How Iran’s Tiered Internet and Apartheid Statecraft Make It Vulnerable to Israel
Mohsen Solhdoost argues that the Islamic Republic’s internal apartheid logics have hollowed out Iran’s resilience and deterrence, making it unusually penetrable for adversaries such as Israel – as the recent 12-day war starkly showed.
When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran in June 2025 – a 12-day campaign of airstrikes and targeted killings – most commentary focused on Israeli audacity and American ambivalence. The more important story, however, lies on the Iranian side. This was not simply a case of a stronger power attacking a weaker one: Iran possesses a formidable missile arsenal and significant regional deterrent capabilities. It was, rather, an attack on a state that has systematically hollowed out its own capacity to deter, absorb and respond to such blows by governing through layered forms of apartheid – gender apartheid, religious and ethnic exclusion, a political-class “caste” system and a tiered digital order that erode exactly the resources that matter most in a confrontation with a technologically superior adversary: social cohesion, competent institutions and a resilient information environment. For an adversary like Israel – which has spent more than a decade penetrating Iran’s nuclear, military and cyber infrastructure – such a domestic order is a strategic gift.
Apartheid at home, brittle deterrence abroad
The first casualty is social cohesion – and, closely linked, human capital. A state that reserves full citizenship effectively for insiders – khodi – while treating women, religious minorities, ethnic peripheries, political dissidents and many ordinary citizens as second-class subjects cannot credibly rely on nationwide solidarity in a crisis, and systematically wastes much of its available talent.
UN experts and rights organisations increasingly describe Iran’s treatment of women as gender apartheid; similar forms of institutionalised exclusion affect religious and ethnic minorities, who face barriers to higher education, public employment and secure property rights. Decades of repression and politicised hiring have generated severe “brain drain”: a sustained outflow of highly skilled Iranians and a dearth of expertise and innovation that cripples sectors from health and tech to defence and nuclear safety. Gender apartheid halves the available talent pool by design, often pushing qualified women out of scientific and managerial tracks or out of public life altogether, while religious and political exclusion removes Bahá’ís and dissidents from universities and public institutions.
Over this sits a political caste system that showers benefits on regime loyalists – Basij and IRGC families, “martyrs’” relatives, aghazadeh – while relegating everyone else to outsider – gheyr-e-khodi – status. Quotas for insider groups in universities and public-sector jobs, “starred students” that deny dissidents education, and the allocation of key security, industrial and diplomatic posts to ideologically vetted clients are not marginal abuses but core institutional expressions of that hierarchy.
The result was visible in the Mahsa Amini uprising of 2022–23, which united the disadvantaged population against this gendered and political apartheid. From a deterrence perspective, this matters twice over: adversaries see not a polity ready to rally around the flag, but a brittle regime ruling over an alienated society, a state with little prospect of unified patriotic mobilisation if struck; and in a state locked in a long shadow war with a technologically sophisticated adversary, such exclusionary structures are strategic self-sabotage. Because intelligence, cyber defence and nuclear security are highly skill-dependent, a system that rewards “reliable” mediocrities and drives capable critics abroad inevitably produces corrupt, inward-looking and penetrable security organisations – exactly the kind of state an adversary such as Israel can exploit.
Digital apartheid as strategic self-harm
If social and political apartheid hollow out Iran’s human and institutional base, digital apartheid sharpens those vulnerabilities: over the past decade Tehran has built a heavily censored National Information Network, tightly filtered global platforms and repeatedly shut down the internet during crises. International monitors now consistently rank Iran among the world’s most repressive online environments. More recently, authorities have moved towards a formal “tiered internet” – fast, relatively open access for state bodies and trusted insiders and a slow, tightly filtered network for everyone else – that rights groups and technologists describe as a “digital caste system” hardwiring existing hierarchies into the connectivity infrastructure. In June 2025, the state responded to Israeli airstrikes with one of its harshest international blackouts, confining most citizens to domestic services while key institutions kept robust channels.
Such practices blunt society’s situational awareness when it is most needed, and by funnelling traffic through a few central gateways the regime both creates attractive technical and human targets for adversaries and encourages itself to shut down the very infrastructure it needs for agile crisis response.
How Israel exploits Iran’s apartheid-shaped vulnerabilities
These vulnerabilities are clearest in Israel’s long campaign of sabotage, targeted killings and cyber operations against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure. Since 2010,
operations widely attributed to Israel – from the Stuxnet worm that destroyed centrifuges at Natanz to assassinations and unexplained explosions – have exposed technical flaws and organisational weaknesses inside the Islamic Republic. They depended on local access: penetration of facilities, supply chains and communications networks through recruited collaborators and compromised companies.
Media reports and official statements describe “extensive” Israeli intelligence activity inside Iran, with regular espionage arrests. The 2025 execution of Mohsen Langarneshin, an IT consultant accused of assisting Mossad in the 2022 assassination of an IRGC colonel, and Iranian claims during the 12-day war that spy rings were providing targeting information together illustrate how central Iranian intermediaries have become to this shadow war. Operation Rising Lion simply took the pattern to a new level, combining long-prepared target lists with knowledge of command-and-control patterns that almost certainly required deep human and technical penetration.
Iran’s apartheid complexes matter most here, creating a pool of citizens whose loyalty is not to the state; most will never collaborate with foreign adversaries, but the odds that some do are higher than in a polity where people feel represented – which makes Iran’s domestic order a “strategic gift” for services like Mossad. Meanwhile, politicised security institutions pour resources into policing dissent while neglecting corruption in sensitive supply chains and vulnerabilities in industrial control systems, making sophisticated foreign operations easier to mount and harder to detect.
Digital apartheid amplifies this by driving ordinary Iranians onto VPNs and informal channels that shrink state visibility while leaving elite networks and centralised gateways as prime targets. The tiered system thus creates blind spots at the bottom and attack surfaces at the top, while the VPN ecosystem itself has become part of the battlefield: during the 12-day war, Mossad issued Persian-language appeals to contact it via “secure” VPN links. Tehran’s censorship architecture has turned mass VPN dependence into yet another recruitment and surveillance vector that adversaries can exploit.
Conclusion: dismantling apartheid as national security
The point is not to romanticise Israel’s choices, or to ignore that it is itself widely characterised as practising apartheid against Palestinians. Its operations – from cyber sabotage to targeted killings – raise serious legal and ethical concerns. Yet campaigns to recognise “gender apartheid” as a crime against humanity explicitly cite Iran alongside Afghanistan, weakening Tehran’s claims to victimhood and making it easier for Western governments and publics to treat covert operations, sanctions and even overt strikes as defensible. Netanyahu’s framing of Operation Rising Lion as a pre-emptive strike against a dangerous, rights-abusing, near-nuclear regime simply tapped into this mood.
By entrenching gender, religious, class–political and digital apartheid, Tehran has fractured the social base for deterrence and war-time resilience, driven out or sidelined the talent needed for modern defence, and created exactly the institutional and informational weaknesses an adversary like Israel can best exploit.
If Iran’s rulers genuinely wished to protect the country, dismantling these apartheid logics – rather than deepening them – would be a strategic necessity, not a human-rights luxury. As long as they do the opposite, the next “12-day war” will be a question not of if but when.
Mohsen Solhdoost, Assistant Professor in International Relations, Department of International Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU)
Photo by Kamran Gholami
