The Rising Lion

 

Sometimes the old symbols rise from their graves like hungry ghosts, and when they do, blood follows.

Chapter 1: The Lions Wake

On that Friday in June—and wasn’t it always a Friday when the world decided to crack open like a rotten egg—the fighter jets screamed across the desert sky like metallic angels of death. Sixty of them, give or take, each one carrying enough ordnance to turn a city block into a smoking crater. The kind of numbers that made old men in war rooms smile their cold, calculating smiles.

Benjamin Netanyahu stood at his office window that morning, watching the sunrise paint Jerusalem in shades of amber and blood. In his pocket, a folded piece of paper held the words he’d whispered into the cracks of the Western Wall ten days prior: “Behold, a people rises like a lion…”

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Ancient words, ancient symbols, all of it dancing together in a waltz as old as hatred itself.

Operation Rising Lion, they called it. Pretty name for ugly work. But then again, the prettiest names always hid the ugliest truths, didn’t they? Like calling a cancer “a growth” or a massacre “collateral damage.”

Across the desert, in the sprawling cities of Iran, people were going about their morning routines—brewing tea, kissing their children goodbye, arguing about the weather. They had no idea that in a few hours, their world would shift on its axis. They never do, these innocent bystanders in the great game of nations. They wake up thinking Tuesday will be like Monday, that their corner grocery will still be there when they need milk, that their sons will come home from university with dirty laundry and big dreams.

But history has a way of reaching out with its bony fingers and grabbing you by the throat when you least expect it.

Chapter 2: Ghosts in the Machine

The strike came with surgical precision—the kind that makes military men orgasmic and mothers weep. Tabriz. Kermanshah. Isfahan. Tehran. Each name a dot on a map, each dot a constellation of human lives about to be rearranged.

The Khondab heavy water reactor took a direct hit, its concrete and steel skeleton cracking like an old man’s ribs. Somewhere in the rubble, a nuclear scientist—a man who’d probably dreamed of peaceful atoms and clean energy—became another statistic in the great ledger of progress.

But it was the symbolism that cut deepest, wasn’t it? Always the symbolism.

Rising Lion. Two words that reached back through the centuries like spectral hands, dragging the ghost of old Persia kicking and screaming into the present. The lion and sun—that ancient emblem that had fluttered on Iranian banners when the Shah was still a king and oil was just black gold waiting to be pumped from the desert’s belly.

In the war rooms of Tel Aviv, someone had been very clever. Very, very clever.

“The rise of the lion for the victory of light over darkness,” the propaganda proclaimed, and somewhere in Tehran, old men who remembered the Shah’s reign felt something cold crawl up their spines. Memory is a dangerous thing when weaponized. It cuts both ways, like a double-edged sword spinning in the dark.

Chapter 3: The Puppet Strings

Three days before the bombs fell, a phone rang in the White House. Donald Trump, that peculiar American emperor with his orange tan and Twitter obsession, picked up the receiver to hear Netanyahu’s voice crackling across the Atlantic.

What did they discuss? The weather? The fate of nations? The price of oil futures?

History would record only that they spoke, but in the spaces between recorded words, deals were made. The kind of deals that shift the balance of power like tectonic plates grinding against each other in the earth’s belly.

By Monday, Trump was tweeting—because of course he was tweeting—about regime change and making Iran great again. MIGA, he called it, like some twisted echo of his campaign slogan. The man who’d built his political career on the bones of American nostalgia was now selling Iranian nostalgia to the highest bidder.

“If the current Iranian Regime cannot MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why not have a regime change???”

The question marks hung in the digital air like vultures, circling the corpse of diplomatic subtlety.

Chapter 4: The Lion’s Shadow

But here’s the thing about symbols—they’re like viruses. Once they get into the bloodstream of a culture, they replicate and mutate and take on lives of their own.

The lion and sun wasn’t just Pahlavi propaganda. It was older than that, older than the Shah, older than the Revolution, older than the oil that made men rich and nations crazy. Twelve centuries old, give or take, evolving through dynasties like a genetic code written in gold and crimson.

Under the Safavids, it represented the marriage of state and religion. Under the Qajars, they added a sword and crown—because what’s a lion without teeth, and what’s power without the symbols to prove it? The Imperial Order of the Lion and Sun, established in 1808, when Napoleon was still rearranging the map of Europe and America was still figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

Green, white, and red—the colors of Iranian flags since 1906, when revolution was still a dirty word whispered in coffeehouses and written on pamphlets passed hand to hand in Tehran’s bazaars.

The lion: power, heroism, the legendary Rostam, Imam Ali—the Lion of Allah. Images that stirred something primal in the Persian soul, something that transcended politics and tapped into the deep wells of cultural memory.

The sun: Mithra, justice, covenants, the light that pierces darkness. Ancient stuff, the kind of mythology that gets into your bones and never lets go.

Chapter 5: Exiles and Echoes

Reza Pahlavi sat in his exile—where, exactly, didn’t matter; exile is a state of mind as much as geography—watching the news coverage with the mixed emotions of a man whose past had become someone else’s weapon.

He’d been calling for secular democracy, human rights, non-violent resistance. Noble goals, the kind that look good on letterhead and sound impressive at fundraising dinners. But nobility has a way of wilting under the desert sun of realpolitik.

The Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse, he claimed. The Iranian people should reclaim their nation, he urged. But from where he sat—in some Western capital, drinking Western coffee, speaking to Western audiences—his words carried the hollow ring of distance.

The younger generation in Iran, the women fighting for their rights, the minorities struggling for recognition—they looked at his royal bloodline and saw not liberation but another form of oppression. The monarchy, to them, wasn’t a golden age to be restored but a ghost story told by old men who’d forgotten the price of their privilege.

“Any genuine democratic transformation must start from within by the people, for the people, and free from the ghosts of empire,” someone wrote in CounterPunch, and wasn’t that the truth? The ghosts of empire have a way of hanging around like unwelcome relatives, overstaying their welcome and eating all the food.

Chapter 6: The Long Game

Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador to Israel, understood the game being played. History, he knew, was littered with the bones of those who thought they could force Iran to its knees through sheer arrogance.

“Iran thrives under pressure,” he observed, and wasn’t that the damnedest thing? Like a desert flower that blooms in drought, Iran had a way of turning adversity into strength, sanctions into solidarity, isolation into innovation.

The Tehran Times quoted him, and somewhere in the halls of power, analysts were already crunching numbers, running scenarios, gaming out the possibilities. What if Iran didn’t fold? What if the pressure created not capitulation but radicalization? What if the lion, instead of lying down, decided to roar?

Epilogue: The Darkness Between

Netanyahu returned to the Western Wall on that Tuesday, ten days after his first visit, and slipped another note between the ancient stones. “That people has risen, the nation of Israel lives.”

The words echoed in the limestone cracks, joining the prayers of centuries, the hopes and fears of generations who’d stood at that wall and whispered their secrets to God or history or whoever might be listening.

But symbols, like prayers, are tricky things. They mean what you want them to mean, until they don’t. The Rising Lion operation had succeeded in its immediate tactical goals—bombs fell, targets were destroyed, important people died. But the lion and sun symbol, that ancient Persian phoenix, was now loose in the world again, carrying with it all the weight of memory and the promise of consequences.

In the desert, the wind picked up sand and scattered it across borders that existed only on maps. The sand didn’t care about nations or symbols or the grand games of power. It just blew where the wind took it, covering and uncovering, burying and revealing, like time itself—patient, inexorable, and utterly indifferent to the small, fierce ambitions of men.

And in the spaces between the official statements and the classified briefings, in the gap between rhetoric and reality, something stirred. Something old and patient and very, very angry.

The lion was rising, alright. The only question was which lion, and whether anyone would be left standing when it finished stretching its claws.

Sometimes the old symbols rise from their graves like hungry ghosts. And sometimes, when they do, they remember exactly why they were buried in the first place.