For a peaceful Middle East

Preview of an upcoming Special Issue on the Middle East

Michel Taubmann — Since the Islamic Republic was founded, you have always opposed foreign military intervention against Iran in any form. In 1980, as a young man, you even wrote to Ayatollah Khomeini offering to fight the Iraqi invasion with the Iranian army. Have you changed your position? And if so, why?

Reza Pahlavi — When Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1980, I wanted to do my duty as an Iranian and defend my country, despite my aversion to the Islamic dictatorship that had been in place for a year. Unlike the People’s Mujahideen, who chose to fight alongside Iraq at the time, I have always placed love for my homeland above any political conflict whenever my country has been attacked. The situation today is very different.

The confrontation with the United States and Israel is the consequence of the warmongering of an illegitimate regime, which has been waging this war since its advent forty-seven years ago.

Persians and Jews share a long common history. In the VIth century BC, our king Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from exile and allowed them to return to their land, Judea. We obviously have no territorial dispute with Israel. As for the Palestinian tragedy, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done everything in its power to inflame it, with the aim of rendering it insoluble. Fiercely opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, it remains hostile to any idea of a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel – a country it continues to refer to as “the Zionist entity”.

As for the United States, while there may be long-standing grievances, the Islamic Republic should, at the very least, have been grateful to Washington for facilitating its rise to power in 1979, by abandoning not only my father, the Shah of Iran, but also the new Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, a liberal opponent who sought to establish democracy.

For forty-seven years, I’ve been fully committed to the fight for democracy, regardless of fluctuations in relations between the Islamic Republic, Israel or the United States. I have always believed that change in Iran will come from the Iranian people. I remain faithful to this conviction.

When a dictatorship maintains itself through war and terrorism, sooner or later it suffers the consequences. And that’s what happened.

M. T. — So, in your opinion, is Iran solely responsible for the military turn the conflict has taken since June 2025?

R. P. — No – not Iran, but the criminal regime! Our people are not warmongers and have never wanted war. The responsibility lies with the Islamic Republic, which imposed itself and maintains its power through terror, like a foreign army in an occupied country. Since 1979, the Tehran regime has made the destruction of Israel a strategic doctrine, and has waged an uninterrupted indirect war through Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and dozens of militias throughout the region. Billions of …