Looking past some of the more formulaic debates between the Israeli left and right about the legacy of the 1967 conflict, Yaakov Amidror examines its profound impact on Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab world as a whole:

Until the Six-Day War, the Arabs had “convincing” explanations as to why they had failed in their wars against Israel. In 1948, the prevailing explanation was that Israel fought against corrupt countries that could not properly unite against it; in the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was the fact Israel was part of an international coalition of superpowers.

The Six-Day War stands out because Israel’s victory was undisputed, and the Arabs were devoid of any excuse for their defeat. . . . The only plausible explanation for the defeat was the Arabs’ claim that they were “surprised.” In that respect, the 1973 Yom Kippur War was something of final proof of the new regional equation by which Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield. The 1973 war, which caught Israel completely by surprise, dealt the Arab armies a massive military defeat. Perhaps it was this reversal of roles that was necessary to reinforce the regional equation. . . .

At the same time, Arab nationalism, especially in its Nasserist sense, failed the test of reality and all but disappeared. It is possible that the blow dealt to the Arab nations had more far-reaching historical implications than common wisdom would have us believe and that its remnants may still resonate in the Arab Spring, which for its part, has consumed the last shreds of faith in Arab nationalism. The resounding defeat in 1967 clearly gave rise to other forces in the Arab world as a substitute for failed nationalism; one of those forces was Islamism, which only benefited from the failure of its modern rival. . . .

[In Israel itself,] the lifting of military rule on Israeli Arabs in November 1966, together with the magnitude of the Arab nations’ defeat in the war a few months later, prompted a fundamental change among Israeli Arabs, as they finally realized they could not undo the results of the War of Independence. To a large extent, this was when the long process of Israeli Arabs’ integration into Israeli society began. . . .

Ironically, . . . it was the Six-Day War that cemented the existence of a Palestinian people in the political and public spheres. Until then there was no tangible link between the Egypt-controlled Gaza Strip and the Jordan-controlled Judea and Samaria, and no Arab country demanded independence for the Palestinians—nothing could have been further from their minds.

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.