In Beirut yesterday, the American envoy Amos Hochstein announced that his next stop will be Israel, where he will try to work out the details of a ceasefire with Hizballah. Hochstein’s statements have been optimistic, and Jerusalem might decide that the ceasefire is in its best interest, but, argues Shany Mor, the negotiations have been conducted on absurd premises:

At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hizballah violated last year, while avoiding any mention of even the desirability of peace—something Lebanon would benefit from more than any other party. . . . According to the Quai d’Orsay and the State Department, the formula for ending the war merely requires punching in the four-digit PIN code 1701. That, of course, is UN Security Council resolution 1701, the one that ended the last war back in 2006.

As Mor points out, Israel strictly abided by the terms of 1701, while the other parties—Hizballah, the Lebanese government, the United Nations peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL—did not. Having ignored seventeen years of noncompliance, France and the U.S. have now sprung into action:

After eleven months of low-intensity warfare, Israel took the initiative, and in eleven days managed to deal Hizballah a decisive blow. . . . [T]he eleven-day campaign woke up the international community in a way that eleven months of rocket fire did not. And the unanimous response has been an urgent call for implementation of 1701.

If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war.

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.”