In An Army Like No Other, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner—a professor of film studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and himself a veteran of the Six-Day War—tells the story of Israel’s army from 1948 until the present day. The military historian Edward Luttwak begins his review by examining Bresheeth-Zabner’s insinuation that the IDF slaughtered some 200 Syrian POWs in 1967:

Israeli military actions—past, present and nonexistent—receive, I would wager, more scrutiny than those of any other army, and in the endless list of accusations against it—valid, semi-valid, improbable, or utterly impossible—no such prisoner massacre has ever previously been included. But I will offer no such probabilistic argument because I was there in the Hula Valley in June 1967.

Of course, Luttwak saw no sign of such a massacre, because one never occurred. But, he goes on to argue, the entire book is filled with similar libels and insinuations, unencumbered by excessive concern for the truth, or even for plausibility.

Bresheeth-Zabner is one of those Israelis who are warmly welcomed in London by the academics and publicists who, for reasons on which we need not speculate here, studiously overlook every other conflict in the world (including Syria’s, amazingly enough, with its own Palestinian casualties numbering in the many thousands) to campaign relentlessly against Israel. That warm welcome is available in exchange for the acceptance of a simple axiom: Israel has no right to exist; hence everything about it is illegitimate, if not also atrocious, beginning with the Israeli army of course.

That is a bargain that Bresheeth-Zabner is very willing to fulfil. We thus read: “The Israelis are the greatest warmongers in the Middle East.” . . . The author’s apparent need to blacken Israel affords him no license for the [book’s] countless factual errors—most of them easily avoidable via a little light googling.

As for the IDF’s supposed victims, Luttwak writes that Bresheeth-Zabner “does not like the Palestinians enough to tell them the truth, thereby insisting on Palestinian exceptionalism.”

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.”