What Two Enemies Share

“IF a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks ago, when an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was reportedly imminent. 
From early adolescence, at the start of Iran’s 1979 revolution, my loyalties have so often been questioned that I’ve come to think of such suspicions as my Iranian-Jewish inheritance.
In the early 1980s in Tehran, a small group of socialist intellectuals who clandestinely gathered in an apartment every Thursday evening let me into their circle. Those were dangerous years. The government was new to power and violently insecure. Opposition groups were under assault. A war was raging with Iraq, and the United States had imposed sanctions. Our days were spent in queues, as the most basic staples were rationed.

New York Times, February 25, 2012