After a highly publicized but failed effort to persuade the Zionist Union, Israel’s main opposition party, to join the Likud-led governing coalition, Prime Minister Netanyahu instead brought in the smaller Yisrael Beiteinu party. In doing so, he discharged Moshe Yaalon as defense minister and offered the position to Yisrael Beiteinu’s controversial leader, Avigdor Lieberman—a move that prompted hysterical reactions from Israel’s left-leaning media. Ruthie Blum comments:

Though Yaalon has an illustrious history and a reputation for being both a serious military man and levelheaded think-tank member, I gave up on him when he started preaching morality to Israeli society. At a time when both radical Islamists and Western professors, as well as huge swaths of the British Labor party, are waging a frontal assault on the Jewish state, accusing it of atrocities it does not commit, the last thing Israel needs is a cabinet member adding fuel to the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic fire.

I therefore say goodbye to Yaalon without a heavy heart. Though Lieberman leaves much to be desired, . . . he [isn’t] even as “right-wing” as his detractors claim. . . . Lieberman’s [positions] are often indistinguishable from those of his left-wing counterparts. It’s the take-no-prisoners rhetoric and associations with dubious characters that make [him] controversial. . . .

On Friday night, . . . [the] middle-aged military correspondent Roni Daniel . . . lost it on live TV. Pounding on the table several times, Daniel interrupted his fellow panelists to announce that the move to replace Yaalon with Lieberman . . . meant that there was no future for his children in Israel. . . . [P]olitical machinations have become so cynical, have gone so far, [he claimed], that the country’s best interests are sacrificed in the desperate attempt by Netanyahu to “hold on to his seat.” . . .

When have politicians in this or any other country not tried to hold on to their seats? This is a reason to leave the Jewish state that boasts a rise in immigration from Western democracies? . . . The . . . question [Daniel] and other Israelis . . . with escape fantasies ought to contemplate is where they imagine they can settle to be rid of their malaise about living under flawed democratic political systems—Syria?

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.