In 2020, my family and I sued the Islamic Republic of Iran in a US federal court for its role in the terrorist attack I survived in Jerusalem in 2003. In 2024, I received a judgment holding the Iranian regime legally responsible.
That ruling mattered. And it was justice delivered through the court system. It was formal recognition that my attack was not random, not isolated, and not disconnected from a larger system of state-sponsored terror.
The United States has designated Iran a State Sponsor of Terrorism since January 1984. For decades, the Islamist regime has provided funding, weapons, and training to terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It sponsors the “pay-to-slay” program that provides stipends to families of Palestinian terrorists who carry out attacks against Israelis. This system incentivizes and embeds terrorism into economic policy.
When you survive an attack and later learn that a government helped finance the infrastructure behind it, that knowledge changes you forever. Call it foreign policy if you want. I call it exploding buses, shattered families, and trauma that lasts a lifetime.
Justice for victims of terrorism is rare. Monetary judgments are symbolic: they do not erase what happened or the long-term trauma lived with every day. Nor do they remove decades of fear that another attack could come at any time.
For years, I believed that justice would come through the courts. The ruling against Iran felt like the only form of accountability victims like me could realistically expect. But when I learned last night that the ayatollah – the man who led the regime responsible for funding the terror network behind my attack – had been eliminated, something shifted. For the first time, I felt a different kind of justice. Not symbolic. Not procedural. What I felt was real accountability for the system that made what I lived through possible.
When Americans protest, confronting Iran and accusing the US and Israel of “starting a war,” I don’t just see strangers saying this. I see family members posting their outrage online, warning of escalation, as if this conflict began just yesterday.
War began a long time ago
But what they fail to understand is that this war did not start yesterday. It began long ago, especially for those of us who were blown up on buses, who buried loved ones, and who have lived for decades with the long-term impact of our attacks, funded and sustained by the Iranian regime.
Iran was the financial force behind the attack that nearly took my life. The regime’s support made it possible, its belief justified it, and its funding continued it. That reality does not disappear because it is uncomfortable. What pains me most is the lack of acknowledgment and a failure to recognize that the regime they defend in the name of avoiding war has already waged one through its proxies against innocent civilians like me.
While it’s hurtful when people dismiss what happened to me, it is far worse when they pretend the threat doesn’t exist. The reality is that Iran’s terror network doesn’t only threaten Israelis or Jews. With a national slogan of “Death to America, Death to Israel,” the threat to Americans is not theoretical. It is quite real: US service members have been targeted by Iranian-backed militias, and American citizens have been killed by groups supported by Iran.
The Islamist regime of Iran poses a threat to regional and global stability. Yet when action is taken against them, the very entity responsible for planning and funding terror, it is called “escalation.”
For terror victims like me, it’s called accountability.
There’s a difference between a reckless war and a war of necessity, between vengeance and justice. Responding to a regime that has for decades spread fear and violence, suppresses its own people, funds proxy militias, and destabilizes entire regions, is not unprovoked or reckless – it is confronting reality, a reality that must be stopped.
Too often, the West has trouble calling out evil for what it is. Instead of talking about those who were murdered by terrorism and the families who were left behind, they hide behind strategy talk. For victims, it isn’t theoretical. It’s real life and very personal. For those of us attacked by terrorists funded by Iran, it isn’t about politics: It’s about danger that never goes away – even if people pretend it isn’t there.
Many may disagree with me and that is their right. But as someone who has carried the consequences of Iran’s policies in my body and mind for more than two decades, I can say this: Justice is rare and accountability is rarer still.
And when it does come, even in this way, it matters. Not only for me, but for every victim who has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that the system that harmed them is simply a matter of international politics.
The writer is the founder and director of Strength to Strength, a nonprofit organization that unites international victims of terrorism and provides long-term psychological and peer support to help them heal and move forward. She is the survivor of a terrorist bus bombing that took place in Jerusalem in June 2003.