An Israeli television program reported earlier this week that two prominent Jewish Israeli left-wing activists had been involved in entrapping Palestinians trying to sell land to Israelis and then handing them over to the Palestinian Authority—which generally punishes this “crime” with death. Contrasting the defensive reaction to these revelations from leaders of the Israeli left to the widespread and firm condemnations from the Israeli right following an attack on a Palestinian family last summer, Liel Leibovitz writes:

Rather than decrying the act of delivering innocents to their tormentors and collaborating with a regime routinely counted among the world’s most repressive, Gideon Levy—the Grand Old Man of the Israeli left—blamed the messenger, insisting that [the television show that broke the story] was airing right-wing propaganda in an effort to curry favor with the brownshirts in the government and save itself from imminent censorship. “This,” Levy wrote in his typically overheated style, “is what it feels like when the ground is burning underneath your feet.” . . . And the author A. B. Yehoshua, no stranger to idiotic pronouncements, said that if the Palestinian Authority chose to execute its own citizens for selling land to Jews, it was fully within its rights to do so. . . .

[T]his collective refusal to move away from the party line and condemn what so obviously needs condemning is evidence of a real and deep crisis in the Israeli left. . . . [After its post-Oslo] prayers for peaceful coexistence were met with Palestinian violence, and most of its voters . . . decamped for other, more sober camps, the Israeli left, shell-shocked, had two choices: readjust their analysis of reality or devolve into dogma. Catastrophically, it chose the latter. . . . If the left truly wants to save Israeli democracy from descending into darkness, it should begin by saving itself.

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.”