In November and December, a number of prominent American Jewish figures traveled to Qatar—including Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the head of the Zionist Organization of America Morton Klein, and the lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The visits seemed part of a charm offensive by Doha to win sympathy in the American Jewish community. On February 2, however, Al Jazeera—which is owned and operated by the emirate—sent letters to several pro-Israel groups in the U.S. letting them know that one of the network’s agents had infiltrated their organizations under false pretenses and secretly recorded conversations that will form the basis of a soon-to-be-released documentary. Armin Rosen tries to make sense of the coincidence of these two efforts:

Over a year ago, news broke that the universe of pro-Israel advocacy groups in Washington had been infiltrated by an undercover activist—who is almost certainly Tony Kleinfeld, a twenty-five-year-old British citizen, Oxford graduate, and Palestine-solidarity advocate. . . . [D]uring the summer and early autumn of 2016, Kleinfeld constructed a false pro-Israel persona, presented himself under a modified version of his first name, and enrolled in Georgetown University’s summer school with the hidden purpose of insinuating himself in pro-Israel groups in Washington. . . .

So, what did Kleinfeld actually find? According to the letters [from Al Jazeera], an operative with the network recorded a young, low-level AIPAC development staffer discussing “under-the-table” relations between Israel and the Arab Gulf states during an event the group held in Florida. . . . If Al Jazeera is sitting on [evidence of some violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act] or some other bombshell about the inner workings of pro-Israel organizations, it wasn’t in evidence. . . . What’s [most] striking about Kleinfeld’s efforts isn’t that he uncovered evidence of serious wrongdoing. Instead, after spending considerable resources and man-hours, . . . Al Jazeera may have documented nothing more wicked than Americans participating in their political system in normative (even, one might say, boring and uninspired) ways.

Because of the . . . . close connections between Al Jazeera and the regime, the extensive resources needed to carry out the undercover sting, and Kleinfeld’s alleged misrepresentation of both his identity and his reasons for being in the United States, many of the letters’ recipients now perceive themselves as victims of state-sponsored espionage. . . .

[The charm offensive last fall] and Kleinfeld’s work tell a dissonant story about Qatar’s view of the U.S. Jewish community: does Doha see American Jews as an obstacle or as an opportunity? Does the Qatari regime want to squeeze the Jewish community or embrace it? Both? Whatever its actual objectives in Washington, what’s clear is that American Jews somehow factor into them. . . . [In fact, both efforts] betray a Qatari preoccupation with American Jewish communal power, as well as a desire to address whichever challenges Doha believes Jewish influence raises for the country’s vast ambitions in Washington and beyond.

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.