A moving piece from Kathleen Hayes, a writer from Los Angeles who has gone from an intellectual critic of anti-Zionism to actual enthusiasm for Israel:

Meanwhile they live like no one I’ve ever seen. At moments of rest on the hottest of days, they break out in singing “Am Yisrael Chai,” clapping their hands and dancing with wild abandon. Jerusalem’s restaurants and shops are bustling; at ten o’clock at night the shopping mall is full of families, Jewish and Arab alike, going into shoe stores and eating ice cream. At a café one afternoon there’s an announcement from the large group at the next table—a couple has decided to get married—and cries of “Mazel tov!” ring out. Israel lives. Everyone knows the war in the south is going badly, that Hezbollah rockets are making the north perilous and largely uninhabitable, and in private conversation they express fear about what’s going to happen. There is no point in dwelling on these thoughts however; the best way of defying the death cult is by living.

And war is an intrinsic part of this life: unwanted, unavoidable, but now so clearly just. At first I’m startled to see so many people—soldiers and civilians, male and female—toting weapons, but accept it immediately. This is what it means to preserve, against all odds, a state for the Jewish people. Soldiers with machine guns at their hips coo over babies in strollers, walk through the streets of Old Town. . . .

Israel was founded as a haven for the Jewish people, why it matters. But Israel is so much more than that. Its people show us how to fight, how to live, and how to fight by living.

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.