While American Jews are familiar with the hostility and inaccuracy that have plagued reporting on the Jewish state in the New York Times and other major media outlets, in the United Kingdom the issue takes on a different character, as the principle offender is the state-run British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which has a near-monopoly on broadcast news. This summer, the BBC gained a new director, Tim Davie, who has expressed an emphatic commitment to bringing impartiality to reporting. Manfred Gerstenfeld sees at least the potential for change:

The British Jewish lawyer Trevor Asserson, now living in Israel, invested his own money from 2000 to 2004 in four well-documented studies detailing the BBC’s systematic bias against Israel. He concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by a widespread antipathy toward the country. This distorted reporting creates an atmosphere in which anti-Semitism can thrive.

Asserson noted that the BBC’s monopoly derives from a legally binding contract with the British government. He defined the BBC’s fifteen legal obligations under its charter and then showed instances in which the BBC breached many to most of the guidelines.

Asserson’s reports had some effect. In November 2003, the BBC created a senior editorial post to advise on its Middle East coverage. A former editor of the BBC’s 9:00 News, Malcolm Balen, was selected for the position. . . . In 2004, Balen undertook an internal inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The report was never released, which led to a series of legal battles. After eight years, the [British] Supreme Court decided that the Balen report is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC had, however, to disclose its legal costs on the matter, which were about half-a-million dollars at the time.

One wonders why, if the inquiry found that its reporting was impartial, the BBC would spend so much to keep it secret.

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.