After the Israeli regime launched its no-holds-barred genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, it found support from familiar quarters: Iranian monarchists based in Western countries, led by the son of the deposed Shah.
In statements to Western and Israeli media following the events of October 7, the self-proclaimed “crown prince,” Reza Pahlavi, openly endorsed the assault on Gaza, while vilifying the Gaza-based resistance movement Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In November 2024, his wife, Yasmine Pahlavi, was photographed at a pro-Israel rally in Washington, waving the long-discredited Pahlavi and Israeli flags, images that were quickly circulated across social media by Pahlavi-linked bot networks.
As the death toll from the genocidal war mounted, the son of the former Iranian monarch and his loyalists aggressively lobbied on behalf of the child-murdering regime, repeatedly justifying its war crimes that earned the Israeli murderers arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Pahlavi has been unapologetic about his close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, as well as lobby groups, even traveling to the occupied territories to publicly endorse the regime’s occupation, genocide, and settler-colonial policies.
The alliance between Iran’s former monarchists and the Israeli regime – actors united by shared interests – gained further momentum after Pahlavi and his spouse visited the Israeli-occupied territories in April 2024 at the invitation of Netanyahu himself.
The visit marked the formalization of what had long been an informal and deeply troubling relationship.
This relationship was further solidified after the Tel Aviv regime launched an unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression against Iran in June this year, resulting in the martyrdom of more than 1,000 people, including women and children.
While the Iranian nation mourned its dead, Pahlavi monarchists openly celebrated. Reza Pahlavi offered no words of sympathy for the victims of the 12-day war, laying bare where his loyalties truly lie.
Recently, he resurfaced once again as merchants in Iran organized peaceful demonstrations in Tehran to protest sharp fluctuations in the national currency, the rial.
Seizing the moment, Pahlavi sought to exploit the situation by calling on Mossad- and CIA-linked sleeper cells inside Iran to incite riots and hijack what had begun as peaceful protests.
Not long before, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel was running a covert influence operation using fake accounts and AI-generated content to promote Pahlavi and advocate for the restoration of monarchy in the Islamic Republic, underscoring the depth of this alliance.
Iran riots 2026 – The same old playbook
What unfolded on Thursday and Friday amounted to “terrorism,” as Iranian officials succinctly described it, when armed rioters rampaged through Tehran and other cities, setting fire to public property, including bus stations, banks, hospitals, and mosques.
The violence followed calls by Pahlavi, speaking from his home in Maryland, urging rioters inside Iran to carry out acts of terror, in line with a script coordinated with Israeli and American intelligence agencies.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in remarks delivered on Friday, stressed that the country would “not back down against vandals,” rejecting acts of destruction carried out to appease foreign powers.
At the same time, he underscored that peaceful protests over economic grievances remain legitimate.
“The Islamic Republic will not back down against vandals. It will not tolerate mercenaries of foreigners,” he said, emphasizing that anyone who serves foreign powers is “rejected” by the Iranian nation.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf echoed these remarks on Sunday, affirming that Iran recognizes the people’s right to peaceful protest over economic concerns, but will stand firmly against armed terrorism.
“Those who openly identify themselves as foreign mercenaries, betraying their own homeland to please the US president [Donald Trump], transforming themselves into Daesh operatives, and inciting a terrorist war, should know that we will confront them with the most severe measures,” Qalibaf warned.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also cautioned the United States and the Israeli regime over their support for the rioters in a post on X on Saturday.
“President Trump’s own former CIA director has openly and unashamedly highlighted what Mossad and its American enablers are really up to,” he wrote, referring to former CIA chief Mike Pompeo.
The intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) also said in a statement on Friday that all foreign-backed plots aimed at destabilizing the country would be decisively confronted.
Ali Larijani, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), likewise said that security forces and the judiciary were prepared to respond “in the strongest manner” to foreign-linked individuals involved in armed violence and organized attacks targeting the Iranian nation.
Pahlavi, according to observers, serves as a pawn in this sinister game played by the US and the Israeli regime to realize what they have sought for more than four decades.
The pitiful life of the younger Pahlavi
The life story of the younger Pahlavi reads as a peculiar chronicle marked by repeated setbacks across nearly every domain – political, academic, familial, professional, financial, and commercial – failures that observers link to grandiose aspirations that were never realistic.
He was born the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the former Iranian autocrat installed and sustained by American and British backing, and was groomed from childhood as the designated successor to the throne.
That trajectory, however, collapsed when Iranians rose against the Western-backed monarchy more than four decades ago, overthrowing the regime and establishing the Islamic Republic.
As the popular revolution unfolded, he fled Iran with his family and eventually settled in the US. There, he enrolled at two separate colleges but failed to complete his studies at either institution.
Even earlier, before the Revolution, he attempted to undergo pilot training in the US military system, enrolling in a one-year program but dropping out just months before completion.
Years later, he claimed in his own memoirs that he had volunteered to serve in the Iranian Air Force during Iraq’s Ba'athist invasion of Iran, only to be turned away – a narrative widely dismissed as a fabrication designed to craft a heroic personal myth.
Following his father’s death, the then 20-year-old declared himself the new “king” of Iran, a self-coronation that received no recognition whatsoever, not even from the US government, which deliberately distanced itself from him.
Decades later, revelations by Israeli intelligence figures exposed that during the 1980s Sacred Defense period, Pahlavi had in fact been plotting a coup aimed at reinstalling himself as monarch.
The plan reportedly began with outreach to Yaakov Nimrodi, the Israeli intelligence operative involved in training Iran’s notorious SAVAK, and included the approval of nearly $800 million in military hardware by then Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon.
The scheme collapsed entirely, after which Pahlavi retreated from public view, relocating to a lavish estate in Virginia. There, he married, lived extravagantly, and spent generously from funds reportedly supplied by American and Israeli backers.
His financial mismanagement eventually caught up with him. Former associates from the old regime filed lawsuits against him, and he was seen in courtrooms pleading his case, claiming he had exhausted his funds.
By his own acknowledgment, the 63-year-old son of Iran’s last monarch has never held steady employment, surviving instead on wealth his father stole from the Iranian people and donations from pro-monarchy supporters based in Western countries.
The loss of royal privilege proved devastating for his family. Two of his siblings reportedly struggled with severe depression and substance abuse, ultimately taking their own lives.
Even on a personal level, many of his aspirations went unrealized. One of his long-held desires – to father a son who could serve as a symbolic heir – never materialized.
The unattainable goal
For many years, Pahlavi portrayed himself as politically neutral, insisting he had no interest in restoring the monarchy, a concession to the reality that such a project was implausible.
Yet encouragement from American and Zionist allies steadily pushed him back into the political spotlight.
Whenever unrest surfaced in Iran, he was quick to insert himself, calling for the removal of the Islamic Republic’s democratically elected leadership and presenting himself as a supposed alternative figurehead.
During the 2010s, Western governments, particularly the US, UK, and Israel, expanded support for a wide spectrum of anti-Iran factions, from Marxist groups and ethnic separatists to monarchists, including Pahlavi.
Like other Western-backed entities branded as “the opposition,” he claimed leadership of a broad, inclusive “national council,” which in practice amounted to little more than a personal platform surrounded by a small circle of loyalists.
Persian-language satellite networks enthusiastically promoted him as an opposition leader, most notably the UK-based monarchist channel Manoto, which ceased operations earlier this year.
These outlets focused heavily on romanticizing royal rule as a lost utopia, glamorizing the lifestyle of the former ruling elite, and targeting younger audiences. Additional content included historical revisionism, conspiracy theories about the revolution, dismissal of Iran’s achievements, and disproportionate emphasis on isolated social issues.
Pahlavi regularly appeared on these platforms, echoing the geopolitical narratives of Washington, London, and Tel Aviv, while consistently denying the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.
With Trump’s arrival in the White House last time, Pahlavi identified what he believed to be a renewed opening. He aligned himself with an administration dominated by neoconservatives and hardline Zionists, endorsing US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and parroting Trump’s rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program.
He became a vocal advocate of the “maximum pressure” campaign, absurdly claiming that crippling sanctions reflected the wishes of the Iranian people, an assertion that revealed his profound detachment from their lived reality.
At the time, his actions suggested confidence that Trump’s strategy would dismantle Iran’s political system, and he worked to present himself as a ready-made figure for a US-engineered “new Iran.”
He was frequently seen alongside Sheldon Adelson, the late Republican billionaire and militant Zionist who once openly suggested using a nuclear weapon against Iran. He also attended multiple events at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC-affiliated think tank known for its aggressive pro-Israel agenda.
When Trump’s policies ultimately failed, Pahlavi’s hopes dimmed, prompting him to seek more direct backing, financial and symbolic, from the Zionist regime itself.
Pahlavi-Israel alignment
In April 2023, Pahlavi and his wife undertook a five-day visit to the Israeli-occupied territories, where they were warmly welcomed by Netanyahu and intelligence minister Gila Gamliel.
In Tel Aviv, Pahlavi echoed Netanyahu’s rhetoric almost verbatim, jointly fantasizing about the collapse of the Islamic Republic and the return of monarchical rule.
Accompanied by Gamliel, the couple toured various sites, attended a ceremony at Yad Vashem, and performed a Jewish prayer at the Western Wall, carefully avoiding any visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque or acknowledgment of Palestinian occupation.
His wife later shared photographs with Israeli female soldiers in occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds, featuring a slogan previously deployed during Western- and Israeli-backed riots in Iran.
Pahlavi was joined on the trip by Amir-Hossein Etemadi, Saeed Ghasseminejad, and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a US-based Zionist lobbying organization.
All three are known for virulently anti-Iranian and anti-Palestinian positions, their advocacy of harsh sanctions, and open support for US-Israeli military confrontation with Iran.
He also met with Hananya Naftali, a Likud-linked social media propagandist and Netanyahu associate who has maintained Persian-language accounts on X and Facebook since 2020, despite not speaking the language.
Israeli media and Pahlavi himself labeled the visit “historic,” though in reality it amounted to little more than a mutual publicity exercise, reflecting long-established ties rather than any genuine breakthrough.
The relationship between the Pahlavi dynasty and Zionist interests dates back to the 1960s, when SAVAK was created with Israeli assistance and secret oil arrangements were finalized beyond public scrutiny.
Pahlavi’s own connections to Israeli intelligence trace back to the 1980s, when he sought their help in orchestrating a monarchist coup, ties that have only deepened over time.
Since the June war against Iran, Israel has again propped up the wannabe ruler, without any luck.
Pahlavi support and the anti-Iranian Crusade
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