On a wall outside Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance, two young women look out at the street. One is Mahsa Amini. The other is Shirel Haim Pour, an Israeli soldier from an Iranian Jewish family, killed at Nahal Oz on October 7. Above them, the wall reads: “Esthers of the World, Rise Up.” Below, in English, Hebrew and Persian: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

I want to explain to Israeli readers what that wall looks like from the Iranian side.

This week is the fourth anniversary of Mahsa’s death. She died in a Tehran hospital on 16 September 2022, three days after the morality police stopped her near a metro station over the way she wore her hijab. This year the anniversary falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during the ten days you set aside for teshuva. The word is usually translated as repentance, but its root means return, and return is closer to what I want to describe.

I grew up hearing the name Israel next to the word enemy, the way a child grows up hearing that water is wet, as a fact about the world rather than a claim anyone had to defend. The Islamic Republic has spent nearly half a century reinforcing that reflex in school textbooks, in Friday sermons, in murals of its own, in forty-seven years of the same slogan. It has less to show for the investment than it expected, because what it set out........

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