Later this month, on the holiday of Purim, Jewish people will dress in silly costumes, eat triangular pastries, and listen to an ancient story about attempted genocide. What we notice, and don’t notice, about that story says a lot about what we notice, and don’t notice, in Israel and Palestine.
The tale comes from the book of Esther. It begins with a dissolute Persian king. He hosts a banquet, gets drunk, orders his queen to “display her beauty” to the revelers, and, when she refuses, banishes her from the throne. As her replacement he chooses Esther, a beautiful young maiden who, unbeknownst to him, is a Jew. Then he makes a calamitous personnel decision: he selects Haman, a pathological Jew-hater, to be his right-hand man. The stage is now set for an epic clash.
Haman persuades the king to sign an edict exterminating the Jews. Esther’s uncle, Mordechai, hears the news and sends word that she must save her people. Although protesting puts her own life at risk, Esther appeals to the king and, through a series of daring maneuvers, turns him against Haman. Haman is hanged. Mordechai takes his job. Good triumphs over evil.
When Jews tell the story of Purim today, many of us stop there. But that’s not quite right. The book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s death. It continues because although Haman is gone, his edict to kill the Jews remains. The king can’t reverse it. What he can do is empower Mordechai and his kinsmen to take matters into their own hands. Which they do. “The Jews struck at their enemies with the sword,” proclaims the book of Esther, “slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” On the 13th day of the month of Adar, the Jews kill 75,000 people. They declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking”. With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry. That’s the origin of Purim.
Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.
For most of our history, when Jews had little capacity to impose our will via the sword, the conclusion of the book of Esther was a harmless and even understandable fantasy. Who can blame a tormented people for dreaming of a world turned upside down? But the ending reads differently when a Jewish state wields life and death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport. Today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us. When we recite them aloud in synagogue, we should employ the anguished, sorrowful tune in which we chant the book of Lamentations, which depicts the destruction of our ancient temples.
Instead, most of us ignore the violence that concludes the Esther scroll. Some contemporary Jews justify it as self-defense. On the far right, some revel in it. But they’re the exception. More often, we look away. We focus on what they tried to do to us. There’s a joke that every Jewish holiday has the same plot: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” That’s how many Jews narrate not only Purim but many of our other best-loved holidays. Passover recounts our liberation from bondage in Egypt. Hanukah celebrates the Maccabees, who freed us from persecution by the Syrian-Greeks.
Festivals we can’t fit into this script tend not to capture our collective imagination. Why is Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah, less well known among contemporary Jews than Purim and Hanukah, holidays of lesser religious significance? There are various reasons. But one of them is this: Shavuot no longer fits the story we tell about ourselves. In modernity, Jews have grown more secular. Except for a religiously observant minority, we no longer describe ourselves as a people chosen by God to follow laws engraved at Sinai. We instead describe ourselves as a people fated by history to perpetually face annihilation but, miraculously, to survive.
With this secularization has come moral evasion. When explicating Jewish suffering, the rabbinic tradition almost obsessively demands that Jews look inward and reckon with our sins. The Talmud blames the Jews for Haman’s rise because they participated in the king’s drunken debauchery. A midrash on the Song of Songs suggests that the Israelites enslaved in Egypt were unworthy of freedom because they worshipped idols. The Talmud devotes almost an entire tractate to how Jews should respond to drought. Its answer: fast and repent for our misdeeds.
This theology is hard to stomach. When applied to modern calamities like the Holocaust, most Jews rightly consider any suggestion that we blame ourselves to be obscene. But in the absence of a belief in divine reward and punishment, we have largely stopped wrestling with what our sacred texts say about Jewish ethical responsibility. We have turned them into tales of Jewish innocence.
That false innocence pervades mainstream Jewish discussion about Israel. It’s why, when discussing Israel’s founding, American Jewish leaders blame Palestinians for their own mass expulsion. “The Palestinian refugee issue originated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war,” explains the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the US’s best-known organization fighting antisemitism, “when five Arab armies invaded the State of Israel just hours after it was established.” The moral chronology is clear: the Palestinians left their homes because Arab nations started a war. Palestinians suffered, but the real victim was Israel.
The problem with this account is that between one-third and half of the Palestinians departed before 14 May 1948, when Israel declared independence and the Arab governments declared war. By the time the Arab armies attacked, Zionist forces had already largely depopulated Jaffa and Haifa, Palestine’s two largest cities. The war’s most notorious massacre of Palestinians, in which Zionist militias killed more than a hundred men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin, occurred in April. When Jewish leaders claim the Arab invasions drove Palestinians to leave, they’ve got the causality reversed. “It was not the entry of the Arab armies that caused the exodus. It was the exodus that caused the entry of the Arab armies,” concluded the historian Walid Khalidi after consulting extensive Arab government documents and press reports.
The other way Jewish leaders render Israel blameless for the mass ethnic cleansing it committed in 1948 is by claiming that Palestinians only left because Arab leaders told them to. In his heftiest book, A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu argues that in many cases “Jews pleaded with their Palestinian Arab neighbors to stay. This was in sharp contrast to the directives the Palestinian Arabs were receiving from Arab governments, exhorting them to leave in order to clear the way for the invading armies.” This argument, too, is mostly fiction. A 1948 report by Israel’s own intelligence service concluded that Zionist attacks accounted for roughly 70% of the Palestinian departures while orders from Arab forces accounted for roughly 5%.
Jewish leaders don’t only evade Jewish moral responsibility when recounting Israel’s past. They do so when discussing Israel’s present. Most Jews were rightly sickened and appalled by Hamas’s massacre on 7 October 2023. But when Israel responded to that carnage with a ferocious assault on the Gaza Strip, the first reaction of many Israeli and US Jewish officials was to question whether large numbers of Palestinians were being killed. “The ‘Gaza health ministry’ or ‘Palestinian health ministry in Gaza’ is controlled by Hamas, and the information it releases cannot be trusted,” declared Aipac, the US’s most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, that November. The death figures coming from Gaza, added Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, were “simply untrue”.
In fact, the Gaza health ministry’s numbers were wrong – but in exactly the opposite way that Jewish leaders suggested. They were too low. A January 2025 study by public health experts from Yale and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that during the first nine months of the war, the death toll in Gaza was roughly 40% higher than the Gaza health ministry estimated. This undercount was predictable. In the first months of the war, the health ministry only counted bodies in morgues yet many of the people killed in Gaza never made it to a hospital. But for Israeli and American Jewish leaders, these details were beside the point. The point was to render Israel blameless, to avoid reckoning with the possibility that a Jewish state might be doing anything wrong.
When establishment Jewish officials did admit that Palestinians were dying in large numbers, they blamed Hamas. “Hamas is responsible for getting Palestinian civilians killed,” declared Aipac on 14 October. The reason: it uses them as “human shields”.
The human shields argument piles fallacy upon fallacy. Hamas certainly operates within civilian areas. But that’s typical of insurgent groups. No guerrilla force puts on brightly colored uniforms, walks into an open field, and takes on a vastly more powerful conventional army. “From the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam as well as Algeria, Angola and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians,” notes the Israeli-born international law professor Neve Gordon. “Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier.”
In fact, even conventional armies often operate near civilians. The Israeli military locates its headquarters in central Tel Aviv. Twenty-four schools sit within a kilometer and a half of its general staff building, which houses the offices of its top commanders. Because such intermingling is common, international law is clear: civilians don’t become fair game just because there are fighters nearby. In the words of the Additional Protocol to the Fourth Geneva Convention, the presence of fighters in an area “shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population”. One key legal obligation is proportionality. According to the Additional Protocol, the “loss of civilian life” from an attack cannot be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
Israel’s assault on Gaza became excessive on 9 October, when it cut off food and electricity to everyone in the Strip. The following day, Israel’s defense minister announced that he had “released all the restraints” on how Israel fought and its military spokesperson declared that “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy”. An investigation by the publications +972 Magazine and Local Call found that in the first five days of fighting alone, Israel bombed more than a thousand “power targets” – which included high-rise apartment buildings, banks, universities and government offices – that it struck not because of their military value but merely for psychological effect. Israeli officials hoped the destruction would shock Gaza’s population into turning against Hamas. Justifying this by invoking “human shields” torches the core principles of international law. But it is necessary to prove that Israel is always innocent. Even when a Jewish state drops bombs that kill tens of thousands of people, it cannot be the real author of this mass death.
Now, rather than proceed to the second round of a ceasefire that would require it to withdraw its troops from Gaza, Israel has relaunched the war with even greater ferocity. It has stopped all humanitarian aid from reaching the people of Gaza. Aipac’s response: Israel is not responsible for this policy of starvation because Hamas will not rewrite the ceasefire deal to release Israel from its obligations.
In this way, establishment Jewish discourse sanitizes Israeli behavior in much the same way many Jews sanitize the book of Esther. Our communal story – told by Jewish leaders from Jerusalem to New York – is not wrong because it acknowledges the evil that Jews suffer, including the evil that Hamas committed on 7 October, and continues to commit by holding Israelis as hostage. The story is wrong because it denies the evil that Jews commit. Our refusal to reckon with the dark side of Purim reflects a refusal to reckon with the dark side of ourselves, to acknowledge our full humanity, which renders us capable of being not only victims, but victimizers as well.
My hope, this Purim, is that when Jews encounter the slaughter that concludes the Book of Esther, we shudder. And that from this revulsion comes a new dedication to ending the slaughter being committed in our name in the Gaza Strip.
