”
Concerning long-term Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable preparations for a Samson Option could help convince Iran or other designated enemy states that massive aggressions against Israel would never be gainful. This could prove most compelling if Israel’s “Samson weapons” were 1) coupled with some explicit level of nuclear disclosure (thereby effectively ending Israel’s longstanding posture of nuclear ambiguity); 2) recognizably invulnerable to enemy first strikes; and 3) “counter-city”/”counter-value” in declared mission function. Additionally, in view of what nuclear strategists sometimes refer to as the “rationality of pretended irrationality,” Samson could enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a more evident Israeli willingness to take existential risks.
On occasion, the nuclear deterrence benefits of “pretended irrationality” could depend on prior Iranian awareness of Israel’s counter-city or counter-value targeting posture. Such a posture was recommended some 20 years ago by the Project Daniel Group in its confidential report to then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Residually, however, to best ensure that Israel could still engage in nuclear warfighting if its counter-value nuclear deterrence were to fail, Israel would more openly adopt a “mixed” counter-value/counter-force nuclear targeting doctrine.
In reference to strategies of preemption, Israeli preparations for a Samson Option — explicit, recognizable and not just sotto voce — could help convince Israel’s leadership that defensive first strikes could sometimes be gainful.
In all cases involving Samson and Israeli nuclear deterrence, visible last-resort nuclear preparations could enhance Israel’s preemption options by underscoring a bold national willingness to take existential risks. However, displaying such risks could become a double-edged sword. The fact that these are uncharted waters and there exist no precedents from which to extrapolate science-based probabilities means Israel would need to move with determination and caution.
What about “pretended irrationality?” That complex calculus could become a related part of Samson. Israel’s leaders will need to remain mindful of this integration. Brandished too “irrationally,” Israeli preparations for a Samson Option, though unwitting, could encourage Iranian preemptions. This peril would be underscored by pressures on both Israel and Iran to achieve intra-crisis “escalation dominance.” Also significant in this unpredictable environment of competitive risk-taking would be either or both sides’ deployment of expanding missile defenses.
This hearkens back to the early days of Cold War nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union, days of “mutually assured destruction” or MAD. Either Israeli or Iranian efforts to reduce nuclear retaliatory force vulnerabilities could incentivize the other to more hurriedly strike first; that is, to “preempt the preemption.” In reference to international law, close attention would then need to be directed toward the peremptory rules of “military necessity.”
If left to itself, neither deterred nor preempted, Iran could threaten to bring the Jewish State face-to-face with Dante’s Inferno. Such a portentous scenario has been made more credible by the recent strategic strengthening of Iran by its tighter alignment with North Korea and its surrogate fighters in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. At some not-too-distant point, a coordinated Iran-Hezbollah offensive (complementing the Iran-Hamas offensive in Gaza) could signal more imminent existential perils for Israel. By definition, all such synergistic intersections would be taking place within the broadly uncertain context of “Cold War II.”
In extremis atomicum, these hazards could become so unique and formidable that employing a Samson Option would represent the only available strategic option for Israel. In the best of all possible worlds, Israel would have no need to augment or even maintain its arsenal of deterrent threat options – especially untested nuclear components – but this ideal reconfiguration of world politics remains a long way off. In that ideal world, Israel could anticipate the replacement of realpolitik (power politics) with Westphalian international politics. Such a replacement would be based on the awareness that planet Earth is an inter-dependent and organic whole.
Plainly, the time for such replacement has not yet arrived. It follows that Jerusalem will need to prepare visibly for a possible Samson Option. The point of this doctrinal imperative would not be to give preference to any actual applications of Samson, but to best ensure that Israel could deter all survival-threatening enemy aggressions.
For the moment, Israel remains in protracted war with Hamas. It can succeed in this conflict only by weakening jihadist state-sponsor Iran. In the best-case scenario, Iran would remain non-nuclear and Israeli management of Iranian terror support would remain within the bounds of conventional deterrence. If, however, Iran were permitted to cross the nuclear weapons threshold by acquiring chain-reaction nuclear weapons (not just radiation dispersal weapons), Israel’s subsequent efforts at deterrence of Iran would become vastly more problematic. At that point, ipso facto, Israel could require a Samson Option to maintain its “escalation dominance.”
There does exist an intermediate, if paradoxical, scenario for Israel. If Iran should become involved in any direct military action against Israel before becoming a fully nuclear adversary, the Jewish State could find itself with a strategic and law-enforcing opportunity to preemptively destroy Iranian nuclear infrastructures before they become operational. Though advancing such a scenario could also create the false impression of planned Israeli aggression, it would more correctly represent permissible self-defense. Most importantly, of course, such an Israeli preemption could prevent a full-scale nuclear war with Iran.
How should Israel navigate chaos? Whether in the Old Testament or in more-or-less synchronous Greek and Roman thought, chaos can be understood as something potentially positive: an intellectual tabula rasa which, if thoughtfully “filled in,” can prepare the world for all possibilities, both sacred and profane. In essence, chaos can represent an inchoate place from which an expanding civilizational opportunity can still originate.
Such thinking is unorthodox, to be sure, but for Israel it could prove manifestly useful. With such thinking, chaos is never just a “predator” that swallows everything whole: omnivorous, callous, indiscriminate, and without higher purpose. Here, chaos is considered instead as an auspicious “openness,” a protean realm from within which new kinds of opportunity can be revealed.
This means the chaos in the Middle East need not necessarily be interpreted by Israel’s senior military planners as a harbinger of further regional violence and instability. In some hard-to-conceptualize respects, at least, such chaos could represent a condition for national security and survival. Though there are still rough seas ahead, their waves could be harnessed for a purposeful strategic direction.
Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1986). His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Mother of Rescued Israeli Hostage Noa Argamani Passes Away After Battling Brain Cancer
Noa and Liora Argamani before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Liora Argamani, 61, mother of rescued Israeli hostage Noa Argamani, passed away on Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital after fighting stage 4 brain cancer.
Noa, an only child, was rescued from Hamas captivity in Gaza in a daring operation from Hamas captivity on June 8. Her mother passed away less than a month later.
The kidnapping of Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or — who still remains in Hamas captivity — at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 was captured in a heartbreaking video, sparking international outcry. Argamani was held hostage by Hamas for eight months before Israeli forces rescued her along with three other hostages: Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. The commander of Israel’s elite Yamam division who led the mission, Arnon Zamora, was mortally wounded in the operation.
In a video released on Saturday night, before her mother passed away, Argamani recounted how she longed to see her parents while she was kidnapped. “My biggest worry in captivity was for my parents,” she said.
Argamani eulogized her mother at her funeral held on Tuesday. “My mother, the best friend I ever had, the strongest person I have known in my life,” she said. “Thank you for the 26 years I had the privilege of being by your side.”
The official X/Twitter account for the State of Israel also mourned the elder Argamani’s passing, writing, “We are devastated to share that Liora Argamani, mother of rescued hostage Noa Argamani, has passed away following an intensive battle with cancer. Our hearts are with Noa and Yaakov Argamani. May Liora’s memory be a blessing.”
Although Noa Argamani reunited with her mother before her passing, rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan’s father passed away from a heart attack only hours before he was rescued. According to a relative in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan, Meir “died of grief” and “a broken heart” over his son’s captivity.
On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel from neighboring Gaza, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others as hostages.
Several hostages were released as part of a temporary truce in November, and others have been rescued, both dead and alive, by Israeli soldiers conducting rescue operations. About 120 hostages remain in Gaza; it is unclear how many are still alive.
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Israel Fights Wars Knowing It Values Life, While Enemies Seek ‘Power Over Death’
Flames seen at the side of a road, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, close to the Israel border with Lebanon, in northern Israel, June 4, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Though the most evident source of human governance is power, true power can never stem from war-making stratagems or capacities. In principle, at least, consummate power on planet earth is immortality, but such power is intangible and must be based on faith rather than science. All things considered, the promise of “power over death” holds primary importance in world politics. This is especially the case in the jihadist Middle East.
There are relevant particulars. The consequences of this sort of thinking represent a lethal triumph of anti-Reason over Reason. Such triumph, in turn, expresses the continuing supremacy of primal human satisfactions in war, terrorism and genocide. On this matter of world-historical urgency, scholars and policy-makers should consider the probing observation of Eugene Ionesco in his Journal (1966). Opting to describe killing in general as affirmation of an individual’s “power over death,” the Romanian playwright explains:
I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death … Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.
Whatever the standards of assessment, all individuals and all states coexist in an “asymmetrical” world. Certain state leaderships accept zero-sum linkages between killing and survival (both individual and collective), but others do not. Although this divergence might suggest that some states stand on a higher moral plane than others, it may also place the virtuous state at a grave security disadvantage. As a timely example, this disadvantage describes the growing survival dilemma of Israel, a still-virtuous state that must unceasingly bear the assaults of utterly murderous adversaries.
What should Israel do when it finds itself confronted with faith-driven enemies who abhor Reason and seek personal immortality via “martyrdom?” As an antecedent question, what sort of “faith” can encourage (and cherish) the rape, torture and murder of innocents? Must the virtuous state accept barbarism as its sine qua non to “stay alive”?
There are science-based answers. What is required of still-virtuous states such as Israel is not a replication of enemy crimes, but decent and pragmatic policies that recognize death-avoidance as that enemy’s overriding goal. For Israel, this advice points toward jihadist enemies. Of special concern is a soon-to-be-nuclear capable Iran and Iranian terror-group surrogates (e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah), notably anxious to acquire “power over death.”
Israel’s most immediate concern will be the expanding war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a conflict in which the terrorist patron state (Iran) could display greater commitments to Reason than its associated fighting proxies. Nonetheless, even this relative reasonableness would devolve into brutish expressions of anti-Reason. What else ought Jerusalem to expect from adversaries who take palpable delight in the killing of “others?”
For Israel, there will be moral, legal and tactical imperatives. Though Reason will never govern the world, civilized states ought not plan to join the barbarians. In the best of all possible worlds, national and terror-group leaders could rid themselves of the notion that killing variously designated foes would confer immunity from mortality, but this is not yet the best of all possible worlds.
For the foreseeable future, the defiling dynamics of anti-Reason will continue to hold sway in Islamist politics. In Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank explains these determinative dynamics at a clarifying conceptual level: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”
Israeli analysts will recognize here the elements of jihadist terror, of martyrdom-directed criminality that closely resembles traditional notions of religious sacrifice. In authoritative world law, moreover, jihadist perpetrators are always differentiable from counter-terrorist adversaries by their witting embrace of mens rea or “criminal intent.
Though Israel regards the harms it that unfortunately comes to noncombatant Palestinian Arab populations as the unavoidable costs of counter-terrorism, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally target Israeli civilians. Under international law, both customary and codified, the responsibility for Israel-inflicted harms lies with the jihadists because of their documented resort to “human shields. In law, such resort is unambiguously criminal. The pertinent crime is known formally as “perfidy.”
At a minimum, every virtuous state’s law-based national security policies should build upon intellectual and scientific forms of understanding. Ipso facto, a virtuous state’s “just wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be conducted as contests of mind over mind. These contests should never be regarded as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.
Israel together with all other states coexist in an international state of nature, a perpetually unstable condition that 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes correctly called a “state of war.” Despite being patently unreasonable, barbarous states and their fighting proxies subscribe to the proposition that “sacrificing” specifically reviled “others” (Jews) offers powerful “medicine” against their own deaths. Among other things, this proposition reflects a grimly ominous “triumph” of anti-Reason over Reason.
Our planet’s survival task is primarily an intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, Israel could have no good reason to expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king among its retrograde enemies. For humane and Reason–based governance to develop, enlightened citizens of Islamic countries in the Middle East would first have to cast aside historically discredited ways of thinking about world politics and international law and do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and “mind” over blind faith and “mystery.”
Ironically, the legacy of Westphalia (the 1648 treaty creating modern international law) codifies Reason. We may discover murderous endorsements of anti-Reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, but there have also been voices of a very different sort. For the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he remarks in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset in the Revolt of the Masses. The 20th century Spanish philosopher identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it….”
Amid all that would madden and torment, the modern state and its proxies often “live” at the apex of anti-Reason. Before this self-destroying existence can change, humankind would first have to accept (1) the Reason-backed “sentence” of universal mortality or (2) the continuing supremacy of anti-Reason. If the second assumption is chosen, it could only make sense in a world wherein traditionally compelling promises of immortality were successfully “de-linked” from “religious sacrifices” of war, terrorism and genocide.
As the first choice is inconceivable for a species that has never generally accepted personal mortality, the second choice offers Israel its only realistic decisional context. To be sure, national and global survival amid anti-Reason can hardly be reassuring, but, at least for now, it represents the world’s only plausible prospect. As for convincing aspiring Islamist perpetrators that inflictions of war, terrorism or genocide on “others” could never confer “power over death” – this task becomes the single most important obligation of all civilized states and peoples.
Because the necessary starting point for all calculations is a world of anti-Reason, Israel will need to understand that political concessions (e.g., territorial surrenders and a Palestinian state) could never satisfy their lascivious foes.
Embracing a world of anti-Reason, these enemies are shaped by what Nietzsche calls “a world of desires and passions.” For them, such a world gives a green-light to the sordid pleasures of criminal barbarism so prominently displayed on October 7, 2023.
In essence, Iran, as mentor to the barbarians, represents the juridical incarnation of anti-Reason. A state of Palestine would add to the Iran-backed forces of anti-Reason. Iran-Palestine would present Israel with a unique existential hazard. Potentially, this hazard would be irremediable.
What next? To deal with conspicuously primal foes, enemies that seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential and law-based strategy should emphasize calibrated military remedies. In carrying out its soon-to-be-expanded operations against Hezbollah, Jerusalem ought never to forget that (1) its core adversary is Iran, not an Iranian terror-group proxy; (2) keeping Iran non-nuclear is an immutable national obligation; and (3) a Palestinian state could never satisfy Jerusalem’s adversaries and would inevitably become a “force-multiplying” peril of unprecedented magnitude.
Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. A version of this article was originally published at JewishWebsight.
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Internal Boycott of Iranian Elections Shows a Regime That Doesn’t Serve Its People
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with a group of students in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 2, 2022. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a landscape once rich with cultural and political heritage now suffers under the yoke of an authoritarian regime that has hijacked the once-sacred act of voting.
The disenfranchised Iranian populace finds itself ensnared in a system where elections serve as nothing more than a spectacle of faux democracy, orchestrated to sustain the illusion of legitimacy for a government that has systematically eroded civil liberties and human rights.
The recent boycotts of Iranian presidential elections is not merely a passive act of defiance, but a pronounced indictment of a regime that has failed its people spectacularly. This boycott transcends mere political disillusionment; it is a profound statement against the regime’s propaganda machine that paints participation as a civic duty, while in truth, it is a coerced endorsement of a predetermined outcome.
Within this context, the roles of presidential candidates become clear. Figures such as candidates Jalili and Pezeshkian, perceived by the public not as pioneers of change but as stalwarts of the status quo, are emblematic of a broader political malaise. They are seen not as legitimate contenders for leadership, but as cogs in a machine engineered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. His regime, epitomized by a relentless grip on power, manipulates every facet of governance — from the judiciary to the military — to ensure that no true opposition can emerge.
Khamenei himself stands as a paragon of dictatorial excess, embodying the antithesis of the democratic values he purports to uphold. His plans to establish a dynastic succession through his son, Mojtaba, reveal a blatant disregard for democratic processes and a preference for monarchical rule disguised as religious governance. This maneuver is not just a perpetuation of personal power; it is an affront to the collective will of the Iranian people, signaling that even the semblance of choice is a privilege granted by the ruling elite, not a fundamental right.
The boycott, therefore, is a critical expression of political maturity and historical consciousness by a society that, despite being shackled by fear and repression, recognizes the futility of participating in a predetermined play. Over the decades, Iranians have cultivated a sophisticated understanding of their political landscape, informed by repeated cycles of promised reforms followed by inevitable retrenchment. This has led to a collective awakening, where the electorate refuses to validate a corrupt system through participation in its rigged elections.
The implications of this silent boycott extend beyond the immediate context of electoral politics to touch upon the very legitimacy of the regime. The vilayat-e faqih system, which centralizes religious and political authority in the hands of the Supreme Leader, is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of democratic governance. It perpetuates a model of leadership that is inherently despotic, reminiscent of historical caliphates where rulers wielded absolute power, unaccountable to their subjects.
This model of governance has not only stifled political dissent but has also led to economic stagnation and social decay. Iran’s economy, heavily sanctioned by the international community and mismanaged by corrupt elites, teeters on the brink of collapse. The regime’s failure to effectively address these issues, combined with its oppressive tactics to suppress any form of dissent, has only deepened the resolve of the Iranian people to seek change.
The reformist factions within Iran, including groups like the Islamic Left and participants of the 1979 revolution, once heralded as agents of change, now find themselves in a precarious position. Their calls for reform, constrained within the parameters set by the regime, have failed to bring about any substantive change. Instead, they serve to perpetuate a facade of progress, even as the fundamental structure of the regime remains unchallenged.
As the regime continues to clamp down on dissent and tighten its authoritarian grip, the response from the populace has been one of increasing resistance. The silent boycott is an active strategy of non-compliance that challenges the regime’s authority and exposes its vulnerabilities. This growing undercurrent of civil resistance is a testament to the resilience of the Iranian people, who, despite enduring decades of repression, are increasingly determined to imagine and fight for a future that aligns with their aspirations for freedom and justice.
In conclusion, the silent boycott of elections in Iran represents more than a momentary expression of discontent. It is a profound challenge to a regime that relies on suppression and deception to maintain control. For the international community and observers of Iranian politics, this act of boycott is a crucial indicator of a shifting political consciousness among Iranians. As this political drama unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the path to genuine reform in Iran must be paved with the active participation of its citizens, demanding and implementing a system of governance that truly represents their will and respects their rights.
Erfan Fard is a counterterrorism analyst and Middle East Studies researcher based in Washington, DC. Twitter@EQFARD.
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