“Israeli Police Raid Jerusalem Mosque,” read a characteristically misleading New York Times headline last week. The caption to the accompanying photograph explained that the police “arrested Palestinian worshipers who had barricaded themselves inside a prayer hall at a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City.” But, as Bassam Tawil explains, those arrested were not worshippers in any usual sense:

Since the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan on March 22, Israeli authorities have taken a series of measures to enable free access for Muslim worshippers to the Aqsa mosque compound. . . . The measures include providing free-of-charge shuttle services for the worshippers, as well as sealing off several main streets in Jerusalem to traffic so that the Muslims will be able to enter and exit the city without delay.

As a result, tens of thousands of Muslims from Israel and the West Bank were able to attend prayers at the mosque, especially on Fridays, in the first two weeks of Ramadan. That is until a group of extremist Muslims decided to turn the Aqsa mosque compound into a scene of anarchy and lawlessness, violating the sanctity of the holy site and endangering the lives of the remaining peaceful worshippers who came to the holy site with the sole purpose of praying and not engaging in any acts of violence.

These extremists, some wearing masks, seemingly did not come to pray. They came, on the face of it, with the aim of rioting and causing disorder. They came with stones, fireworks, wood planks, and iron rods. That is not what Muslim worshippers usually bring to a mosque. They prevented worshippers from leaving the mosque. Their intention was, to all appearances, to create a violent riot against Jewish visitors and the police. In addition, they desecrated the mosque by smuggling fireworks, clubs, and stones into the mosque and barricading themselves inside it using iron rods and furniture among other objects.

There is no law prohibiting non-Muslims, including Jews, from touring the site. In fact, the Islamic religious authorities have long welcomed non-Muslims as visitors at the Aqsa mosque compound. The issue here, however, is that some Muslims have decided that they do not want to see any Jews visiting the site. That is apparently because Muslim leaders, including the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, have been telling their people that the Jews have no right to visit Judaism’s holiest site.

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.