We’re not even a week into 2026, and already the year looks set to be no less monumental than 2025 on the world stage.
Much of the attention is on the successful but controversial arrest and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US Navy Seals. And rightly so: it’s an unprecedented move by US President Donald Trump, with potentially huge repercussions. However, events are unfolding in Iran that are potentially even more significant.
What started off on December 28 as a relatively contained protest against Iran’s rapidly deteriorating economy that took place mostly in the country’s commercial districts — especially in its famed bazaars — quickly erupted into a nationwide movement calling, once again, for the fall of the Islamic Republic and its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Sceptics point out that we’ve been here before with Iran. And indeed we have.
The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022-23, which resulted from the arrest, beating and ultimate death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her hijab “incorrectly”, and the “Green Movement” protests of 2009-10 that erupted after the re-election of hard-liner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a rigged election, were just two of the dozens of protests against the Islamic Republic ever since it took control of the country in 1979.
Admittedly, most of the others — including one just last year — have been on a far smaller scale and usually with more limited demands. But all were quite clearly unsuccessful in seriously damaging, let alone overthrowing, the regime.
And yet for the Middle East things change quickly, and the reality of 2022 or 2009 was quite different from that of 2026. So much so, that there are real reasons to expect that these protests could have a different outcome than those of the past — even the long overdue fall of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes and largest sponsors of Jihadist terror.
The dismantling of a lie
Most Iranians despise the Islamic Republic regime, but it has long maintained control over its population through brute force, as all fascists do.
The Islamic Republic and its military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have long projected an image of vast military might, within the country and without. Considering how successfully it quashed former protests, its ongoing nuclear programme, its armada of ballistic missiles and its countless terror proxies across the region and beyond, that image was hardly lacking in substance.
But then it made a fatal mistake: it engaged Israel in open warfare. Things could have gone very differently. There is evidence to suggest that it was a mere lack of co-ordination that prevented the massacre of October 7 from being even worse, as Hezbollah was supposed to attack Israel’s north just as Hamas attacked its south but failed to do so until a few days later, when Israel was on full alert.
Instead, for all of the suffering and death, every part of the Islamic Republic’s multi-front war on Israel proved just how empty Iran’s vaunted power actually was.
Of all of Iran’s proxies, Hamas has proven to be the most resilient, as it remains a powerful guerrilla force in Gaza and a real obstacle to peace, but its military leadership has been decimated and most of its terror infrastructure has been destroyed — sadly, with the civilian infrastructure into which it was woven.
Meanwhile, after a year of terrorising the residents of northern Israel — climaxing in its murder of a dozen Druz children — Hezbollah was for all intents and purposes nullified in Israel’s notorious but mind-bogglingly brilliant “pager attack operation”, in which thousands of Hezbollah leaders and fighters were crippled or killed simultaneously by exploding pagers engineered by Israel, with almost no civilian casualties. This was swiftly followed by the elimination of most of its remaining leadership in targeted strikes.
Things hardly went better in Syria for the Islamic Republic, as the fall of the Assad regime broke Iran’s grip on the country, and while the Houthis in Yemen may have launched hundreds of rockets at Israel, they were never much more than a persistent pest — albeit an occasionally deadly one.
The devastation of the ‘12-Day War’
Nothing humiliated and weakened the Iranian regime more than last June’s “12-Day War”, in which Israel — with some last-minute direct aid from the US — took the fight directly to Iran itself with targeted strikes against its rapidly developing nuclear programme, much of its military infrastructure and many of its military leaders and nuclear scientists.
In retaliation Iran let loose its available arsenal of ballistic missiles, and though the results were far more devastating than similar missile attacks over the past two years — about 28 Israelis lost their lives, with thousands more injured and dozens of buildings destroyed — it was a far cry from the show of military might Iran may have hoped it to be.
Israel’s long-standing policy of every civilian dwelling having a bomb shelter, or at least access to one, once again kept civilian casualties as low as possible, but beyond that, defensively and offensively, Israel proved that it outclassed Iran militarily.
It showed the Islamic Republic to be every bit as incompetent as it is corrupt, radical and oppressive.
Despite possessing one of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Islamic Republic has driven its people into economic ruin, pouring untold billions into a military network aimed at the destruction of a country it does not even border.
Its nuclear programme has achieved little more than ever-harsher sanctions — paid not by Iran’s leaders, but by civilians.
This was already enough to fuel the ire of most Iranians who already despised it, but it’s hard to imagine that even the Islamic Republic’s most fervent supporters weren’t disillusioned when it proved that all those billions of dollars were dedicated to a military project that ultimately amounted to little more than hot air.
A weak Iran, an indifferent world
The Islamic Republic has not been this weak in years, perhaps ever. If ever there was a moment for the Iranian people, rather than outside forces, to overthrow their draconian leadership, it is now. But to do this, they do need all the outside support they can get.
Fortunately, we know there are hundreds of thousands of people across the Western world and beyond who will take to the streets to stand for what’s right and true — and to stand against the massacring of innocent Middle Eastern civilians by an oppressive …
Wait, no, sorry, much like when it came to the actual genocides in Syria, Yemen and Sudan, those claimed millions of “activists” and “human rights champions” are nowhere to be found. There are no mass protests on the streets of London or Paris calling for a “free Iran”, or encampments on university campuses staging sit-ins in solidarity with the Iranian people.
No placards calling out the murder of dozens of innocent protesters, and no celebrities proudly displaying their trendy anti-IRGC pins as awards season heats up. No grassroots movements demanding that Western governments exert pressure on the Islamic Republic stand by the protesters in Iran who are risking life and limb just by wearing their hair uncovered or playing secular music on the streets.
Because once again the adage has proven true: “No Jews, no news.” But so be it. These vapid hypocrites continue to show exactly who and what they are. Meanwhile, the Iranian protesters continue to show exactly who and what they are: freedom fighters and heroic social justice warriors in the truest sense of those terms.
May they finally succeed in ridding themselves once and for all of their tyrannical oppressors and usher in a new, better era for their country and the whole region. It’s been far, far too long coming.
• Preskovsky is a freelance writer.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.