War on Iran: How Israel is demolishing the myth that once shielded it

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.