While Israel’s navy tends to be quite good at what it does, its activity is limited to preventing arms shipments from reaching Gaza, patrolling the country’s Mediterranean coastline, and defending against attack from the sea. Now a group of American and Israeli experts has argued that Israel should develop a true maritime strategy to insure the security of the global shipping routes on which its economy depends. Haviv Rettig Gur explains the importance of the issue in light of the changing U.S.-Israel relationship as well as the American retreat from world leadership in general and from the Middle East in particular:

For a country like Israel, the U.S. is not just an ally, it is a world order. Its navy serves as the de-facto global coordinating and enforcement institution that ensures the security and safety of maritime commerce—a fact of overwhelming significance to a country like Israel, which carries on almost no trade across its land borders and transports 99 percent of its foreign trade by volume via the sea. . . .

[I]t is this America, . . . as it reassesses its capacity and desire to bear so many of the world’s burdens, that is increasingly turning to Israel as an anchor of stability and prosperity that can help mitigate, at least in the limited scope of its regional reach, the fallout from U.S. disentanglement. Can Israel shoulder a larger share of the burden of upholding the global order on which its own safety and prosperity rely? . . .

An upgraded Israeli maritime presence would act as a force multiplier for [the U.S. navy], and vice versa. And that means the two navies must learn to work together far better than they have in the past. . . . The benefits of [greater cooperation] for Israel are obvious. For one thing, ensuring the security of gas fields [off Israel’s coast] gives Israel unprecedented energy independence.

China and India, [meanwhile], may seem out of reach of Israel’s current navy, but these two eastern powers are quickly becoming vital to Israel’s future prosperity. . . . Yet maritime routes eastward pass within striking distance of an increasingly assertive Iran, not to mention Somali pirates and other potential pitfalls for Israeli shipping. If Israel’s economy comes to depend on eastward commerce, it does not stretch the imagination very much to believe that Israel could find itself deploying a meaningful naval force . . . to the Indian Ocean. . . .

Meanwhile, the permanent U.S. naval presence in the Mediterranean, the report notes, has shrunk drastically since the end of the cold war. . . . In other words, there is more at stake here for Israel than mere strategic clarity. The world is changing, and [Israel’s] ability to secure the sea is becoming increasingly vital.

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.