Since Israel has no formal constitution, its Declaration of Independence occupies a special place as the nation’s foundational document. In its final form, the declaration was the product of extensive wrangling by various parties with different ideas about what sort of country the Jewish state should be. Jodi Rudoren describes the original version:

[The early drafts] were written in English by a little-known, Ukrainian-born lawyer, Mordechai Beham, who confided to his in-laws over lunch in Tel Aviv on April 24, 1948 that he had been enlisted to write the defining manifesto and had no idea where to begin. After several hours in the private library of an American rabbi who lived nearby, Beham, [then age] thirty-three, emerged with a document that began with Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase “when in the course of human events.” He also cribbed from Deuteronomy, the English Bill of Rights, and the United Nations’ partition plan for Palestine.

Only a few of Jefferson’s words survived in the final version read out by David Ben-Gurion three weeks and a dozen drafts later. But Yoram Shachar, a law professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, argued . . . that the American influence was nonetheless profound, noting that God appears in both documents’ concluding paragraphs.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”