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Matti Friedman: After the Bombs
Matti Friedman: After the Bombs
Fully veiled women walk past a mural illustration depicting scenes from the epic Persian poem “Shahnama” (Book of Kings) in central Tehran. (Atta Kenara/AFP via Getty Images)
American B-2s just changed the Middle East. Now it’s time to return the region to the humans who live here.
By Matti Friedman
06.22.25 — International
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The Free Press
The Free Press
Matti Friedman: After the Bombs

JERUSALEM — It’s hard to talk about optimism on a morning with dozens of Israelis wounded by Iranian ballistic missiles, and with whole blocks in ruins in several of our cities. But as news sinks in of the dramatic U.S. Air Force attacks against the beating heart of the Axis of Resistance that has sown chaos across the Middle East over the past three decades—the whirring subterranean centrifuges that were bringing the Shia theocracy in Iran ever closer to a nuclear weapon—there’s a feeling of decisive change that we haven’t felt in this region for a very long time.

If these strikes, and the ones still being carried out by Israeli aircraft as I write, succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program and breaking the regime’s chokehold on its own people and those of other countries—then today could be remembered by hundreds of millions of people in this region, and by billions watching from afar, as a turning point.

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Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman is a Jerusalem-based columnist for The Free Press. He’s the author of four nonfiction books, of which the most recent is Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.
Tags:
Iran
Israel
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