Having spent his career working for the State Department both in Washington and abroad, including numerous diplomatic postings in the Middle East, Alberto Fernandez is now the president of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, a U.S. government-funded Arabic-language radio and television network. In an interview with Robert Nicholson, Fernandez discusses the moral component of American foreign policy, and how his own Roman Catholic faith has informed his work:

[America’s priority should be] our national interests in the Middle East, our relations with historical allies, and the need to confront aggressive adversaries like Russia and Iran. But our long-term interests are ultimately best served by regimes that respect human dignity and promote policies that encourage human flourishing. We tend—overwhelmingly—to have the opposite [approach] today across the region. The region desperately needs more critical thinking, more honesty and understanding of the “other” in the face of daunting political and socioeconomic challenges.

But we also have a built-in problem in foreign policy because we tend to have a short attention span, something our adversaries often do not. . . . And we have tended to cultivate the type of tools, I am thinking here of the training of personnel, that focus on the more shallow, short-term, and superficial. I remember in Sudan being the only Western chief of mission who spoke Arabic. But the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese ambassadors all spoke Arabic. . . .

All too often Westerners come to the Middle East with a built-in sense of the superiority of postmodern liberal society over a supposedly benighted and fanatical East. The reality is rather more complicated than that. [Furthermore], being a [religious] believer can and should help you understand people’s motivation, what touches their heart and spirit, what is most precious to them, more than life itself. Westerners, especially the highly secularized members of the elite who tend to staff Western foreign ministries, have sometimes forgotten, if they ever learned, that man does not live by bread alone.

This dismissal of the spiritual (or if you prefer, ideological or inner) dimension of the human condition can be worse than folly. It can be deadly. This is not to present a simplistic clichéd image of a spiritual East and material West, but the world is broader and deeper than the jaundiced view from Foggy Bottom or Brussels or the island of Manhattan.

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.