In the U.S., people have been excluded from military service for such minor physical defects as flat feet. Israel, by contrast, has long taken the attitude that every citizen has something to contribute to the people’s army. Most recently, a group of young men and women who suffer from such conditions as autism and deaf-mutism have been assigned to the prestigious and secretive 8200 Unit, responsible for cyberwarfare, where they help to destroy and dispose of computer hardware containing classified information. Lior Ohana speaks with some of the team’s members:

We follow Chief Warrant Officer David, [a pseudonym for the supervising officer], through the gates of the scrapping factory. Piles of shiny equipment pass by us behind huge signs labeled “Classified” and “Top Secret.”

“Nice to meet you, I’m Shai, thirty-three years old from Tel Aviv,” a volunteer on the autism spectrum, holding a large screwdriver, introduces himself. “I live with my mom and dad. I really love taking things apart, and that’s why I love being here, and I also love playing on the computer, which goes along with what I do here. Come, let me teach you. First, we need to remove all the screws from the computer drive and search for the hard disk that contains everything we’re not supposed to keep.”

“I’m from Ra’anana, and my dad is also a lieutenant colonel, and I wanted to follow him to the army and volunteer,” says A., twenty. “I enlisted in Unit 8200, and since then I’ve been dismantling, assisting with machines, but mainly sorting, doing what needs to be done. I contribute to the country. . . . That’s what I wanted to do the most. I enlisted, put on the uniform, received a beret, and I’m so happy to be like my dad.”

From the small but significant factory, David and his colleagues primarily want to convey an important message: “There is no shortage of work in all areas of the army,” explains David. “We need more manpower, not just for ourselves but for the entire army. These soldiers here teach us and assist us in an exceptional way.”

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.