As this is written, a 26-year-old Iranian named Erfan Soltani is waiting to be taken from his cell and hanged.
He was arrested at home near Karaj last week, accused of taking part in the new wave of protests against Iran’s rulers and charged with moharebeh – “war against God.” Human-rights organizations say his trial was a formality, held at speed, with no meaningful defense and no real right of appeal. His case is described as the first protest-linked execution of this uprising, but this is neither the first, nor the last.
Behind Erfan’s story is a much larger horror. Since the demonstrations began, thousands of protesters have been murdered by the regime. Conservative counts from groups like HRANA confirm more than 2,500 deaths; some investigations by opposition media put the true number far higher, in the five-figure range. The state admits to roughly 2,000 dead, blending protesters and security forces into one statistic. What nobody seriously disputes is that we are looking at one of the biggest massacres in modern Iranian history.
And yet, in city after city, people keep coming. They chant not only “Death to the dictator,” but a slogan that would have sounded impossible a few years ago: “Javid Shah” – long live the Shah. They march under the old Lion and Sun flag of the monarchy.
They shout that the exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, will return.
Western observers often treat this as nostalgia: a country that has suffered under a theocracy reaching back for a romanticized past. But listen carefully and it sounds more like engineering. The crowds are not dreaming of marble palaces. They are looking for something solid enough to confront a clerical regime with guns, keep the state in one piece, and then submit to elections. In a landscape of failed republics and brutal militias, they are reaching for a tool that still has weight in the imagination of the region: a crown.
The methods that are killing Erfan are familiar to anyone in Israel who has watched Gaza. The names are different – Revolutionary Guards, Basij, Quds Force instead of Qassam Brigades – but the logic is the same. The rulers claim the right to speak for God. They blur politics with religion, criticism with treason. They make examples in public squares. Hamas has executed its internal enemies in courtyards and crossroads; Tehran now does it with a noose and a charge of “war against God.”
If you accept that as normal, then everything becomes a holy war. If you reject it, you have to ask a very unromantic question: what kind of institutional machine can actually defeat movements like this – and still leave space for ordinary people to decide their future?
The Kingdom of Gaza
That is the question I have tried to answer in my work on what I call the Kingdom of Gaza.
The idea is not to export the Pahlavis to the Mediterranean. It is to treat constitutional monarchy as a piece of political technology, not as nostalgia – a way of concentrating legitimacy in a single, recognizable figure while locking his power inside a legal box and giving the public a clear, scheduled chance to say yes or no.
Applied to Gaza, the sequence looks like this.
First, Hamas has to be dismantled and the shooting stopped. In its place comes some form of international Board of Peace – call it what you like – with real authority to stabilize the Strip: reopen hospitals, restore water and electricity, demobilize gunmen, rewrite school curricula. This is the crisis-management phase; without it, nothing else can start.
The difference from previous experiments is what happens next. Instead of handing the keys to the next party militia or leaving a vacuum for Islamic Jihad or some new franchise of ISIS, the Board would oversee the installation of a Muslim constitutional monarch for Gaza – a sovereign whose status does not come from a militia biography but from a lineage millions of believers already recognize.
In practice, that means looking to the established royal houses of the region: ideally those that trace their ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, such as the Hashemites of Jordan or the Alaouites of Morocco, but potentially also other durable dynasties like the House of Saud. The crucial element is not a specific family name but a kind of legitimacy that a local warlord cannot fake.
This king would not rule as a 19th-century autocrat. From the first day, his authority would be caged inside a written constitution. An elected parliament and an independent judiciary would stand opposite him. His role would be to guarantee continuity; to veto any attempt by one faction to capture the whole state; to symbolize the long view while ministries, courts, schools and roads are painfully built up from the rubble.
And the most important clause in that constitution would not be about the king at all. It would be about the end of his reign.
The Board of Peace would make its own departure conditional on a binding referendum in Gaza, monitored by outsiders that both sides can tolerate. At its simplest, that referendum would ask one question: do you wish to keep this constitutional monarchy, yes or no? A “no” vote would automatically trigger a shift to a republican model using the same institutions. The king arrives, in other words, with his own expiry date written into the law.
Why begin with Gaza rather than the West Bank or somewhere else? Because, for once, there is a Palestinian territory whose future border with Israel is not in dispute. Gaza and Israel do not claim the same land. Gaza is small enough to secure and rebuild. And after the last war, it is clear to almost everyone who lives within rocket range that the old menu – militias, “resistance,” NGO management – has produced only ruins and trauma.
Look back at Iran. Young men and women who never saw the Shah are chanting for the monarchy while their friends are blinded by metal pellets and their classmates are buried at night without funerals. They are not simple. They are choosing what they think is the least dangerous bridge away from the rule of the turban.
In Gaza, we have a terrible luxury they do not: the chance to design such a bridge in advance.
I do not pretend that a Kingdom of Gaza would be pure, or painless, or guaranteed to succeed. I am saying only this: the region itself is showing us, in blood and banners, that monarchy – constrained, time-limited, constitutional – still has a specific kind of power against Islamist regimes that claim God as their party leader.
If thousands of Iranians are willing to risk their lives under royal flags to escape one theocracy, perhaps we should at least consider whether a deliberately designed monarchy could help another people escape another. We have tried every obvious solution in Gaza. They have all failed. The least we can do, in honor of people like Erfan Soltani, is to think seriously about one that is not obvious at all.
The writer is a Moscow-born Israeli novelist, tech entrepreneur and art-photographer and author of the bestselling novel Loneliness-12.