The week Iran buried Ali Khamenei, Iranians in a Stuttgart square raised the Israeli flag — and told me why they stopped being afraid.

A woman came over to say hello, one of many who did that afternoon. The first thing I saw was the pendant at her neck. Her name, written in Hebrew. I read it to her. She wears her own name in the language of the people this regime has named its first enemy, and she wears it openly, on a public square where anyone can walk past and read it. She did not do it for me.

I had come to a small square off Mailänder Platz, where a few dozen people were standing. Iranians. The old imperial flag with the Lion and the Sun — the real one, they say, without the crab: their name for the stylized Allah the Islamic Republic put at the center of the flag in place of the lion. I counted: some twenty-five Iranian flags, seven or eight Israeli. A blue Star of David over a German square, in Iranian hands. Not a single headscarf in the crowd.

Two police officers stood nearby. That was all.

Iran had just finished burying Ali Khamenei — killed in February in a strike by the two adversaries he built his life around, the United States and Israel. His son and successor has not appeared in public since his appointment, not even at the funeral. American strikes were landing again this week. The theocracy is deeper in crisis than at any point in its forty-seven years. And in a German square, Iranians were not mourning. They were raising the flag of Israel.

It was not always like this, and they told me so themselves. Before........

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