“It’s been over 30 years the Islamic Republic is telling us that Israel will bomb us,” Mona says through tears of exhaustion and anger, “and now that it is happening, we find out that not a single bunker has been built for us, not a single emergency plan designed, while everything continues to be more and more expensive! It’s as if no one cares for Iranians’ lives, including our own government!” The night before, Mona—my best friend back home, whose name I’ve anonymized—had driven for over four hours through heavy traffic to get out of Tehran and reach a small village right outside the city, where she and her partner think the bombings will be less intense. On the highway in the opposite direction towards Tehran: not a single vehicle. Since the Israeli defense minister’s warning to evacuate the capital city, almost everyone is trying to leave.

When Israel started carrying out a series of airstrikes on June 13 in “Operation Rising Lion,” its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed it was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. In a message to the “proud people of Iran” following the attacks, Netanyahu, as usual, says much more:

As we achieve our objective [to thwart the Islamic regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile threat], we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom … The regime does not know what hit them, or what will hit them … It has never been weaker. This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.

Posted on the Israeli prime minister’s official YouTube page, comments for “Uncle Benjamin” on “Making Iran Great Again” count in the thousands. “Bibi, we love you from Iran, and we love Israel,” reads a post by an account named DavinBritain.

It is not typical for a foreign leader to address himself to the people of another country, especially one he considers to be the archenemy of his own country, to call, essentially, for a coup d’état, while leveraging a former domestic protest movement, Woman, Life, Freedom, that started in September 2022 following the death while in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini.

But in Iran, control over Iranian narratives is constant, both from the authoritarian government, which is fixated on restricting its citizens’ speech, freedom of assembly, and opinion—lately evidenced by the strict legal actions and repressive response to the 2022 protests—as well as from foreign actors, who meddle with Iran’s domestic affairs with the goal of controlling the country’s narrative and, with that, its future.

Foreign-backed campaigns to destabilize the ruling regime in Iran, which has been in power since 1979, following the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, are nothing new. Netanyahu has been presenting to Western audiences its existential fight to stop Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program since at least 1992, paving the way to Israel’s overt intention to topple the Islamic Republic in Iran.

In the 2002 US congressional hearing that led up to the invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu, then foreign minister of Israel, was already sharing his obsession: “Of course we would like to see a regime change—at least, I would—in Iran, just like I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out. It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. Iran has … 250,000 satellite dishes. It has internet use.”

Today, when you turn on a TV in any Iranian city, foreign-based Persian-speaking media, which sometimes even report from critical military sites like the Israeli Iron Dome, are omnipresent, shedding severe doubt on the independence of the Iranian narratives these outlets frame.

In 2022, when Iranians, and more specifically Iranian women, took to the streets, their courageous defiance secured important—although fragile—gains within Iranian society. Mona, for example, has been defying the compulsory hijab laws every day since her release from prison in 2023 for joining the protests. Many other brave Iranian women like Mona decided to walk the streets of the country with no hijab, claiming their right to bodily autonomy.

Without foreign interference, Iranians’ fight for change in Iran has been underway, challenging Netanyahu’s statement that he is here to “free Iran.”

The manipulation of the narrative has spread from TV screens, or “satellite dishes,” to social media. Just a month before Israel began its attacks in Iran, many Iranians using VPNs to access social media apps like Instagram saw pop-up memes of Ayatollah Khamenei—Iran’s “supreme leader”—shattering into pieces, along with the message “The Islamic Republic of Iran is in its weakest phase”; the clip closes with shackled hands breaking free and the words “the free generation.”

Today, the official Israeli Defense Force’s social media account, which started in 2019  and counts millions of followers, curates IDF officials expressing themselves in fluent Farsi on past and ongoing military operations in Iran. The account even celebrates Iranian New Year, Noruz, and commemorates the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, as well as occasionally reposting messages from Reza Pahlavi, the Los Angeles–based son of the ousted King Pahlavi, a staunch supporter of Israel.  It is on this account that the IDF explained in Farsi that “the actions underway in Tehran are the same as the actions Israel took in Gaza and Lebanon.”

As Mona alluded to, it is as if Iranians are continuously being held back from their own agency in the struggle for change and peace. Whether towards a freer society or a devastating war, who is centering what the millions of Monas in Iran want?