Whatever the fate of Adam Boehler’s negotiations, eventually the question of planning for postwar Gaza must be addressed. President Trump clarified in a press conference yesterday that his plan to depopulate and then rebuild the Strip doesn’t involve “expelling any Palestinians.” If that is so, it accords nicely with Robert Satloff’s proposal to find common ground between the White House’s plan and the Egyptian one endorsed by Arab leaders. Satloff begins by pointing to the contradiction at the heart of so much anti-Israel rhetoric about Gaza, namely:

the fact that 75 percent of the population is formally registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as “Palestine refugees” displaced from other areas by the 1947–49 war (or, more likely by this point, descended from those refugees). In other words, three-quarters of Gaza residents publicly declare that they have no legal or national connections to the Strip itself and have accepted UN refugee benefits pending final resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . . Conventional wisdom long held that the refugee problem could only be resolved in the context of creating a Palestinian state.

Satloff suggests dealing with both the reconstruction problem and the “refugee” problem at once, which would take away a major source of the ongoing Israel-Arab conflict:

Given clear options, some Palestinians would choose to stay in Gaza and renounce their refugee status in exchange for the deed to a new home of their own. Others, with the promise of compensation, would no doubt jump at the chance to move—whether to the West Bank, an Arab or Muslim country, or elsewhere, depending on how wide the doors to asylum, permanent residency, and even citizenship swing open around the world. . . . The numbers are not nearly as daunting as one might think.

Arab states currently want it both ways: on one hand, they argue that Gazans have such a firm attachment to the land that few would ever leave voluntarily; on the other hand, they reject the very idea of voluntary relocation because they fear numerous Gazans would in fact take that option—more than their societies can absorb. Washington should not accept this contradictory position.

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.