Since the outbreak of the current war between Israel and Iran—much like during the previous one last summer—I have been sought after for interviews by foreign media. An Iranian-born pro-Palestinian Israeli political activist is, it seems, a highly desirable commodity. Some want me to explain the Israeli position, others the Iranian one, still others to hear about the attitudes of the Jewish Iranian community in Israel. I find myself repeating the same answers over and over. I cannot explain these positions, I say, since I find them difficult to understand myself. Nothing about this war makes much sense to me.

During one interview I was asked whether I thought my parents had made a mistake when they left Iran following the 1979 revolution. The question astonished me, not because I found it offensive but because I have been asking it myself for so many years. Now, as I watch my homeland go up in flames, it echoes in my mind more loudly than ever.

My family and I left Iran in January 1979, on the same day the Shah fled the country. I was nine years old. Later my parents came to identify as Zionists and even sought to apply that identity to themselves retroactively. But the truth is that until the revolution they had never even considered emigrating to Israel; all of our plans for the future took place in Iran. Over the years, as I became Israeli, my parents maintained a proud Iranian identity. From our emigration until his death, there was not a single day when my father’s soul did not long for his Tehran.

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My parents were not especially political people. Life in Iran’s middle class suited them well: when the revolution began my father had recently been promoted and become the manager of the main branch of one of Iran’s largest banks, and we spent time at its exclusive members’ club once or twice a week. On winter weekends we would travel to the ski resorts near Tehran; in the spring we would spend time in the city’s green outskirts. We divided our summer vacations between our family home in Isfahan and the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Our Judaism was not demanding; it was simply part of the creek bed through which our lives streamed. My brother and I attended a Jewish school, and our family celebrated the Jewish holidays. But we drove our car to the synagogue, even on Yom Kippur, and never avoided eating at a friend’s home or a restaurant because the food was not kosher. Our social circles included Muslims, Armenians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and others. Even our names, before we were compelled to change them in Israel, came from classical Persian rather than Hebrew.

As demonstrations swelled in late 1978, my parents’ sense of stability began to falter. Like many Jewish members of the middle class, they attributed their rise to the economic and secularizing reforms overseen by the Shah and his father in the first half of the twentieth century. The revolution, which was taking on an increasingly pronounced Islamic character, seemed to them to bode poorly. To be sure, its leaders consistently emphasized that Jews were—and would remain—an integral part of Iran’s social fabric; many Jews also took part in the uprising, whether within the ranks of the Communist Party or through other political channels. But the revolution made other Jews, like my parents, feel like a minority in their own country for the first time. They feared losing their share in a society whose foundation would be Islamic law.

One evening in late December we went to get labu—pieces of warm, sweet beetroot wrapped in newspaper that street vendors in Tehran sold on cold winter days. As we reached the main road where my father’s bank branch was located, we saw, from across the street, a group of masked people smashing the building’s windows, as protesters were doing at banks all over the country. We stood and watched as they broke inside, pulled down the portrait of the Shah that hung on the wall, and set the place on fire before running away.

My parents described our departure weeks later as something temporary, just until the storm passed. My brother and I did not have time to say goodbye to our friends, but we were sure that we would see them again. In Israel we encountered attitudes that were broadly patronizing and often racist. The fact that Iran was a Muslim country marked us as inferior; in the 1970s Tehran was more cosmopolitan than anything Israel had to offer, yet now our new classmates—and even our teachers—asked, for example, if we had lived in a tent before emigrating, or if I had ever seen an elevator. The English teacher at my new school in Jerusalem automatically placed me in the weakest study group, even though my school in Tehran had begun Hebrew and English lessons in kindergarten and my English was far more advanced than that of my Israeli classmates. The school’s administration awarded me a scholarship that I had never asked for and did not need.

As an immigrant child, the impulse to not only integrate but fully assimilate became almost existential for me. In the end I succeeded in this task far beyond expectation—unlike my parents, who never stopped feeling like strangers in their new country. A painful gulf opened between us: I now belonged in a place whose rules they could never quite decipher, no matter how hard they tried.

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My father has been gone for far too many years now, and in a cruel trick of nature my mother has lost the ability to speak. Within this silence I now sink into their longing—a longing that was foreign to me for so long, and which now feels as though it is eating at me from within. I see the sorrow in my mother’s eyes as she watches Tehran burning on her television screen, and I take comfort in the fact that my father did not live to witness this horror. And I find myself longing, in both of their stead, for Tehran, Karaj, Isfahan—for all those beautiful places where we lived our lives before they became lists of bombing targets, their names horribly mispronounced by smug journalists.

Watching Israeli news channels has become unbearable. Support for the war is wall-to-wall; I have not seen a single journalist ask why this latest attack was necessary when only nine months ago, at the end of the last war with Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel had achieved a “historic victory that will stand for generations.” The Zionist opposition parties have also lined up in favor: their leader in the Knesset, Yair Lapid, tweeted that for now “there is no coalition and opposition—there is only one people and one IDF, and we all stand behind it.” Yair Golan, the head of the Democrats party and supposedly the leftmost figure on the Zionist political spectrum, also expressed his support: “The IDF and the security forces are operating with strength and professionalism; they have our full backing.” The police, which have been operating in the spirit of Itamar Ben-Gvir since the Kahanist minister assumed control of the Ministry of National Security, have violently dispersed the few small antiwar demonstrations that have taken place.

On social media I am confronted with images of horror: the videos from Gaza that I absorbed every day for more than two years have suddenly been replaced by videos from Iran; now the cries of anguish are not in Arabic but in Persian. And as they did with images of destruction from Gaza, my fellow Israelis respond to pictures of Tehran in flames with laughing emojis. I see an advertisement from a carpet company offering a discount sale on Persian carpets under the headline “Eliminating the Persians.” It is as if, to the people around me, the lives of people elsewhere have no substance, are not real. Throughout my many years as a political activist, I have grown accustomed to feeling anger at Israeli society. But now it does not anger me—it frightens me.

In a little less than a week Iranians will celebrate Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, a beautiful holiday that marks the beginning of spring. I remember vividly the excitement leading up to the festivities in Tehran: the thorough cleaning of every home, the carpets taken outside to air. I sprinkle water on the plate of lentils I am sprouting, which will stand at the center of the holiday table, and I think of Tehran covered in soot, and of the black, poisonous rain falling over the city. I shrink from the thought that the country whose citizenship I hold is responsible for this suffering. I think of my parents, who feared becoming a minority. And I, who feel more like a minority here in Israel with every passing day, fill with longing for a homeland now in flames.