In reviewing a new book by Ilan Troen, an Israeli scholar, the historian Allan Arkush runs through a wide range of arguments against a Zionist presence in the land of Israel. The book, called Israel/Palestine in World Religions: Whose Promised Land?, starts by examining secular and political arguments against Jewish political legitimacy, among them

the currently “regnant, if not hegemonic, argument” that Zionism is nothing but a form of settler colonialism. The four pages in which he explains how “scholars and polemicists have wrenched out of context an exactingly developed colonial-settler analysis to describe a distinctive and different historical experience” constitute perhaps the most concise and cogent deconstruction of this unfortunately fashionable accusation now available in print. Yet Troen doesn’t delude himself into thinking that “the misapplication of the colonial-settler pattern to Israel” or any other challenge to the legitimacy of Zionism can be deflected through argumentation.

Troen argues that these “theological dimensions” of anti-Zionism derive instead mainly from Christianity and Islam, according to whose “historic doctrines, the (possibly) miraculous return of Jews to reclaim and rebuild their ancient homeland should never have happened.”

In his chapter on Christianity’s claims, Troen quickly and effectively sketches the story of Christian supersessionism, which delegitimated Judaism as a religion along with any Jewish claim to the Holy Land. He demonstrates that this doctrine underlay the Catholic Church’s initial opposition to Zionism but didn’t prevent it from ultimately recognizing the existence of the State of Israel. Nevertheless, even when it did so, it did not “acknowledge the legitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. It merely affirms the presence of Jews.”

If there is some range in Christian views of Zionism,

there is no comparable diversity within Islam, however, “which has been far more unified in its opposition to Zionism than Christianity.” Troen’s capsule history of the domineering relationship of Islam toward Judaism effectively covers all of the ground between the Qur’an and Hamas, demonstrating the deep roots and abundant fruits of Islamic resistance to Zionism and hatred of it.

Still, Arkush concludes hopefully, “Troen sees some grounds for optimism even within the Muslim world, such as the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, led by Mansour Abbas.”

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.