JERUSALEM, Israel – In the nearly 47 years that Iran’s Islamist regime has been in power, women have stood at the forefront of the internal dissent that has erupted from time to time onto Iran’s streets.
British-Iranian journalist Jonathan Harounoff is currently Israel’s spokesperson to the United Nations. He’s written a new book investigating the role of women in the Iranian resistance, and he recently spoke with CBN News.
To watch our interview, click on the video above. (Note: there may be some lag time for the video to load.)
The text of the discussion is below.
CHRIS MITCHELL: Johnny Harounoff, thanks for joining us here on Jerusalem Dateline. You’ve written a very timely book called Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomenLifeFreedom Revolt.” Tell us why you wrote the book.
JONATHAN HAROUNOFF: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. The reason why I wrote the book, it was three years in the making, was because whenever anyone reads the news, Googles the Islamic Republic of Iran, all you see is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dangerous proxies across the world. You’ll see news about them building a very dangerous foreign policy agenda, their nuclear weapons program, but very little is told about the people of Iran.
Who are these 90-plus million people inside Iran? What do they want? What are their aspirations? Do they share views with the Islamic Republic? Do they not? And this is very much a culmination of of years and years of interviewing Iranians on the ground and in the diaspora, who really illuminate just how different their views are, and their aspirations are to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a specific focus on a massive wave of protest that took place in 2022, 2023, after the death of a young 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, when she was killed, by the by Iran’s morality police, and we saw a massive wave of of of uprising and unrest inside Iran and globally. And this is just this was just one example of a whole list of examples of the Iranian people uprising in their 46-year quest for freedom.
CM: What did you find out about the women in particular? What are they feeling? What are they yearning for right now?
JH: Most of all, they’re yearning for the freedom to choose, the freedom of choice. Freedom to dress freely, to act freely, and they don’t have those freedoms. Since 2005, 2006, there have been the morality police roaming the streets, ensuring that the women of Iran and the men as well are dressed appropriately, and if they’re not, then they face very severe repercussions.
CM: Yeah. So we see pictures before the Islamic Republic that many of the Iranian women were dressed like Westerners, and then now they’re dressed, almost sometimes, some women head to toe in black.
JH: And you saw very, a very sharp reaction to that. Right at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, it officially came into being February 1979, as early as March 1979, March 8th, which was International Women’s Day every year, you saw, hundreds of thousands of Iranian women stormed the streets because, and chant that this is not the revolution they wanted to bring about.
They were promised something completely different. And they marched because they did not want the mandatory hijab, and they didn’t want all of these restrictions imposed on their lives. And it’s not just confined to what they wear. They face a sort of second-class status in all other aspects of life, whether it’s custody, divorce, marriage, travel, and work, all other kinds of facets of their life are highly restrictive, which is why they’ve just been fighting for a better life.
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CM: Is it possible that there might be a glimmer of hope that the regime would fall and the women could have freedom?
JH: There is always hope because so long as the people of Iran face severe domestic challenges, they are going to rise up. So you saw after the 12-day war that the regime has been weakened, very militarily. But on top of that, they’re facing very severe domestic challenges.
Right now, there’s a severe drought enveloping Iran in almost all of Iran’s 31 provinces. There are water shortages in Tehran, the capital city. They’re instituting public holidays to ensure that people leave the city to alleviate all of the pressure on water pressure and water needs. They’re facing severe drought issues.
And just imagine if Iran and other countries in the region, like Israel, had some kind of alliance in a post Ayatollah era. Israel is a world-leading country in terms of water technology and these kinds of issues. And imagine that kind of collaboration that you could have seen, had there not been a regime in place that is so maniacally focused on annihilating the State of Israel and destroying America and other Western allies.
CM: Yeah. Final question, Johnny. What is the message you want people, especially in the West, to get from this book?
JH: That the people of the world, I would say, and especially the people of Israel, stand with the people of Iran in their quest for freedom, and there is immense support out there. And while Israel isn’t actively involved at all in any kind of regime change, if the people of Iran choose to rise up, and I suspect they eventually will, the people of Israel stand with them.
CM: Johnny Harounoff, thanks so much for joining us.
JH: Thank you.
