A fundamental part of Gaddafi's ideology was anti-Zionism. He believed that the state of Israel should not exist, and that any Arab compromise with the Israeli government was a betrayal of the Arab people. In large part due to their support of Israel, Gaddafi despised the United States, considering the country to be imperialist and lambasting it as "the embodiment of evil." Rallying against Jews in many of his speeches, his anti-Semitism has been described as "almost Hitlerian" by Blundy and Lycett. From the late 1990s onward, his view seemed to become more moderate. In 2007, he advocated the Isratin single-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, stating that "the [Israel-Palestine] solution is to establish a democratic state for the Jews and the Palestinians... This is the fundamental solution, or else the Jews will be annihilated in the future, because the Palestinians have [strategic] depth." Two years later he argued that a single-state solution would "move beyond old conflicts and look to a unified future based on shared culture and respect."

What country did Gaddafi refer to as "the embodiment of evil"?