Yesterday’s newsletter addressed the complex situation unfolding in Syria, and the conflicting reports about it. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has a thoughtful explanation of what has happened, and how it has been misunderstood:

According to reports, the recent wave of violence was not a broad-based jihadist uprising against all [religious] minorities but a targeted, context-specific assault on the Alawite community along the Syrian coast. In one district alone, local sources reported that over 60 Alawite civilians were executed in a single night, contributing to an overall toll of more than a thousand dead in just a few days. It was a sweeping wave of violence and revenge killings in the Alawite strongholds like Latakia and Tartus. These grim numbers expose a carefully orchestrated massacre—an event that ignited an already volatile powder keg of sectarian resentment.

But also, this latest bloodshed is a continuation of decades of civil war, internal power struggles, [and] deep-seated anti-Alawite grievances as much as it is an outcome of external influences and jihadist mass murderers. . . . The Iranians very well could be the instigators behind these events due to the stakes their axis has in Syria.

Israel has substantial reasons for apprehension, not least because of the recent massacres perpetrated by Gaza-based jihadists—who, in certain historical contexts, have been considered even more moderate than the current strain of jihad from which HTS, [the group now ruling Syria], emerges. Israel’s worst fear is the replacement of Shiite jihad with a more unpredictable Sunni jihad on its northern border or the emergence of an Islamist, pro-Turkish Syria. Such scenarios, arguably among the worst imaginable, have informed Israeli strategic decisions, including airstrikes aimed at eliminating Syrian military capabilities after Assad’s fall.

Ron Ben-Yishai, meanwhile, provides a more detailed examination of Israel’s actions. The bottom line:

Israel is observing from the sidelines, enforcing its policies primarily through its air force, and is transparent about its preference for Syria to become a federation. While Israel has no intention of occupying the country, Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz aim to shape a new demilitarized reality south of Damascus near Israel’s border.

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.