The holiday of Purim starts in a little less than two weeks. At the end of the book of Esther that is read during it, the wicked Haman’s plan to slaughter all the Jews of Persia—including “small children and women, in a single day”—is foiled and, with permission from King Ahasuerus, the Jews instead rise up and kill those who wished to take part of in their extermination. The scriptural account of the Jews slaughtering over 75,000 of their enemies has disturbed the moral sensibilities of some modern readers.

Haim Jachter, by contrast, puts the events of the book in proper context. He points out that the text states that Ahasuerus gave the Jews of Persia permission “to stand up for their lives” against “those that would assault them” (8:11) and also “to avenge themselves on their enemies” (8:13). Yet, the next chapter, which describes the events themselves, does not say that the Jews took revenge, only that they “lay hand on such as sought to hurt them” and killed “their enemies.” Moreover, Jachter explains, the text emphasizes that the Jews were granted royal permission to kill women and children and to take their property—but refrained from doing either. The Jew, in short, were not engaged in massacre but in self-defense.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.