In this way, the Haggadah used for the Passover seder has become a platform for every possible cause but that of Jewish liberation. That can be harmful since it transforms the one Jewish ritual in which even most secular Jews participate into something that doesn’t reinforce their identity in ways that promote their sense of Jewish peoplehood.

As irritating as that may be, the damage that it does cannot compare with a reinterpretation of Purim that has become the preferred narrative for those who hate Israel and support those who seek to destroy it. In this way, the Purim tale is not so much about Jewish salvation as it is an excuse to depict ancient Jews as mass murderers. In so doing, this buttresses the smears of the modern-day State of Israel and its war of self-defense against the genocidal terrorists of Hamas.

That’s the spin we’re getting from people like anti-Zionist writer Peter Beinart, who wrote this week in The Guardian to argue that Purim provides the proper context for the debate about the war Israel is waging on Hamas after terrorists infiltrated the southern border and attacked Jewish communities on Oct. 7, 2023. Similar revisionist articles were also published in The Forward by novelist Michael David Lukas as well as on the My Jewish Learning website by leftist Rabbi Jill Jacobs, a shrill critic of Israel, though the latter doesn’t specifically raise the war in Gaza. A not-dissimilar piece, albeit without a byline, can also be found on the website of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, which is best known for its video library of testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.

Holiday revisionism

Purim is celebrated each year on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar, which begins this year on the evening of March 13 and lasts through sundown the next day, right into Shabbat. It commemorates the foiling of an attempt at the genocide of the Jewish people in the Persian empire 2,500 years ago and is celebrated with the reading of the biblical book of Esther in which the story is related. On Purim, costumes are worn to remember how the Jewish Queen Esther concealed her identity before revealing herself to the Persian king in order to save her people. More than any other Jewish holiday, it is a day of merrymaking with children’s carnivals, sending gifts of food to friends and neighbors, attending parties and festive meals, not to mention immoderate consumption of alcohol.

But Purim revisionists aren’t so much interested in the plot of the evil Haman to slaughter the Jews and their deliverance due to the courage of Esther and the cunning of her cousin Mordechai. They are more concerned with the denouement of the Purim story told in the ninth chapter of what is also referred to as Megillat Esther (the “Scroll of Esther”), which is, as these writers are at pains to point out, often overlooked amid the fun.

In it, the Jews are faced with the fact that even after Haman’s execution on the orders of King Ahasuerus, his orders enabling the mass murder of Jews throughout the Persian empire cannot be revoked. That means that the Jews can’t simply sit back and be saved by the king or anyone else. They must, instead, arm and defend themselves against those eager to carry out Haman’s evil command.

As the book puts it, “On the very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power.” Since they were a people who had been conquered in their own land, which led to their dispersion, the Jews were expected to be easy prey for slaughter. Instead, “the Jews mustered in their cities to attack those who sought their hurt; and no one could withstand them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all of the peoples.”

The actions of the Jews seem like a pretty straightforward case of self-defense in which would-be murderers got their comeuppance. But Beinart and the other revisionists hone in on the statistics provided by the biblical account, in which we are told that 75,000 of those who opposed the Jews died.

After two and a half millennia, treating the book’s account of these battles as historically accurate is a rather dubious assumption. As with a lot of numbers in the bible, that 75,000 figure is more than likely an exaggeration that was accepted by tradition to make the magnitude of the Jews’ victory clear. It may be no more accurate than the numbers of casualties in the fighting in the Gaza Strip supplied to a credulous international press by Hamas.

Embracing powerlessness

Whatever the details of what actually happened, the idea that the Jews had turned the tables on those who sought their death and killed a lot of them is horrifying to modern-day leftists. They are guilty not only of judging the events of the distant past by contemporary standards but of branding the actions of Jews in Persia as “war crimes.” They also think that the Purim story provides a pattern and rationale for their equally misguided accusations aimed at Israelis today.

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.

Beinart was once a self-styled liberal Zionist. After discovering that most Israelis weren’t interested in his ignorant and suicidal advice to empower their enemies via “land for peace” deals, he turned on them and now opposes the very idea of Jewish sovereignty. That is something that is, given the culture of the modern Middle East dominated by Islam, an invitation to another Holocaust. He routinely slanders Israel in mainstream outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times. His latest effort is a solipsistic attack on the Jewish state called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, which expounds on his theories about the virtues of Jewish powerlessness and the need for Jews to atone for the sin of surviving yet another attempt at their annihilation.

In his Guardian piece, which is adapted from his book, Beinart not only regurgitates 75 years of propaganda produced by the Jewish state’s enemies but argues that the real story of Oct. 7 isn’t the Palestinian orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction. Instead, it’s the Israeli counterattack in which, thanks to Hamas’s deliberate tactics of endangering their own people and hiding behind them, many civilians have been killed in the subsequent fighting.

So, he and other anti-Zionists seize on the conclusion of the Purim tale to demonstrate that not only was the Jewish answer to attempted genocide disproportionate but to use it as a historical precedent, if not justification, for Jews to commit “evil” acts. So, too, for Lukas, who speaks of Purim and Gaza as examples of the Jewish “capacity for evil.”

Remembering Amalek

Both Lukas and Jacobs also are at pains to highlight the teachings from Parshat Zachor, the Torah portion, which by tradition is read on the Sabbath before Purim, in which the Jewish people are enjoined to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt.”

Amalek was the nation that—unprovoked—harassed the Jews during their wanderings after the Exodus from Egypt, attacking the weak and the stragglers. The book of Deuteronomy goes on to declare: “You shall blot out the name of Amalek from under Heaven. Do not forget!”

It is true that Jews, like other human beings, are capable of doing wrong, even evil things. The Purim revisionists never fail to mention the crime of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Jew who on Purim in 1994 murdered 29 Arabs in prayer in cold blood at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. A tiny minority of Jews try to rationalize or even justify Goldstein’s heinous act because of Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews. The overwhelming majority of Jews and Israelis, however, reject such arguments.

More to the point, Goldstein’s rampage is in no way comparable to the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to defeat Hamas in Gaza. That is a campaign of urban warfare against the terrorists’ organized military formations during which the IDF has done its utmost to avoid civilian casualties as experts on the rules of war have attested.

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.

Purim resonates with the Jews of the Diaspora because it is easy to identify with Esther’s plight and to understand the bravery required for her to step out of her comfortable, even privileged existence, in order to save her people. But it is also an object lesson in the necessity for Jews to prioritize their self-defense.

Judging Jews for refusing to be victims

In the book of Esther, it’s not enough to merely gain the favor of non-Jewish authority figures. The Jews also have to arm themselves, and confront and defeat their would-be murderers, as any people would do when faced with the prospect of their genocide. To look at those efforts as intrinsically evil because doing so necessarily involves violence—and, yes, the death of some of those who wish to kill Jews—is not merely wrongheaded. When embraced by Jews, it is a psychosis in which the intended victims of mass murder refuse to help or save themselves.

That isn’t moral or sane.

Those who not only urge Jews to adopt this course in the face of genocidal Jew-haters and judge them as wrongdoers if they prefer to protect their lives would never dare to treat any other people in that fashion and thus engage in a particularly toxic variant of Jew-hatred. Since Oct. 7, Jews have been confronted with a surge of antisemitism that is rooted in the denial of their rights, both to their ancient homeland and to self-defense. That is all the more reason for them to understand how important it is that they never allow themselves to again be at the mercy of those, like Haman (who we are told descended from Amalek), or those who believe in the same genocidal creed, whether they are German Nazis or Palestinian Arab Islamists.

Anyone who confuses such evil-doers with the defenders of the Jews has lost their way.

On this Purim, we must indeed remember Amalek. We do so not to justify wrongdoing but to understand that those who seek to strip the Jewish people of their ability to defend themselves are the accomplices of those murderers who represent the contemporary incarnation of evil.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.