Yesterday, King Abdullah II of Jordan met with President Biden—the latter’s first meeting with an Arab head of state since taking office. Writing in advance of the visit, Ghaith al-Omari and Ben Fishman discuss the problems currently facing the kingdom, America’s priorities, and how all this relates to Israel:

Externally, Jordan is facing challenges on all of its borders. To the north, the Syrian conflict has flooded the kingdom with refugees, cut off an important trade route, and threatened to bring Iran—directly or through its proxies—to its frontier. To the east, attempts to deepen relations with Iraq (whether bilaterally or through a trilateral process with Egypt) have produced diplomatic progress but few concrete economic dividends. To the west, a weak and fickle Palestinian Authority remains a source of concern, and relations with Israel’s leadership were extremely negative under the former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, causing civil and diplomatic affairs to suffer greatly (though security ties remained strong). And to the south, King Abdullah’s relations with the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman are tepid at best.

[But] Israel’s new prime minister Naftali Bennett and its foreign minister Yair Lapid have placed early emphasis on revitalizing the relationship with Amman. On July 8, Lapid and the Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi signed an important deal that will increase water sales to the kingdom (after the collapse of the long-negotiated Red Sea-Dead Sea Conveyance Project) and expand Jordanian trade to the West Bank. The United States should applaud this momentum and encourage other areas of cooperation, including healthcare, energy, the environment, and grassroots initiatives.

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.