In October 1973, simultaneous Egyptian and Syrian attacks caught Israel unaware, and for the first few days of the war the Jewish state’s survival was in serious peril. According to one body of conventional opinion, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger deliberately, and at great cost in Israeli casualties, delayed an emergency airlift of arms to the IDF, believing that an overwhelming Israeli victory would be less conducive to postwar negotiations than a stalemate. But, writes David M. Weinberg, the charge is simply untrue: 

Kissinger, and President Nixon, clearly wanted to lead postwar peace talks based on an Israeli victory, not on a draw with the Arabs, who were backed by Soviet arms. Israeli victory was in America’s interest. The fact is that for the first two days of the war, no emergency airlift was requested by Israel, only some anti-aircraft missiles and routine items already in the existing supply program. In fact, Israeli leaders were telling Washington that the war was going well. . . . Kissinger argued [nonetheless] for sending limited arms to Israel to cement the U.S. role in regional diplomacy.

On the fourth day of the war (October 9), Israel revealed to the U.S. that it had lost 500 tanks and 50 fighter jets, and it asked for urgent replacements. Nixon was preoccupied with his domestic scandals (Watergate and Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s resignation), but Kissinger got Nixon to guarantee to replace Israel’s losses, allowing the IDF to dip immediately into its reserve arms stocks.

It was only on the seventh and eighth days of the war (October 12-13) that Israel told the U.S. it was failing to win the war quickly and was running out of basic ammunition. Kissinger then got Nixon to okay an emergency airlift of arms in U.S. military planes. Over the first full day of the airlift, the U.S. shipped more weaponry (1,800 tons) to Israel than the USSR had sent to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq over the four previous days; 3,000 tons of equipment were to follow.

So much for the canard that Kissinger purposefully delayed Israel’s resupply. Furthermore, Kissinger wisely counseled Israel against agreeing to a ceasefire on the fifth day of the war, because at that time it had lost territory. Israel should agree to a ceasefire, he warned an exhausted and dispirited Prime Minister Golda Meir, only when the IDF had regained the upper hand and had pushed into enemy territory.

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.