When it comes to Middle Eastern affairs, Americans have often been April Fools

From two springs of poison, American ignorance, naivety, and arrogance allow many to overlook how their hands helped shape the hatred they now fear, rooted in the bloody history of the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. invasion, subsequent occupation, and the shattering of Iraqi society.

In the spring of 1948, Jewish men with guns and grenades moved house to house through a Palestinian village named Deir Yassin, emptying rooms with fire and steel.

By the time the shooting stopped, at least 107 villagers lay dead, among them women and children who had awakened that morning expecting nothing more than another day of uneasy coexistence with their Jewish neighbors in the hills west of Jerusalem.

Five years later, halfway across the Middle East in Tehran, another spring brought another kind of death — not of bodies, but of a nation’s democratic hopes.

There, in August 1953, American and British operatives orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he nationalized his country’s oil industry.

Most Americans have never heard of Deir Yassin. Fewer still know the name Mosaddegh or understand how the CIA, operating under the code name Operation Ajax, dismantled a constitutional government and helped restore a monarch who would impose a brutal rule for the next quarter-century with U.S. backing.

And because many do not know these things — because the history taught in American schools often seems to begin on Sept. 11, 2001, as though the world were invented that morning — they struggle to understand why many in the Middle East regard the United States not as a beacon of liberty, but as a sinister power willing to subordinate democratic ideals to strategic interests.

When it comes to Middle Eastern affairs, Americans have often been April’s fools, waking late to consequences sown long before.

For example, President Donald Trump tore up the historic 2015 multinational agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was concluded with Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.

That deal dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification, until Trump abandoned the policy for reasons he never explained.

Israel and Sunni Muslim nations supported his withdrawal, but almost everyone else said Trump was foolish, and now the United States is at war again, a brutal punctuation mark in a conflict that may have already lost the attention of many Americans.

Four U.S. Army Reserve soldiers — Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and Sgt. Declan Coady, 20, of Des Moines, Iowa — were killed March 1, 2026, at the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait when a drone struck their position.

The village of Deir Yassin sat on a rocky slope west of Jerusalem, its stone houses looking toward the coastal plain.

In the months after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, fighting intensified between Jewish and Arab forces.

On April 9, 1948, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi, Zionist paramilitary groups operating outside the main Haganah command structure, attacked the village.

Accounts differ in some details, and the precise death toll remains disputed. Early Arab reports put the number as high as 250; later scholars estimated that about 107 Palestinians were killed.

What is widely agreed upon is that civilians died in significant numbers and that news of the attack spread rapidly. Survivors and Arab broadcasters described killings, and the event reverberated across Palestine.

Historians say fear generated by Deir Yassin contributed to the flight of Palestinians from other towns and villages during the war surrounding Israel’s creation — a mass displacement Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Five years later, in Iran, another confrontation unfolded — this time over oil and sovereignty.

Mosaddegh, an aristocratic nationalist politician, led a parliamentary effort in 1951 to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., arguing that Iran should control its own resources. Britain, which depended heavily on Iranian oil revenues, imposed sanctions and sought international support to reverse the move.

In 1953, amid Cold War anxieties in Washington about potential Soviet influence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 executed a covert operation to remove Mosaddegh.

The plan — Operation Ajax — involved propaganda, political maneuvering, and support for military officers opposed to the prime minister.

The effort initially faltered, and Iran’s shah fled the country. But within days, pro-Shah forces prevailed. Mosaddegh was arrested and later tried.

The shah returned and consolidated power, ruling until the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when anti-American sentiment, fueled in part by memories of the coup, erupted into the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis.

For many Iranians, 1953 became shorthand for foreign interference. For many Palestinians, Deir Yassin became a symbol of dispossession and fear.

Neither event alone explains decades of conflict. The Middle East’s history is crowded with rival nationalisms, sectarian divides, regional ambitions, and global power struggles. But these two episodes remain touchstones — moments when Western actions left deep scars.

Americans often ask why hostility toward the United States can feel so visceral in parts of the region. The answers are neither simple nor singular, but they do not hate us for our freedom as much as they despise the evil and violence that disrupted their society.

Yet in the hills west of Jerusalem and the streets of Tehran, memories endure — passed from parents to children, woven into national narratives, invoked whenever Washington speaks of democracy or stability.

Nations, like people, are judged not only by their intentions but by their deeds.

In 1948 and 1953, evil deeds were done by the American government to innocent people in the Middle East.

The smoke has long since cleared from Deir Yassin. Mosaddegh has been dead for decades. But history does not dissolve on its own timetable.

It lingers, instructing those who remember — and confounding those who never learned.