Since the October 7 attacks, Jews have asked, again and again, why there hasn’t been more outrage against Hamas, why haven’t there been international demands for the release of hostages, and so forth. These questions have been given new intensity since the murder of the Bibas children and their mother was confirmed. Tal Fortgang argues that this sort of response reflects a pre-Zionist, diasporic mentality:

Some of us still cling to the old mindset of powerlessness, declaring credulously how we were now supposed to be full members of an enlightened world, expressing shock at how every leader of every nation and every NGO disavowed hatred of the Jews and dutifully swore “Never Again” only to go silent when Kfir and Ariel were taken from their mother and murdered. “Where was the UN? Where was the Red Cross?” ask those still unable or unwilling to break from the clutches of our past helplessness, even as the UN employed and sheltered the terrorist murderers, and the Red Cross gleefully participated in their grisly pageant.

When Jewish babies were kidnapped, the then-president of the United States planned a pier to bring aid to their captors. Kfir and Ariel were suffering unspeakably beneath Gaza, and the then-vice-president said Israel could not move heaven and earth to get them back—she had looked at the maps, and it just wasn’t worth it. The Biden administration and its USAID director Samantha Power sent $2.1 billion in “emergency” supplies to Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza, openly funding our enemy’s war of extermination against us under the pretense of “evenhandedness.” And that was the reaction of our supposed best friend, while the rest of the planet from London to Beirut brayed for our blood and defamed us daily for fighting back.

International law didn’t save Kfir and Ariel. Neither did social justice, or human rights, or any of those high-minded concepts. And they never could. If anything, they served as cudgels to stop the Jews from using our power to save precious Jewish babies. We can only focus on doing what is necessary to defend ourselves, because no one else will do it for us.

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.