During his brief period out of office last fall, Israel’s current prime minister published an English-language memoir. Andrew Roberts writes in his review:

Most politicians’ autobiographies are turgid affairs. They tend to be written for the historical record, or for votes in the next election, or to prove that the author was always right about everything—three reliable avenues to literary failure. Because very often the authors’ successes were won as the result of negotiation and compromises in anonymous committee rooms and dingy back offices, their memoirs struggle to convey drama: long speeches are reproduced; debates over long-dead issues are reheated; readers yawn.

Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography, Bibi: My Story, which, as I realized around page 200, is not a politician’s autobiography at all, but an adventure story dressed up as one. It is a Tom Clancy novel written for a Tom Cruise movie adaptation, posing as a normal politician’s memoir. Yes, it has the photo of the author on the front cover and the requisite subtitle and the necessary width of a political memoir, but inside it is entirely different. Besides being a blood-and-guts page-turner more reminiscent of a film script than of the memoirs of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, it also deserves a place as one of history’s great Zionist texts.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to work out the essential truth about what drives Netanyahu: despite his achievements and longevity in office in the infamously tough bearpit of Israeli politics, he considers himself to be only the third most impressive member of his immediate family. For here is a man who is acutely conscious of having constantly to live up to the extremely high expectations of his father, Benzion, and brother Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu. Since both are dead, they cannot tell him whether he has succeeded or not. . . . The last time that I have encountered such filial piety in a book was in Winston Churchill’s two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who arguably did not deserve it, having been a beast to his 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.”