On Wednesday, two out of three British-Iranian hostages were released by Iran, following Britain’s payment to it of a $530 million debt. Their release, as Nigel Farage writes, is wonderful news for the prisoners and their families, but the manner in which it was arranged should cause great alarm. The former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo called the debt repayment “blood money” and predicted that Iran will use the funds to “terrorize Israel, the UK, and the U.S.” Farage explains the context of the hostage negotiation and suggests that it might further damage Western relations with Saudi Arabia, a key regional rival to Iran.

At the very least, the timing of the hostages’ release prompts serious questions. Why has Britain chosen this moment to repay Iran the money? It could have done so at any time since Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was first imprisoned in 2016. The answer is that the British government is hoping to repair relations with Iran. It shares Joe Biden’s enthusiasm for rebooting the Iran nuclear deal. . . .

On the same day the aforementioned British hostages were released, Boris Johnson visited Saudi Arabia and held talks with Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed. The purpose of this trip was to persuade bin Salman and bin Zayed to commit to increasing energy exports from the Middle East so that the West can cut its reliance on Russian oil.

Things did not go well.

First, three executions were carried out in Saudi Arabia shortly after Johnson landed in Riyadh. They followed the 81 executions which took place there last weekend. The Saudis would not have ordered these killings while a visiting foreign premier was on their soil unless they wanted to send a message to the West. Second, Saudi Arabia announced that day that it is close to agreeing with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan and not dollars, thereby damaging the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market. If nothing else, this is hugely symbolic and shows deep unease with Biden’s administration. Johnson left the Middle East emptyhanded. He got precisely nothing in return for his visit.

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.