Behind the judgments of organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is a belief in Israel’s ineradicable wickedness. Russ Roberts analyzes this belief, which can also be found in the rhetoric of anti-Israel demonstrators:

The protests aren’t about criticizing or reforming Israel. They’re not about the settlements on the West Bank. They’re not about getting Israel to improve the daily life of Palestinians in Gaza. They’re not about pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution. They’re not even about delegitimizing Israel. They’re about erasing Israel.

In Roberts’s interpretation, this attitude only makes sense when Israel is seen through the lens of “settler colonialism,” as understood by contemporary academics—the “only sin that negates the legitimate existence of a country.”

Some . . . of the animus toward Israel is simply Jew-hatred. But settler colonialism gives more than sheep’s clothing to that wolf. It motivates many casual observers against Israel. If I am right, we have been fighting the wrong battles when we explain that many Gazans lived fairly well on October 6 or that Hamas inflates the death toll in Gaza by including the deaths of Hamas fighters. The real intellectual battle is over the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

While Roberts is certainly correct, his contention only begs the question: why is Israel singled out as the epitome of settler colonialism? Israel, Roberts adds, “is a remarkably dishonest example of settler colonialism.” So while he may be right that some “casual observers” can be talked out of their hatred of Israel by understanding its history better, there will no doubt be others unreachable by reason. The latter may or may not hate Israel because they are anti-Semites, but for them hatred of Israel fulfills the role traditionally played by hatred of Jews.

That being said, Robert’s conclusion cannot be dismissed: “we ignore the doctrine of settler colonialism at our peril.”

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.”