Arash Azizi

Will they accept like a 300% pay cut for the next year?

Because that's what Iranians have had to go through, right?

So because of this, there is indeed a huge gap.

They basically, they're faced with a regime that has been trying to repress them, is super corrupt on its own terms, brought them international isolation, poverty, declining economy.

I know to put the cherry on the top,

Iranians are kind of a very patriotic people, and this regime doesn't even sort of, and it has now understood and tries to speak more in the language of Iranian nationalism, but it has make them involved in an issue like Israel-Palestine, for example, that is not a core Iranian national issue.

It would be actually very different if it was a regime that was involved in nationalist adventurism.

Iranians could see, but it's, and this is also hard for outsiders to believe, you know,

Iranians had no clue about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

Like if you ask people, you know, I'm an expert on this issue.

I'm a Middle East politics guy.

I'm always amazed.

I talk to young Iranians, even though the regime every day has talked about Palestine for so long, they don't know anything.

Like they don't know what's the difference between 1967, 1948.

They don't know because this is not a topic that they felt close to.

And by the way, that's how it's very funny.

People on the American left understand that about America,

They understand very well why many Americans are like, we don't wanna be involved in Iran or the Middle East.

But they somehow can't understand that Iranians, well, they feel the same about Palestine, Israel, which is thousands of kilometers away, is not related to them, and it has cost them a lot.

So this confrontation with Israel and the United States,