What are the effects of this war on the viability of some kind of Palestinian sovereignty? Yesterday, Evelyn Gordon argued in Mosaic that the Jewish state’s best safeguard against terrorism is occupying territory. Efraim Karsh takes this argument one step further:

Hamas’s latest aggression may well have driven the final nail in the coffin of the two-state solution. For one thing, while most Israelis have been disabused of the idea by Yasir Arafat’s war of terror and the subsequent confrontations with Hamas, Saturday’s horrendous massacres may convince other international players of the mortal dangers that would follow if Israel withdraws from key West Bank areas (which would be needed for a viable Palestinian state to exist).

After all, were such an invasion to ensue from a West Bank state, hordes of terrorists would be able to roam the more populous streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in no time. What do two-state solution campaigners believe would happen then? What sovereign state could possibly allow a situation that would arise in which their citizens could be indiscriminately slaughtered on its streets?

What’s more, the grim brutality of Hamas’s recent atrocities may also draw international attention to the corrupt and oppressive nature of its regime. And just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and educational transformation, so long as the West Bank and Gaza continue to be governed by Hamas’s (and the PLO’s) rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can possibly develop there.

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.