World without Iran vs World without Israel

Honestly I can't really think of any another excuse they could use to send white colonialists to live in the Middle East.

If they can't put white colonialists there, the "favorite child" would have to be a nation from a local ethnicity (and, "worst", Muslim) and the whole propagandistic idea that "they have Western Values" - a slogan which carries both a "they think like us" for Liberals and a "they look like us" for Conservatives so as to get the support of both political groups - wouldn't work anywhere as well, plus there would be no group of people in the West unwaveringly supporting them entirely out of tribalism (as a large segment of the Jewish people in most Western countries support Israel no matter what).

So I totally agree with you that it would extremelly hard, maybe even impossible, to have a favored child in the Middle East that could get the level of public opinion support in the West that Israel managed to get.