For all the Biden administration’s talk about the need for a ceasefire and a two-state solution, and its recent criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war, it has continued to support the Jewish state in deed. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Washington has approved a massive shipment of armaments to Israel, and that an internal assessment concluded that their potential use raises no human-rights concerns.

By contrast, the Senate passed a bill last week allocating military aid to Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel, but it is now being held up by the House of Representatives. Matthew Continetti comments:

The obstacle isn’t substantive. It’s personal. House Speaker Mike Johnson won’t bring the Senate bill to the floor. But he can correct his mistake. And if he chooses not to, then members of both parties should support a discharge petition that would allow the pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine majority to speak.

The world is a dangerous place. America’s allies face existential threats. Vladimir Putin intends to absorb Ukraine into his resurgent Russian empire. Iran’s theocrats seek to destroy the Jewish state by proxy wars and nuclear arms. Xi Jinping wants Beijing to rule Taipei. We owe it to our friends—and to the generations of Americans who sacrificed for peace—to do what we can to deter aggressors.

The critics argue that ending aid will bring the Ukraine war to a close. Not so. Russia will continue to fight. Ukrainians will resist. Even if the combatants agreed to a ceasefire along the current lines of control, Putin would resume the invasion at his convenience. He’s done it before. And he has targets beyond Ukraine. At this moment, Russia is probing Finland and Estonia—NATO members both.

A minority of lawmakers are exploiting their leverage in a historically narrow House majority to paralyze the Congress, abandon our allies, and embolden our adversaries. Americans deserve better. They deserve a voice.

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.