In April, the Syrian government enacted Law Number 10, which determines how the regime will prioritize the reconstruction of the country’s war-torn areas. One of the law’s clauses will make it very difficult for internal refugees—those displaced elsewhere in the country due to the fighting—to reclaim real property they abandoned. Ibrahim Abu Ahmad argues that there is something more sinister in this law than mere red tape or even avarice:

Government actions [such as this] appear designed to tip the balance of power among the country’s different ethnic groups in Bashar al-Assad’s favor by blocking Sunni refugees’ returns to certain strategic areas of Assad-controlled territories. If Sunnis, [long the majority religious group in Syria], become less than 50 percent of the population, other minorities could create an effective majority that will be able to stand against Sunni Syrian interests. Indeed, if Assad, [who, along with much of his ruling clique, is not Sunni but Alawite], were to succeed in creating a Syria where Sunnis are no longer a majority of the population, he may be able to place increasing pressure on a group that already has a tense relationship with Syria’s minorities, and is now in addition blamed by Assad’s supporters for the war [itself]. . . .

[T]he ambiguity in the law’s wording has raised speculation that this legislation is part of a government initiative to gain control over vast swaths of personal property by enabling the state to become the final determinant of which civilians will reside where in postwar Syria. Many Syrians fear that the government intends to redistribute the properties of its Sunni citizens to Assad supporters and non-Syrian Shiite proxies, providing residences for Shiite forces and their families and thus making permanent their presence in the country. . . .

Assad is trying to secure strategic areas in Syria by creating a majority-non-Sunni population there, which will enable him to tighten his control over Syria with less cost and more efficiency. This will also serve the interests of Iran, which would like to form a Shiite corridor from Tehran to Beirut.

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.