On Saturday, both NBC News and the New York Times published articles about the hardships experienced by Gazans observing Ramadan during wartime. The Washington Post, for its part, focused on how the war has dampened the festive mood among the Muslim community of Yorba Linda. Before the holy month began, the White House had spoken of efforts to convince the warring parties to agree to a pause in fighting for the holy month. Robert Satloff points out that, historically, Muslim rulers have had no qualms about waging war during Ramadan:

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war may be known to Jews as the Yom Kippur War, but it is widely known in the Arab world as “Harb Ramadan”—the Ramadan War—given that Anwar Sadat dispatched Egyptian forces to cross the Suez Canal during the holy month. But it is only a relatively recent example of Arab or Muslim armies waging war during this month.

The Saudi newspaper Arab News provided a helpful primer on the topic in 2014: “While much literature has been written on Islamic conquests focusing on strategy, many victories occurred during Ramadan due to the focus of the Ummah on Allah Almighty and this removed fear from the hearts of the Muslims.” . . . More recently, take a look at the bloodthirsty Ramadan record of Islamic State.

For Hamas and its fellow travelers, waging war during Ramadan—including sacrificing fellow Muslims as pawns in the fight against Israel, inciting tensions at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque to trigger violence at that holy site and launching terrorist attacks against civilians—are all acceptable military tactics, as valid during Ramadan as they are the other months of the year.

In fact, Al Jazeera published an article in Arabic in 2021 glorifying the various acts of terror committed by Palestinians during Ramadan, which it described as “the month of jihad and victories in Islamic history,” during which Muslims exhibit “greater readiness for self-sacrifice.”

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.