Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s memorial day for fallen soldiers, began yesterday evening, and tonight gives way to Independence Day. Among those mourned are numerous members of non-Jewish groups. Hillel Kuttler writes:

Israel’s Defense Ministry counts 24,213 people as military fatalities (including those serving as police officers and prison guards) and victims of terrorist attacks, dating to before the state’s founding 75 years ago. My interviews this month with representatives of several minority groups reveal that the number includes 427 Druze, 221 Bedouins, 27 Christians, and approximately ten Circassians.

In a country replete with memorials to people killed protecting Israel, those communities’ losses are highlighted to varied degrees. The Druze complex in the Carmel mountains near Haifa, which includes a pre-army training center and an amphitheater on whose stage stands a memorial wall with the engraved names, is state-sponsored. So is a facility in the Jezreel Valley honoring the Bedouins; both sites host Yom Hazikaron ceremonies. The Circassian Heritage Center, in the village of Kfar Kamma, west of Tiberias, is privately funded. Jawdat Salameh, a Catholic, said he hopes to establish a memorial in the Galilee commemorating fallen Christian Israelis.

Since the combat death of his son in 1969, the ninety-five-year-old Druze leader Amal Nasser el-Din has been organizing efforts to memorialize these heroic Israelis. A former Knesset member, el-Din is scheduled to receive the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian honor, tomorrow. El-Din’s grandson was killed fighting in Gaza in 2008:

At the family’s mourning tent in 2008, someone asked Nasser el-Din whether he felt angry at Israel for the losses in action of his son and grandson. (Another son, Saleh, who likewise served in the Israel Defense Forces, was abducted as a civilian in 1995 by Hamas terrorists. He was never heard from again and is presumed dead.)

“To attain a strong, independent state, you must sacrifice,” el-Din [responded]. “And if I have to, I’ll sacrifice another son.”

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.”