This is not the only difficult policy decision America currently faces with respect to Israel’s crisis. Although the topic of sanctions lacks the moral urgency of the safety of U.S. citizens in the hands of sadistic captors, it could in the long run prove no less consequential—and if mishandled, could lead to even greater losses of life. In accordance with the 2015 nuclear deal, UN sanctions on Iran’s drone and missile programs will expire on October 18. Anthony Ruggiero and Andrea Stricker argue that Washington must make sure the sanctions are renewed, and explain why doing so matters for Israel’s safety:

The expiration of the UN embargoes will make it easier for Iran to obtain foreign missile and drone equipment. Tehran already procures such equipment but will face fewer restrictions and enforcement actions to stop it from flowing from supplier and transit countries. Tehran will also increase its use of front companies and other concealment efforts to make illicit procurements for missile and drone activities more difficult to detect—and therefore harder for the U.S. and Europe to sanction.

Iran will use this new permissive procurement and sales environment to augment weapons provisions both to Palestinian terrorist groups that attack Israelis and to Russia to undermine Western support for Ukraine. . . . If the U.S. and its European partners rely solely on national authorities to retain the missile and drone sanctions [rather than renewing them at the UN], Iran will see it as a sign of Western weakness and intensify its malign activities, including its nuclear program.

When the West does not respond to Iran’s destabilizing policies in the region and beyond, Iran typically takes full advantage. Allowing the embargoes to lapse would be a further signal that the U.S. and Europe will stand down on Tehran’s drone, missile, and nuclear proliferation.

The U.S. and Europe have time to act and reverse their acquiescence to Tehran’s growing destabilization of international security. There isn’t a moment to lose—the people of Israel and Ukraine depend on it.

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.