Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

There is a rhythm to modern Iranian history — a rhythm written in marches, in Internet blackouts, in gunfire, and in funerals dug before dawn. Every few years, resistance to decades of theocratic repression erupts upward.

Women step into the streets unveiled. Students chant truths the regime has outlawed. People demand change and freedom. For a brief second, history seems to tremble — as if the hinge might finally turn.

And then, as it has too many times, the regime crushes the movement. And the world — reliably — scrolls on.

This is Iran’s tragedy: not only the savagery of its rulers, but the astonishing brevity of the world’s attention span.

Iran rises in waves — each braver than the last — and each greeted with a flicker of sympathy, followed by silence. Outrage, like hashtags, burns bright only when fashionable — which usually means when the target of the outrage is Israel.

Remember the Green Movement in 2009.

Millions protested a fraudulent election. We saw grainy videos smuggled past censors; we watched Neda Agha-Soltan die in the street. The world offered “concern,” urged “restraint,” and then moved on. Tehran learned a brutal truth: the world forgets fast.

2019 brought another explosion — not just students this time, but working-class Iranians struggling under poverty while the regime funds Islamist supremacist terror worldwide. In days, more than 1,000 people were killed. The Internet went dark. Burials happened quietly. The world barely blinked. 

Then came 2022: Mahsa Amini, murdered for the “crime” of showing her hair. “Woman, Life, Freedom” ignited like a fuse. Girls tore down portraits of the “Supreme Leader.” Women burned hijabs not out of ideology, but out of rage. Even the regime looked shaken. 

But the headlines faded, and so did global attention.

And today, Iranians march again — not to annihilate another nation from river to sea, but simply to live. They risk bullets for rights that Western activists hashtag from brunch tables: speech, education, music, laughter, uncovered hair.

Meanwhile, the same influencers who coordinated “All Eyes on Gaza” and “All Eyes on Rafah” — complete with slick graphics and celebrity amplification — can barely spare a line for the thousands beaten, tortured, executed, or disappeared in Iran. The selective empathy is staggering.

All eyes on Gaza — but not on girls beaten for letting some hair show.
All eyes on Rafah — but never for gays and dissidents hanging from cranes.
All eyes where moral theater is easy — not where courage is costly.

Greta Thunberg condemns Israel almost daily, yet finds no breath for Iranian environmentalists rotting in Evin Prison. Hollywood posts infographics about alleged oppression in democracies while Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shoot teenagers in the street for merely protesting. This isn’t solidarity — it’s trend-based activism.

Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly. Silence is their oxygen. The ayatollahs know outrage burns hot but brief, especially when neither Jews nor Israel can be blamed.

They wait for hashtags to fade — and they have been rewarded for their patience and brutality repeatedly. 

A free Iran would remake the Middle East more than any ceasefire or summit. It would cripple Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, at the source. It would end the world’s largest state sponsor of Islamist terrorism. And it would return Iran to its civilizational legacy — poetry, scholarship, music — instead of exporting murder and martyrdom purportedly in God’s name. 

But beyond geopolitics, Iran’s uprisings remind us of something deeper: the yearning for freedom never dies. Dictators can kill protestors, but not the memory of liberty. Repression delays freedom, but cannot erase the desire for its return.

So, this time — whether the streets swell or fall momentarily silent — our responsibility is simple: Remember. Amplify. Support. Refuse to look away.

Iranians take the risks. We must merely keep the lights on.

The media, celebrities, and the international community spent two years focusing everyone’s attention on Gaza. It’s their obligation to put the same focus on Iran — not only when the crowds roar, but when the streets fall quiet.

Freedom has a long memory. So must we. This uprising — or the next — may be the one that breaks the regime, if the world keeps its eyes open long enough to witness it.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.

Personnel from EU maritime mission Eunavfor Aspides’ transport a casualty during rescue operation following an attack by Yemen’s Houthis on the Dutch-flagged general cargo ship Minervagracht, which caught fire in the Gulf of Aden, in this screengrab taken from handout video released on Sept. 30, 2025. Photo: Eunavfor Aspides via X/Handout via REUTERS

Last week, the Saudi Royal Air Force didn’t bomb Houthi rebels or Iranian weapons depots. Instead, in a stunning act of “Blue on Blue” warfare, they bombed the proxy forces of their closest ally, the United Arab Emirates, in the port city of Mukalla.

This was not a mistake. It was a message. And for those in Israel and the US dreaming of a unified “Arab NATO” to counter Tehran, the message is catastrophic: the anti-Iran coalition is officially dead.

The strikes on Mukalla were the kinetic finale to a diplomatic standoff that has been festering for months. In late December, Saudi intelligence flagged a maritime vessel departing from the Emirati port of Fujairah, bound for Mukalla. Its cargo? Not humanitarian aid, but a massive shipment of armored vehicles and heavy weaponry destined for the Southern Transitional Council (STC) — the UAE-backed secessionist movement that has effectively carved a statelet out of South Yemen.

Riyadh’s response was swift and brutal. Viewing the armament of a separatist entity on its southern border as an existential threat, the Kingdom issued an ultimatum that shattered the polite fiction of Gulf unity: withdraw the shipment and vacate the contested positions “within 24 hours,” or face the consequences.

The UAE, perhaps banking on the alliance’s history, called the bluff. They lost.

Saudi jets pounded the 37th Division Camp and the port facilities in Mukalla, destroying the shipment and killing at least seven STC fighters.The psychological impact was immediate. The UAE announced the “conclusion” of its military presence in the area — a diplomatic euphemism for a forced retreat — while their local proxies began a chaotic withdrawal. Witnesses in Mukalla reported a disorganized rout, with retreating fighters looting government buildings and loading refrigerators and washing machines onto military vehicles as they fled toward Aden.

Into this vacuum stepped the “National Shield Forces” (Daraa Al-Watan). Funded, trained, and salaried directly by Riyadh, this new proxy army has successfully retaken Mukalla and the strategic Ash Shihr oil terminal.

This shift represents a fundamental change in the war’s geology. Saudi Arabia is no longer fighting just the Houthis; it is now actively dismantling the infrastructure of Emirati influence in Yemen. The fight is over the “Triangle of Power” — the oil and gas fields of Marib, Shabwa, and Hadramout. Riyadh envisions a pipeline from the Empty Quarter to the Arabian Sea to bypass the Iranian-threatened Strait of Hormuz. An independent, UAE-controlled South Yemen sitting on that pipeline route is a strategic non-starter for the House of Saud.

The implications for Israel and the West are grim. The concept of a monolithic Sunni bloc standing against the Islamic Republic of Iran has been revealed as a mirage. While Saudi F-15s were busy targeting Emirati-supplied armored personnel carriers, the Houthi rebels — Iran’s premier proxy — sat back and watched their enemies destroy each other.

The chaos has already forced the STC to redeploy six brigades of the elite “Giants Forces” (Al-Amaliqa) away from the frontlines with the Houthis to defend their southern strongholds against the Saudis. This leaves the strategic city of Marib vulnerable. If the Houthis seize this moment to launch a new offensive, they could capture Yemen’s last government-held oil fields without facing significant resistance.

Perhaps most alarming is the silence from the West. The Trump administration, despite its “maximum pressure” rhetoric against Iran, appears paralyzed by this internecine conflict between its two key Arab partners. A State Department spokesman issued only a tepid call for “restraint,” highlighting a total loss of American leverage over the Gulf monarchies. The “Big Brother” dynamic, where Washington could pick up the phone and force Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to play nice, is over. The US now faces the nightmare scenario of mediating a war between its own allies while trying to contain Iran.  

The airstrikes in Mukalla are a turning point. The “Blue on Blue” incident proves that national interests in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have superseded collective security. For Israel, this means that the security architecture of the Red Sea cannot be outsourced to a Gulf coalition that is busy aiming its weapons at itself.

As the smoke clears over Mukalla, the winner is not Saudi Arabia, and certainly not the people of Yemen. The winner is the regime in Tehran, which just watched the American-backed security order in the Arabian Peninsula bomb itself into oblivion.

Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx

Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

For years, Jewish leaders have warned of a “talent pipeline” crisis: too few professionals entering and remaining in Jewish education, campus life, advocacy, philanthropy, and communal leadership.

The concern is real. But it is incomplete. The deeper problem is not simply how many people are willing to serve. It is how much our institutions are asking them to carry, and whether the system they are being asked to sustain still works.

In short, the denominator has been ignored.

As a recent and important essay in eJewishPhilanthropy argued, every pipeline debate fixates on the numerator — how many people we recruit — while avoiding the denominator: the total scope of human capital demand created by the size, structure, and fragmentation of the Jewish communal ecosystem.

Without confronting that denominator, recruitment efforts merely reshuffle scarce talent across too many institutions, leaving core needs unmet and professionals overstretched.

Over decades, Jewish communal life accumulated organizations, programs, boards, task forces, and administrative layers designed for a different era — one marked by higher affiliation, stronger institutional loyalty, and a labor market where mission could reliably compensate for lower pay, limited mobility, and diffuse authority.

That world is gone. Demographics shifted. Younger Jews became less institutionally anchored. Labor markets tightened. Costs rose. Expectations expanded. Yet the institutional footprint remained largely unchanged.

October 7 shattered the illusion that this mismatch was manageable.

The Hamas massacre generated an extraordinary grassroots response. Jewish families mobilized instantly. Donors gave generously. Students demanded guidance and protection. Synagogues filled. Informal networks moved faster than anyone expected. The moral instinct of the Jewish people proved strong and resilient. Generosity was never the problem. The question is whether the infrastructure that received those dollars was capable of deploying them with the speed and coordination the moment required.

Institutionally, the response was uneven, slow, and often confused. Too many organizations were uncertain of their roles. Messaging diverged when unity mattered. Efforts overlapped in some areas while gaps persisted in others. Coordination lagged. Decision-making was fragmented. In a moment that demanded speed, clarity, and authority, too much of the system defaulted to process.

The fact that major Jewish organizations launched a “centralized communications operation” two months after the attack — explicitly to coordinate messaging and combat misinformation — underscored how absent such coordination had been when it was most needed.

I write this as a professor who has been on the front lines since October 7. Students came to me desperate for guidance, support, and protection. They wanted to know what Jewish organizations could offer them. Too often, the answer was unclear — or silence.

Campus Hillels struggled with mixed messages. National organizations issued statements but offered little in the way of rapid, tangible support. Meanwhile, campuses became hotbeds of antisemitism, and Zionist students were left feeling abandoned and isolated. The grassroots impulse was there. The institutional response was not.

This was not a failure of values or commitment. It was a failure of structure.

Crises do not create institutional weaknesses; they expose them. October 7 was a stress test, and it revealed a Jewish communal ecosystem that is too fragmented, too duplicative, and too bureaucratically slow for the world we now inhabit. To deny that is not loyalty. It is denial.

Ask any director of a small Jewish nonprofit what keeps them up at night, and they will not say “lack of mission.” They will say: understaffing, unclear mandates, and the slow grind of doing three jobs at once.

Young Jewish professionals increasingly encounter a sector defined by unclear authority, overlapping missions, underwhelming compensation, and relentless expectations. They are asked to staff too many institutions doing too much of the same work, often with insufficient support and limited prospects for advancement.

When they leave, their departure is framed as a generational failing — an unwillingness to commit. In reality, it is often a rational response to structural failure. Leading Edge research confirms this pattern: in 2023, Jewish nonprofits scored 13 percentage points below the national benchmark on employee well-being, and subsequent studies found that professionals in the field “lacked hope.”

This is where the conversation must become more honest — and more uncomfortable.

The redundancy in the Jewish world is frequently defended in the language of pluralism or innovation. In practice, it drains resources, dilutes leadership, and spreads scarce talent thin. Every additional board requires time and labor. Every duplicated back office diverts dollars from mission. Every institution preserved solely because it already exists is a tax on the entire ecosystem.

Mergers, consolidation, and shared services are not threats to Jewish life. They are prerequisites for its resilience.

Other sectors confronted this reality years ago. Healthcare systems consolidated to improve coordination and responsiveness — with over 2,000 hospital mergers since 1998 and health system affiliation rising from 53% to 68% of community hospitals.

Universities merged or shared infrastructure in response to demographic decline, with more than 120 colleges closing or merging since 2016. Philanthropic networks streamlined operations to focus on outcomes rather than overhead. These changes were painful, controversial, and necessary. Recent Jewish consolidations — Leading Edge absorbing JPRO, Birthright Israel merging with Onward Israel, the formation of Prizmah from legacy day school networks — offer models worth studying, however imperfect.

None of this is easy for Jewish organizations to hear. Jewish communal institutions are shaped by history, trauma, and hard-won survival. Many were built in response to real threats — antisemitism, exclusion, displacement — and their leaders understandably equate institutional continuity with communal safety. Consolidation can feel like vulnerability. Change can feel like erosion. Letting go of autonomy can feel like surrender.

But history teaches a harder truth: Jewish communities do not disappear because they adapt. They disappear because they refuse to. Institutions that cannot reform in response to demographic, cultural, and political change eventually hollow out, even if their names remain on the door. Survival has never meant stasis. It has always meant disciplined adaptation; preserving purpose while altering form.

Funders bear particular responsibility here. Philanthropy has too often rewarded proliferation over consolidation, novelty over coordination, and institutional survival over systemic health.

If donors continue to fund duplication, they should not be surprised when talent shortages worsen and crisis response falters. Those serious about Jewish continuity must prioritize impact, accountability, and coordination even when that requires difficult tradeoffs.

Jewish life still generates immense moral energy. The instinct to gather, to defend, to educate, and to create meaning remains strong. But that energy is now being poured into a system built for yesterday’s realities.

October 7 was a warning. If Jewish communal leaders continue to expand expectations without restructuring capacity — if they refuse to confront the denominator alongside the numerator — they will not be prepared for the next crisis. And there will be a next one.

The choice is not between tradition and change. It is between adaptation and decline. 

Every board, funder, and executive should be asking a simple question: If this institution did not exist today, would we create it? And if the answer is no, what are we prepared to do about it?

Ignoring that question is not conservatism. It is complacency.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.