In examining the recent upsurge on deadly attacks on Israelis civilians, Jonathan Spyer notes that it is normal for such incidents tend to increase during Ramadan, though usually they take the form of street harassment or low-grade violence. He further notes that “this atmosphere of tension is neither incited nor controlled by any organized political or religious element,” but rather spreads in a loose fashion via social media. Finally, he argues that “this wave of attacks has no coherent political aim and is wedded to no identifiable political process.” In that way, he says, it reflects the “salient fact not only of Palestinian but also of broader Sunni politics in the Levant, Iraq, and the surrounding areas.”

Over the past two decades, every political project emerging from among this population has gone down to failure. The second intifada of 2000-04, the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt of 2012-13, the 2012-18 Sunni Arab insurgency in Syria, and the Islamic State “caliphate” of 2014-19 are the most significant mass political efforts by Middle Eastern Sunni Arab populations in recent years. All were defeated.

The result of these failures has not, however, been the emergence of a more pragmatic politics. Rather, a sort of inchoate, largely formless, rejection of current arrangements is identifiable. This rejection produces periodic episodes of violence but seems unlikely to affect larger structures of power.

In the case of Israel and the Palestinian territories, a familiar pattern has emerged. The Jewish and Arab populations are at near demographic parity. Efforts at partition going back nearly a century have foundered on the consistent unwillingness on the Arab side to accept the division of the land as the final settlement of claims. As a result of this rejection, combined with the inability on the Arab side of reaching its goals by force, the conflict remains in a kind of chronic state: unresolved but subject to more or less successful management.

Might the power of shared religious symbols eventually prove sufficient to unite [the now deeply splintered Palestinians]? If so, the result will be the return of this conflict to its acute form.

In contrast to this record of failure stand the Gulf monarchies (with the exception of Qatar) and Morocco, which appear to have embraced a program of religious moderation and normalization with Israel.

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.