At a campaign rally for Donald Trump last weekend, a group of attendees started shouting “genocide Joe,” an epithet that radical leftists have been hurling at President Biden because of his support for Israel. The former president, upon hearing the shouts, said, “They’re not wrong.” It is, of course, impossible to know if Trump understood the implications. But this is not the only statement he has made recently that appears at odds with his pro-Israel record while in office.

Seth Mandel, remarking on comments Trump made previously, takes a closer look:

Trump . . . has an obnoxious habit of deeming Democratic-voting Jews as heretics, and he repeated it [last week] when telling reporters that Jews who vote for Biden “should have their head examined.” This treads dangerously close to the “good Jews/bad Jews” dichotomy mostly favored by people who do not like Jews very much. Trump isn’t such a person, but many of his fans are. If this is an appeal to Jewish voters, it is boneheaded. If it is really a winking message to his supporters on the new right, it is morally repugnant.

It seems, Mandel adds, that “every time Trump opens his mouth these days he has harsh words for Israel’s war effort,” which is one thing he seems to share with his successor. Yet the presumptive Republican nominee’s pronouncements seem to stem not from a political strategy but from a tendency to see everything in personal terms—in favors done or loyalty owed.

Such are the dangers of thinking purely transactionally regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And this mode of thinking—regardless of which “side” you’re coming from—introduces a measure of volatility that is uniquely unsuited to the challenges of extricating the Middle East from the bloody chaos of Hamas and its Iranian patron.

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.”