Except for the last year when my family moved to Turkey, my high school years, from 1970 to 1975, were spent at Ettefagh. Of the 2000 or so student body at the time about 20 percent where non-Jewish — Muslim, Zoroastrian, Christian, Baha’i and other faiths. My brother and I were among this minority, even if the only difference between our Jewish classmates and us was exemption from Hebrew class. I still remember vividly our beloved principal Dr. Beroukhim, who had a doctorate in physics from France and an undying passion for his subject, stopping noisy boys racing up and down our school’s central marble staircase, ordering them to instead ‘Go study physics!’.

Though from a practicing Muslim family, I also liked going to the synagogue with my Jewish classmates. My multi-cultural upbringing was not limited to school either — my parents had always honored the place of all of Iran’s religious minorities, and actively encouraged diversity at home. At any rate in those years no one was forced to pray, and no one was prohibited from it, either — religion seemed to matter less than academic and social skills, and education was revered by all. In hindsight Ettefagh was a microcosm of Iranian society then: those early 70s coincided with the golden age of contemporary Iran itself, halcyon days of a nation believing in endless future possibilities, forging its way towards modernity and prosperity — not quite there yet, but definitely on the path.

During high school I had started learning about the Holocaust on my own, devouring books like Leon Uris’ Exodus and Mila 18 — I still remember haunting nightmares of those teenage years, about the Nazi concentration camps. I also remember that when we heard of the death of Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of Israel’s current prime minister and leader of the 1976 rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, to free the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane headed to Israel, I wept. In those days many Iranians looked admiringly to Israel and its achievements, especially its greening of the Negev Desert — a model for arid Iran, with its own massive interior deserts.

With the 1979 Islamic revolution, the promises of a secular and forward-looking Iran as ‘the Japan of the Middle East’ disintegrated. Almost immediately relations with Israel soured as well. But even after the revolution, among ordinary Iranians admiration for Israel remained strong: while the mollahs, Iran’s new masters, were busy mass executing political prisoners, brutalizing women for not properly covering their hair, and supporting terrorist groups, Israel was building a thriving economy, a diverse society, and proudly asserting itself as a hub of science and technology, and the only democracy in the Middle East — all despite the hostility of the Arab world around it.

Meanwhile most of my Jewish classmates — like vast numbers of Iranians of all faiths and backgrounds — started fleeing the brutality of Iran’s theocratic regime, settling mainly in Israel, New York or Southern California, with pockets in Canada and Europe. We remained connected though, even as our life paths diverged. I joined the United Nations and spent my career working in different countries. Over time I also started learning of the plight of Palestinians, through eyewitness testimonies of colleagues working in the West Bank and Gaza. When I was based at UN headquarters in New York, the lectures of the scholar Edward Said brought home the tragedy of the Palestinians — expelled from their own lands as payment for the sins of the Europeans who had perpetrated the Holocaust. Learning of the daily humiliations endured by the Palestinians, from courageous figures such as the Gaza-born human rights lawyer Raji Sourani or the Israeli-born journalist and author Amira Hass was enlightening, and heartbreaking.

Ettefagh School, h/t Wikimaps

Israel’s forefathers — giants of the calibre of Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres — though unequivocally devoted to protecting their country, were also profoundly human. They fought hard, but never shunned peace. Especially they did not belittle the Palestinian tragedy. Who can forget the speeches of Shimon Peres, or those of the erudite former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban, defending at the UN the right of Israel to exist? But political and societal changes in Israel over the past years, and more recently the arrogant reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, with his visible disdain for Palestinian life, his inclusion of openly extremist settlers in his governing coalitions, and his ultimately catastrophic cynicism made it increasingly difficult to remain supportive of Israeli policies. With my former classmates we avoided discussing Palestine.

On October 7th this year, after the first shock at Hamas’ macabre murder of 1200 Israelis and kidnapping of hundreds of others, our immediate response as a family was to reach out to our Jewish Iranian circles — we knew many had relatives in Israel. But even before worldwide solidarity with Israel’s nightmare could consolidate, another nightmare began — this one of daily bombings of Palestinians at schools, hospitals, mosques and refugee camps in Gaza. Thousands of children killed, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, already living lives of extreme hardship and indignity on a sliver of land, pushed to move, again. Where could these families go, how many times were they to be uprooted, and what new cycles of violence would their sorrow and rage, at seeing loved ones killed and maimed by Israeli bombs, bring to the region tomorrow?

The questions are complex and endless but my high school years at Ettefagh at least taught me that the tragedies unfolding in Israel and Gaza are far less about religion than they are about fear, loss of dignity, greed and especially lamentable and power-hungry political leaders and their disregard for human rights. Judaism, Christianity or Islam do not cause these tragedies, leaders who use them for their own objectives do. When tyrants of the likes of Syrian president Assad or Iranian president Raisi sit at the podium of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as they did a few weeks ago, to speak of Palestinian human rights even as they trample, daily, on the most basic rights of their own countrymen and women, they become a stain on Islam, not its representatives. Equally, the violent Israeli settlers and the extremists on Netanyahu’s cabinet can be an insult to Judaism, they certainly do not represent it. I know because I have lived through and experienced far kinder, wiser, inclusive versions of both these religions.

The time has come, on this 75th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to reclaim the multicultural traditions of our lands, lands that form the cultural and geographic kernel of the world, the meeting place for Asia, Africa and Europe. From the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Pakistan and Afghanistan, from Central Asia and the Iranian plateau to the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, in the name of religion our countries have been mired in conflict and violence for far too long. We have experimented with every shape and form of exclusion and hatred, yet if we think carefully, again and again throughout millennia of our collective histories, whenever we have been tolerant of diversity and inclusive of the ‘other’, we have done better.

Persian Jews, globally no more than 350,000, are one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, having arrived in Iran according to recent scholarship even earlier than during the thus-far assumed Achaemenid Empire, maybe as early as the 8th century BC — roughly 1300 years before the arrival of Islam! The overlaying of Judaic and Persian characteristics has produced a culture more vibrant than the sum of the two — a people with deep respect for learning, great sense of humor, warmth, resilience, subtlety and love of life. Diversity and inclusivity make every community, every country, richer. Why do we keep depriving ourselves of such a treasure bestowed on us?

A few weeks ago walking past the Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome, I came upon a candle-light ceremony for the Israel/Gaza war. A young couple — she Jewish and he Muslim — were chanting prayers in Hebrew and Arabic, holding hands and weeping openly. Seeing the depth of pain ‘leaders’ in our region have caused these young people filled me with anger and shame. We are tired of ruthless despots, tired of their obscurantism and small-mindedness, tired of seeing religion used and abused to unleash so much suffering. As Ettefagh taught me all those decades ago, everyone simply aspires to genuine respect, dignity and a fair and level playing field. That is all. The rest will work itself out. What is the use of thousands of years of culture and history, if we are not even able to grasp the wisdom of this simple and obvious truth?

Nassrine Azimi served most of her career with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), where she has led numerous initiatives, programs and offices on three continents. She currently coordinates the Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH) Initiative (http://glh.unitar.org), a global campaign she co-founded in 2011 to disseminate and plant worldwide seeds and saplings of the hibakujumoku, trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She is an adjunct professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, a visiting professor at Hiroshima Shudo University and a Research Fellow at the San Diego Botanic Garden, where she has been part of efforts to bring botanic gardens to post-conflict and least developed countries. She chairs the EDEN Seminars — Emerging and Developing Economies Network – in Japan.

Reprinted from The Chukogu Shimbun with the author’s permission.

After finishing high school in Turkey I left for university in Europe. It was a given though that after graduation I would return home, to be a part of the new Iran, where everything was possible for a studious young person — yes, even a girl — like myself. Barely three decades since the humiliations heaped on it by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States when they occupied the country during WW II and its aftermath, Iran of the late 60’s and early 70’s was finding its place in the world, an ancient civilization in the midst of a dizzying modernization. Despite ever stronger headwinds, under the rule of the ambitious, autocratic and yet in some ways progressive Shah, the country’s economic trajectory was still upward. And we, the young women of the middle kingdom, were part of that future.

Then the 1979 Islamic Revolution happened.

Analysts still ponder the why and how of an uprising that toppled the Middle East’s most powerful military and a ruler who, despite many flaws, had brought much tangible economic benefits to the country and social rights to its people — especially women and minorities. Even more confounding was the reigns of power being taken by Ayatollah Khomeini — a brooding, unrelenting theologian and long-time opponent in exile, who hailed in a harsh version of Islamic rule internally, and declared ‘exporting the revolution’ as the regime’s primary goal, externally.

Almost overnight Iranian women lost decades of hard-won rights.

One was my role model Dr. Farrokhroo Parsa, a female physician and women’s rights activist who — 54 years before Mahsa Amini was arrested and beaten to death by the regime’s ‘morality police’ for a few strands of hair— had become minister of education, a first in Iranian history. Dr. Parsa was arrested by the revolutionaries, convicted by a sham tribunal and executed by firing squad.

In the decades since, the Islamic Republic has continued to destroy the lives of thousands of Iranians, men and women alike. Judges and lawyers, writers, artists and journalists, students, scientists and academics, environmentalists and entrepreneurs, even moderate religious leaders — all harassed and threatened, put under house arrest and exiled, thrown into the notorious Evin Prison, or killed. Thousands of the best-educated have fled, entailing one of the largest brain-drains in the country’s history.

What can the Iranians of the diaspora — four to five million of us — free in our adopted lands and watching helplessly as our bare-handed brothers and sisters in Iran are beaten and shot at with live bullets by the regime’s brutal and well-funded security apparatus, do to help?

First, we can continue reminding the world that Iran — a rich, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and ancient civilization, a country three times the size of France — deserves better than this. We must remind that Iran has the resources — material, natural, human — to rebuild not just itself, but help bring stability to the Middle East. We must be more vocal, in outlining how transformative it could be if the mollahs’ regime, today subservient only to its own survival, were instead replaced by a government devoted to the well-being of Iranians and to peace in the region — rather than to silencing the citizenry and fomenting chaos elsewhere.

Especially we must counter nay-sayers who keep repeating — and the current regime amplifying for its own benefit — that there is no alternative to the status quo, no leadership that can fill the void and lead the dissent, that Iran can only be kept together by the mollahs, otherwise it risks becoming another Iraq or Afghanistan, or hijacked by groups even more extremist than the one in power.

This argument is made over and over again, but it is not true.

The United Nations as a trusted arbiter, could take a leading role in a peaceful transition for Iran. Under a two-year transitional government overseen by the UN, Iran could prepare for free and fair elections to chose its future, with all parties allowed to participate unconditionally. Iran has many able, reform-minded leaders: they are like those fighting on the streets of Iran’s cities. They include the human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, languishing in prison. They include the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, the journalist Masih Alinejad and the academic Abbas Milani, in exile. They are like the football legend Ali Karimi, threatened. They are like the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest. As Reza Pahlavi, a prominent member of the opposition movement Iran Revival and son of the former Shah, tirelessly repeats, all of these men and women can and will rally, to help rebuild the country.

A recurring slogan on the streets of Iran these days has been calling the regime bisharaf — ‘without honor’ in Persian. A majority of Iranians has now determined that a regime that abuses and kills its women and crushes the aspirations of its youth so brutally, has no honor left. As the uncle of Mahsa Amini said simply of the current rulers ‘They know nothing about Islam, nor humanity’.

It is time to stop the killing, and to help Iranians change course. Many of us in the diaspora, too, are at service, to contribute. We know a different Iran is possible, we have glimpsed it, and long to celebrate in it the Persian new year Nowruz — the victory of light over darkness. In Iran, New Year’s day is celebrated on the vernal equinox, as winter recedes, and is called Nowruz (literally “New Day”). Yes, there is a hope, kept alive in millions of Iranian hearts around the world for more than 43 years: next Nowruz, in Iran.

This article is written in the author’s personal capacity.

So much truth about nuclear weapons, in just three short sentences.

Cascading bad news such as the unravelling of the Iran nuclear deal, and the collapse of the checks and balances painstakingly put in place over decades to manage the nuclear Damocles Sword over our collective necks, seemed on everyone’s mind this August 6 in Hiroshima—a palpable sense if not of outright despair, then certainly of gloom. As a pelting rain swept across the Peace Memorial Park where 50,000 people had gathered, the usually calm and restrained Governor of Hiroshima, Hidehiko Yuzaki, voicing the sentiments of many, poignantly asked, ‘Why are some countries allowed to possess nuclear weapons that can inflict a trauma that remains incurable for 74 years or more? Why are they allowed to threaten other countries to use their nuclear arsenals?’ Is it really permissible to cause such a catastrophe?’

The nuclear genie, brought out of the bottle at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, has been devouring in recent years and one by one most of our collective defenses against it. As Ernest J. Moniz and Sam Nunn write chillingly in this month’s Foreign Affairs, there is a ‘deliberate and accelerating breakdown of the arms control architecture that for decades provided restraint, transparency, and predictability for each side’s conventional and nuclear forces.’ They convincingly argue that decaying agreements and mind sets, with ever more sophisticated weapons, cyber technologies and AI make our era one of the more dangerous in the planet’s history. Other global crisis, especially climate change, can but exacerbate the fragile balance.

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) has estimated that even a small-scale limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan for example, one that would involve only 0.03% of the world’s nuclear weapon capacity, could risk the starvation of almost two billion people, notably in the Indian subcontinent and China. For her part the essayist Elaine Scarry, in a lecture at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation earlier this year, raised the mortifying thought of how just a small handful of people—to be really stark, maybe just nine—have their finger on the nuclear button, and therefore on our collective destiny. No parent can sleep peacefully after reading this.

Time is not on our side. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, championed by the International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and supported by a few enlightened states and the United Nations, is steadily building momentum, but is still only half way to entry into force—24 of the required 50 states have ratified. Unlike most other global issues, nuclear weapons remain the quasi monopoly of states (for now). This is true not just in countries with little democratic checks and balances like China, Russia or North Korea, but even in democracies like the US, UK, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. If so, then surely the case must be taken more urgently to the seemingly distracted but potentially powerful global citizenry?

The UN, ICAN and others groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are trying. The ICRC has produced one of the shortest and most effective videos to date on the impact of a nuclear war (https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-world-ready-face-nuclear-war-no-so-lets-ban-bomb) —in just 1:51 minutes the film does more for the anti-nuclear cause than many pious declarations. More, much more is needed however. We must cease to be distracted by trivia, and refocus laser-like on humanity’s most urgent threat, mobilizing the talents of the best and the brightest—the most creative film makers and artists, scholars, inventors and business leaders around the world, from whichever ‘side’ they may be—to make the case for a nuclear-free world. We must find ways to do so as meaningfully in Beijing as in Moscow, in Washington, New Delhi or Islamabad.

ICAN has done well too, by mobilizing the young, and by going for the jugular—i.e. tracing the money. In 2012 it had estimated that worldwide nuclear weapons cost a hefty US $300 million a day (considering how opaque most nuclear-weapon budgets are, this is most likely below the real cost). Meanwhile ICAN’s Don’t Bank on the Bomb campaign is picking momentum, pressuring corporations, banks, pension funds and the like to drop out of the bomb business. In democratic countries it is also easier to identify and expose companies benefitting from the macabre nuclear trade.The lion’s share of nuclear weapon development contracts in the United States for example is held by just a handful of corporations. Aggressive divestment campaigns, and strategies to expose and shame non-ethical companies, could put them on the defensive.

The sheer number and power of nuclear weapons today can make the bombs that plunged Hiroshima and Nagasaki into nuclear hell 74 years ago seem almost benign. But as the Governor said even here we glimpse merely the outward expressions of grief—we will never know the reality of nuclear horror and the suffering behind the dignified exteriors of survivors. Many hibakusha dedicated their lives to remembering the calamity of that day and its aftermath, so that we may not forget. Now they watch the crumbling of all they worked for, their dreams for a non-nuclear world.

My friend the Hiroshima architect Akio Nishikiori often describes his childhood memories of the pre-WWII Hiroshima, something of a small Venice with its many rivers and taxi-gondolas. On summer nights his family would eat at cafés along the river and stroll the bustling streets of Nakajima district, then the central shopping and entertainment center. All that vanished with the bomb when Akio was eight. His sister Hisako, who was 14, was killed and Hiroshima almost disappeared into the dark side. The erudite and humanist Akio has dedicated his life to rebuilding his city, and now almost 82, continues to fight for peace every day. But Akio and other citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone cannot save us from nuclear annihilation. We must step up, all of us, now—this is by far our most urgent mission.