On Sunday, a young IDF veteran vacationing in Brazil hastily left the country after finding out that a warrant had been issued for his arrest on war-crimes charges. The Israeli Foreign Ministry recently said that it is aware of twelve cases where complaints have been filed against individual Israelis living or traveling abroad, from Thailand to Ireland, although there are yet to be any arrests. In the Brazil incident, and at least some others, the attempts at prosecution are the result of a coordinated effort, as Lahav Harkov explains:

The organization hounding Israeli soldiers around the globe is called the Hind Rajab Foundation, and it has strong ties to Hizballah. . . . The Brussels-based organization, founded in September and named for a five-year-old Palestinian girl alleged to have been killed by the IDF in Gaza, takes legal action against what it calls “perpetrators, accomplices, and inciters of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.”

In October, the foundation submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court with the names of 1,000 IDF soldiers, claiming that they committed war crimes. The foundation also gave the letter to the embassies of eight countries that have taken an antagonistic stance towards Israel, including Spain, Ireland, and South Africa, calling on them to issue Interpol arrest warrants against the individuals.

The Hind Rajab Foundation is led by Dyab Abu Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, longtime anti-Israel activists with ties to terrorist organizations. The Beirut-born Jahjah, [a former Hizballah fighter], was behind multiple riots in the streets of Antwerp at the beginning of the century, including violence against Jews in the city and burning an effigy of an Orthodox Jew. Jahjah had been banned from entering Britain because of his extremist views.

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.