War on Iran: How Israel is demolishing the myth that once shielded it
Submitted by Gabriel Polley on Tue, 03/17/2026 - 20:05
Before this conflict, Tel Aviv had largely bent the region to its will, amid false claims of its own vulnerability in a 'tough neighbourhood'
Iranian workers clear debris from a damaged building after a strike on the capital Tehran on 15 March 2026 (Atta Kenare/AFP) Off Ever since the state’s founding, Israeli leaders have trotted out phrases like “a villa in the jungle”, “tough neighbourhood” or, perhaps most tiresomely, “only democracy in the Middle East”.
The function of this propaganda has been to persuade their audience - both the domestic Israeli electorate, and the leaders and citizens of Israel’s allied states in the Global North - that the country is an island of civilisation in a sea of barbarism.
They suggest that despite its sweeping victories in most of the wars it has fought, its region-leading military backed by unlimited US aid, and its nuclear arsenal, Israel is in fact at continuous risk of being overrun by Arab, Iranian and Muslim hordes, and its people “driven into the sea” - just as, in fact, Jewish militias drove Palestinian refugees into the sea in 1948.
This myth has had a powerful, malign impact.
It has convinced successive US administrations to hand Israel a blank cheque annually; to bankroll its military-industrial complex, despite Tel Aviv’s continual violations of the very international law Washington claims to uphold elsewhere.
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It has convinced Israelis to accept the total militarisation of their society; a permanent state of hostility with most of the Arab and Muslim world (the people, if not their unelected leaders); a permanent occupation of Palestinian land; and a series of wars disrupting daily life, all while keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - the face of a country permanently at war - in power throughout a long-running corruption scandal.
It also convinced most European countries and Global North governments to extend immediate sympathies to Israel after 7 October 2023, and to turn a blind eye as Israel began its campaign of mass killing, starvation and displacement of Gaza’s people.
Geopolitical shift
That the “tough neighbourhood” mantra is myth, not reality, is borne out by the historical record. Over the last six decades, Israel has seen its enemies fall one by one. The Six-Day War of 1967 showed that neighbouring Arab states collectively could not pose a serious threat to Israel.
The 1978 Camp David Accords and subsequent peace treaty between Israel and Egypt removed from the equation the most populous, powerful and influential Arab country, which under former President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and ‘60s had been at the forefront of confrontation with Israel and solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In the 1980s, Israel ironically channelled arms to the newborn Islamic Republic of Iran in a bid to weaken its more established enemy, Iraq. And in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, triggering the horrific Sabra and Shatila massacre, in a bid to end the threat of an armed Palestinian national movement.
By 2023, in reality, Israel faced few regional threats, beyond those deriving from the global and regional antipathy created by its ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people
The 1990s and 2000s saw geopolitical shifts in Israel’s favour. The demise of the Soviet Union, once a significant source of support for Palestinians and progressive Arab states, led to a period of unfettered dominance of Israel’s patron, the US.
In the early 1990s, Israel succeeded in neutralising the Palestine Liberation Organisation, turning it into a subcontractor for occupation through the bad-faith Oslo Accords. Lobbying for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel again participated in the destruction of an Arab state it viewed as an enemy. Continuous lobbying against Iran also succeeded in contributing to devastating sanctions placed on that country.
More recently, through the so-called Abraham Accords, Israel forged alliances with distinctly undemocratic partners in the region: the absolutist Gulf monarchies of the UAE and Bahrain, along with Morocco, rewarded for its recognition of Israel by US recognition of its own occupation of Western Sahara.
By 2023, in reality, Israel faced few regional threats, beyond those deriving from the global and regional antipathy created by its ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people. Yet a group of foes remained, sometimes labelled collectively as the “axis of resistance”.
This included armed groups in the occupied Palestinian territories, notably Hamas; Hezbollah in Lebanon; Syria, weakened by civil war, but still the main conduit through which weapons reached these armed groups; the Houthis in Yemen; and Iran, which never attacked Israel directly before the countries exchanged missiles over 12 days in 2025.
Worst enemy
Following the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023, Israel’s political and military leaders greedily seized on what they saw as an opportunity to reshape the Middle East based on their own interests, regardless of international law and whatever suffering this campaign might cause.
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Devastating assaults on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon reduced the capacity of resistance groups to a point that Israeli leaders found tolerable, but which also allowed them to continue to use these groups as boogeymen to motivate the Israeli public for war.
After the fall of the Assad government in Syria, Israel effectively demilitarised the country through a bombing campaign that destroyed Syria’s heavy weaponry and its naval and air forces. Israel also occupied more of the Golan Heights, to surprisingly little objection from the country’s new authorities, eager to curry favour with the US.
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Now, after the unprovoked US-Israeli bombing of Iran in the midst of what were surely viewed by the Trump administration as sham negotiations, Israel clearly believes it can obliterate the last state that has really stood up to it. It seems likely that however Iran emerges from this war, it will either have little ability or no desire to engage in or sponsor significant resistance against Israel in the near future.
Far from finding itself in a “tough neighbourhood”, Israel today sits virtually in an empire of its and Washington’s own making - a region that it has brutally bent to its own will.
While once western powers might have given Israel military and diplomatic support because they saw Tel Aviv as a defender of their interests and assets in a Middle East that was awash with anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine and Arab nationalist sentiment, today the picture is very different. Not one Arab government has offered more than verbal condemnation of Israel’s Gaza genocide.
The vicious, hubristic and absurd attack on Iran is an attempt to warn off anyone who might think about turning such verbal criticism into action. But without its old myths to protect it, and continuing to damage its own image with its treatment of the Palestinian people and its regional belligerence, Israel may soon reveal itself as its own worst enemy.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
War on Iran Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29
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