On July 2, an explosion shook the Iranian uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, causing considerable damage. This was but one of several mysterious fires and explosions that struck military sites in the Islamic Republic this summer. While it’s not clear that all of these were acts of deliberate sabotage, there is reason to suspect Israel intelligence services were behind some of them. If so, writes Joshua Muravchik, this is but one of several times that the Jewish state has prevented the emergence of an aggressive, nuclear-armed, rogue state:

[E]ver since an Iranian opposition group laid bare Iran’s secret nuclear program in 2002, much of the world has seemed as anxious about what Israel might do to prevent an Iranian nuclear breakout as about Iran’s quest for the bomb. Israel’s latest apparent tactic was “audacious and risky,” wrote a Washington Post columnist. It amounted to “a dangerous gamble,” warned the head of the Rand Corporation’s Middle East program.

Perhaps so: audacious and risky tactics, dangerous gambles, have been hallmarks of Israel’s self-defense, which has enabled it to survive in the face of endless threats that few other nations have had to face. It has emerged as the strongest and most stable country in the Middle East, a reality that is recognized universally by unbiased observers. What is less often acknowledged is that actions taken in Israel’s self-defense have also redounded to the benefit of America and, indeed, of the world. [Indeed, the Jewish state] has been responsible for some of the world’s most important measures of what is called “counterproliferation.”

These other instances include, most prominently, the destruction by Israel jets of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s al-Kibar reactor in 2007, and—in collaboration with the U.S.—the cyberattack that destroyed some 1,000 Iranian centrifuges in 2010. As Muravchik points out, there were likely other clandestine efforts at degrading these countries’ nuclear programs as well. And thanks to these efforts, the world is a much safer place than it would have been otherwise:

Preserving its regional nuclear monopoly manifestly serves Israel’s security. But it serves the general interest as well. Israel is neither a proliferator nor an aggressor. Not every forceful action it has taken over the years has been wise, but all have been rooted in self-defense. Its nuclear deterrent encourages its neighbors to accept that it cannot be driven into the sea, and this conduces to peace. Were a neighbor such as Syria to deploy nuclear weapons, Israel’s deterrent would be eroded, making a future large Israeli–Arab war more likely. With nuclear weapons on both sides, the region would live nearer the edge of catastrophe.

[Likewise], it is easy to see that Iran’s nuclear aspirations do not threaten only Israel, perhaps not even primarily Israel, which has a nuclear deterrent of its own. They would be brandished to further Iran’s drive to dominate the region, a shield behind which Iran could become still more aggressive and a Damoclean sword with which to intimidate its neighborhood.

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.