The world today may not be facing a crisis of power to a greater extent than ever before, but it is facing a crisis of meaning. The major powers still possess armies, economies, technology and media, but the narratives that once offered modern people a sense of direction, hope and meaning beyond consumption and power have lost their credibility among segments of the public.
Against this backdrop, Alon Mizrahi’s recent writing about Iran deserves consideration as more than a personal position or an ordinary political commentary. Mizrahi grew up in Israel and comes from an Arab-Jewish family. At one point in his life, he also served in the Israeli military. For years, he worked in Israel’s cultural and media spheres, but gradually became a prominent critic of Zionism and Israel’s political structure. He says that following the events of October 7 and Israel’s response, he came to the conclusion that Israel could no longer be his home, even from a cultural and linguistic perspective.
Mizrahi now describes himself as an “Arab-Jewish, formerly Israeli and anti-Zionist” Jew and runs an independent media project called The Mizrahi Perspective. His writings on Palestine, colonialism, Zionism and Iran have attracted considerable attention in recent years. According to Mizrahi himself, after he began working seriously in English, his audience grew by about 70,000 followers over six months.
For this reason, the intellectual background of someone like Mizrahi matters when he speaks about Iran. He is not simply a foreign political activist commenting on Iran from a distance. He is someone who spent a large part of his life in Israeli society, experienced it from within and now views that same structure through a deeply critical lens.
In his recent piece, Mizrahi presents an extremely bleak picture of the contemporary world. He sees the West as caught between nihilism and overt evil, China as immersed in materialism, Japan as trapped in dependency, Christianity as emptied of meaning, and the media and academia as part of the existing crisis. But amid this darkness, he identifies one important exception: Iran.
He describes Iran not merely as a regional power, but as the “only organized light” in a world that, in his view, has been almost completely engulfed in darkness — a country that still preserves ethics, dignity, resistance and humanity in its discourse.
The significance of this passage becomes greater when we consider that Mizrahi does not describe himself as a religious person. He explicitly says that he is not searching for God, has had a bitter experience with Judaism, has no interest in mysticism and finds religious rituals unappealing. Therefore, what draws him toward Iran, at least according to his own account, is not necessarily Shiism as a religion, but rather an image of Iran as a symbol of independence, resistance to domination and the defense of human dignity.
This position did not emerge suddenly. In recent months, Mizrahi has repeatedly analyzed Iran through a civilizational and philosophical lens. In June of this year, in an article titled “We Are Moving Toward a Global Shia Consciousness,” he described the confrontation between Iran and the West as more than a military conflict, characterizing it as a clash between two different worldviews. Several weeks later, in another piece, he assigned Iran a role beyond self-defense and described it as a force confronting colonialism in West Asia.
His latest comments should therefore be viewed as part of an intellectual trajectory in which Iran has evolved from a political subject into a civilizational concept for the writer.
Of course, one individual does not represent an entire nation or global movement, and Mizrahi’s position should not be taken as evidence that such a view has necessarily become widespread among Jews or Israeli society. His significance lies elsewhere: he is a visible example of an audience member who shares neither Iran’s religion nor its nationality, yet sees elements of Iran’s discourse as aligned with his own values.
This is where the discussion of Iran’s soft power begins. Soft power is not simply the ability to attract audiences through religious or cultural commonalities. It becomes genuine power when a narrative can represent concepts such as independence, justice, dignity, resistance and opposition to domination in the minds of people from different backgrounds.
Mizrahi’s narrative shows that Iran’s discursive reach can extend beyond the boundaries of Shiism and even beyond the boundaries of Islam. An audience for Iran’s soft power does not necessarily have to be Muslim or a political ally of Tehran. It can be an Arab-Jewish person, an opponent of Zionism, an anti-war activist, or someone from Latin America or Africa whose own experience has involved colonialism and domination.
Of course, this capital can remain sustainable only if a deep gap does not emerge between discourse and conduct. Soft power cannot be created through promotion alone. Its credibility is built through behavior, consistency, sincerity and the ability to turn proclaimed values into lived experience.
From this perspective, the story of Alon Mizrahi is not simply the story of an anti-Zionist writer. He is an example of an audience member who, amid a crisis in the world’s dominant narratives, has found concepts within Iran’s discourse that hold meaning for him. This is the point at which a political discourse can cross geographic and religious boundaries and become soft power — a form of power whose audience is not necessarily an official ally of Iran, but one that has accepted part of Iran’s image as a symbol of independence, resistance and human dignity.
NOURNEWS