Why the West Can’t Think Clearly When It Comes To Israel and Iran

How two theocratic regimes became essential to each other’s mythology—and why Western democracies keep funding the theatre.

Nick Holt’s latest essay is an indictment of the false binary between Israel and Iran—how two regimes defined by mutual loathing have come to rely on each other, and why the West keeps mistaking the spectacle for strategy.

—By Nick Holt

It’s difficult to write about this conflict.

Not because I’m emotionally invested—but rather, because I am not.

And that, it turns out, is the greater challenge: to look directly at a war of absolutes without being conscripted into its mythology.

Because this isn’t a dispute over borders or diplomacy. It is something older, more theological—more total. A mutually reinforcing death spiral between two radical theocratic nationalisms: each animated by the belief that the other’s existence is a metaphysical offense.

Israel and Iran don’t just oppose each other—they require each other. Their legitimacy is, in part, built on the other’s illegitimacy.

Over time, this binary has hardened into dogma. And in the West, to raise the topic at all is to be told you must choose. You are expected to wire yourself into the script: for or against, Zionist or antisemite, anti-imperialist or terror apologist.

Criticize Iran, and you’re engaging in policy debate.

Criticize Israel, and you’re branded—often instantly—as dangerous, disloyal, or suspect.

This asymmetry isn’t accidental. It is the fruit of decades-long propaganda—multi-platform, multi-generational—so effective it has produced a cohort of Westerners, particularly in countries like Australia, the U.S., and the U.K., who respond to any criticism of Israel like pre-programmed Manchurian candidates.

You can almost see the chip activate. Mention the word “occupation” or “Palestinian,” and their pupils contract. Their posture stiffens. Out comes the pre-loaded invective: “antisemite,” “terror sympathiser,” “Jew-hater,” “delegitimiser.” It doesn’t matter what you actually said. The content is irrelevant. The trigger has been pulled. A reflex has replaced a thought.

These are not considered responses. They are code executions—scripts implanted through decades of media saturation, historical sanitisation, and moral conditioning. In the original Manchurian Candidate, the sleeper agent is hypnotised to kill when a specific phrase is uttered. In the Western discourse, the programming is more insidious. The trigger is not a phrase—it’s a principle: thou shalt not question Israel.

These are not angry reactionaries foaming on street corners. These are professors, journalists, politicians—people who would describe themselves as liberal, compassionate, rational. But when it comes to Israel, their minds are not their own.

The illusion of independent thought vanishes, and in its place is something far more chilling: pre-approved morality, administered on schedule, with righteous force.

I no longer engage these types—not out of spite, but out of economy. You cannot reason with a pre-recorded message, and I have no interest in debating a human auto-reply.

This didn’t happen by accident. It was built—systematically, deliberately—over decades.

Through Hollywood, the Israeli state was cast as the plucky underdog: a miracle of survival in a desert of savagery. Through education, Zionism was fused with Western liberalism: a shared project of democracy and Enlightenment values. Through politics, bipartisan loyalty became scripture: unquestioned, unexamined, unrelenting.

Since 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $150 billion in bilateral assistance—more than to any other country—solidifying a strategic dependency that renders criticism politically radioactive.

Through media, Israel’s critics were rebranded—not as dissenters, but as threats. Headlines sanitized occupation. Language blurred victims and aggressors. Bombs became “responses.” Displacement became “security.”

Over 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of international law—a fact the UN reaffirms in annual resolutions nearly every Western outlet ignores.

This is why the average American—or for that matter, Brit or Australian—can recite Hamas like a catechism but has never heard of the Nakba. They can tell you Iran funds proxies—Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in Iraq—but remain blissfully unaware that Israel once helped facilitate the rise of Hamas in Gaza during the 1980s, seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO.

As recently as 2019, Netanyahu remarked: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas.”

And while Iran is vilified as a sponsor of regional destabilization, Israel’s own operations escape scrutiny.

During the 2021 conflict alone, Israeli airstrikes killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza, including 66 children, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This is not collateral—it is the arithmetic of impunity.

And still, Israel sits on an undeclared nuclear arsenal—estimated between 80 and 400 warheads—developed at the Dimona facility and kept outside the purview of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran, meanwhile, is under constant surveillance, sanction, and threat over the possibility of acquiring one.

At the UN, Israel is condemned in over 15 resolutions annually—more than all other nations combined. Yet the U.S., along with a rotating cast of Pacific microstates, reliably casts its veto or abstains, ensuring the narrative remains hermetically sealed at home.

In this ecosystem, Israel doesn’t just have defenders. It has apostles. And criticism doesn’t just spark disagreement. It triggers something closer to exorcism.

So why does it work?

Perhaps it’s not just human nature—but the current condition of the human mind: overwhelmed, tribalised, and desperate for certainty. We are drowning in data and starving for meaning. So people cling to clarity—however false—like a man clutches driftwood in a flood.

The algorithm rewards outrage. The media demands alignment. Identity is now performance, and performance is tribal. Belief has become secondary to opposition. So we flatten complexity into slogans, reduce moral nuance to hashtags, and compress century-old conflicts into thirty-second reels.

Ambiguity is no longer a sign of wisdom—it’s treated as cowardice. And doubt, once the engine of reason, is now rebranded as betrayal.

But if, like me, you haven’t surrendered your mind—if you still believe that thinking is not treason, that judgment belongs to the individual, and that moral clarity must be earned through reason, not inherited through allegiance—then you’ll find this entire performance intolerable.

It’s not analysis. It’s tribal theatre. And it exists to make sure no one asks the only question that matters: who benefits?

This is not a contest between good and evil. It is a mutually sustaining conflict between two radical theocratic nationalisms—each animated by the belief that the other’s existence is a metaphysical offense.

And for all the moral posturing, the real scandal is not the fanaticism on either side. It’s that the so-called rational democracies bankroll it, frame it, and serve it to their citizens as moral necessity.

This is not diplomacy gone awry. It is not the tragic by-product of clashing interests or misread signals. It is something older, more primitive, and far more dangerous: a theocratic death spiral between two regimes that define themselves by the illegitimacy of the other.

To say that Israel and Iran are locked in conflict is to say almost nothing. The truth is, each regime requires the other—not as an opponent, but as a pillar of its own mythology.

For the Islamic Republic of Iran, Zionist Israel is a desecration of Islamic land and prophecy. For Zionist Israel, Iran is a genocidal state whose very rhetoric justifies a permanent state of siege. Their antagonism is not political. It is existential.

Each claims it cannot survive without the other’s disappearance. This is not a geopolitical rivalry—it is a clash of civilizational narratives, rooted in theology and sustained by paranoia. And perhaps the most dangerous fiction of all is that it only concerns them.

Because it doesn’t.

It concerns you—especially if you live in the West.

For decades, Western democracies—chiefly the United States—have armed, enabled, narrated, and financially underwritten this binary. Not because they believe in it. But because it serves them.

Since 1979, Iran has positioned itself not simply as a nation-state, but as the vanguard of a revolutionary Islamic order. Central to that identity is the rejection of Israel—not as an unfortunate neighbour, but as a theological error. Anti-Zionism in Iran is not contingent on Israeli actions; it is foundational. To normalize relations would not be political evolution—it would be apostasy.

But this posture isn’t just ideological—it’s strategic. Refusing to recognize Israel cements Iran’s image as a bulwark against Western hegemony. It plays well in Arab streets, Shiite strongholds, and among those disillusioned with American imperial hypocrisy. It allows Tehran to claim the mantle of moral resistance—even as it crushes dissent at home.

And while Iran is vilified as an irrational theocracy, it is anything but. Dangerous, yes. Repressive, certainly. But also cold, calculating, and acutely aware of how to exploit the West’s addiction to enemies.

U.S. intelligence estimates Iran spends between $700 million to $1 billion annually on Hezbollah alone, with additional support flowing to Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. But unlike Israel, Iran does not receive a dime from Washington.

The chants of “Death to America” are performance. The real strategy is survival through antagonism. The Iranian regime understands that playing the villain in Washington’s drama is precisely what keeps it relevant—domestically, regionally, and globally. Abandoning that role would risk both external leverage and internal cohesion.

And Israel? It plays the same role—equal parts calculation and self-preservation.

Israel’s survivalism has long since calcified into expansionism. Its posture is permanently hawkish, its politics increasingly illiberal. But none of this would be possible without the spectre of Iranian annihilation.

Iran justifies everything: the airstrikes in Syria, the covert assassinations across the region, the expansion of settlements, the permanent occupation of Palestine, and the refusal to negotiate peace. Without the Iranian threat, the siege mentality collapses—and with it, the Zionist project in its current form.

This is more than strategy. It is psychology. The trauma of the Shoah has become a doctrine of perpetual vigilance. Vigilance calcified into dogma. And dogma into policy. So deeply embedded is this policy that any Israeli leader who proposes genuine reconciliation is treated as suicidal—or worse, a traitor.

Here lies the irony: Iran’s nuclear ambiguity and Israel’s undeclared arsenal were both designed for deterrence. But in practice, they reinforce the binary. Neither side wants war. Both need the shadow of war to justify the status quo.

It is a macabre symbiosis: two regimes locked in existential dread, each animating the other’s reason to exist.