In the past few weeks, the fragile political compromise that has held Sudan together since the ouster of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 has come apart, leading to fighting between rival factions that has left hundreds dead. The current conflict pits the head of the military and de-facto ruler Abdul Fattah al-Burhan against the forces of Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. Monday, the press reported that Jerusalem has reached out to both sides to offer to mediate. Ehud Yaari provides a history of Israel’s relations with Sudan from the 1950s to the present, and considers how the current situation might affect the country’s accession to the Abraham Accords in 2020:

During the current normalization era, Israeli authorities have failed to cultivate relations with Sudanese civilian parties, focusing entirely on Burhan, his subordinate officers, and to a lesser extent the RSF, [Hemedti’s militia]. For three successive governments in Jerusalem, no serious effort was undertaken to show the Sudanese people the potential benefits of normalization. A lone attempt to establish a “Sudan-Israel Friendship Association” in Khartoum quickly faded away, and humanitarian aid sent by an Israeli NGO did not receive any publicity.

The two-and-a-half-year delay in converting the normalization declaration into a signed peace agreement appears to have put the entire process at risk. Even if Sudan forms a civilian government in the near term, it may prove reluctant to test the public mood by concluding a treaty with the “Zionist enemy,” as Israel is often referred to by the local press, social-media commentators, and politicians. If Burhan wins his contest with Hemedti, his Islamist allies may convince him to suspend or at least slow down normalization; similarly, if Hemedti prevails, he will have to factor in how [his] potential partners feel about Israel.

Keeping Sudan in the Abraham Accords may therefore require the United States to insist that Khartoum fulfill its commitments and complete the peace agreement—perhaps even by warning the country that it stands to lose the U.S. benefits granted in conjunction with the initial normalization declaration. Most of Sudan’s civilian factions do not want to forfeit American support.

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.