Gaza War: Hamas is Haman

(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

We have passed not just the start of Ramadan, but the first and second Fridays, with today’s noon service considered particularly sacred. Forty thousand Israeli Muslim citizens and East Jerusalem Residents have come to the Noble Sanctuary—for Jews, The Temple Mount—each Friday to pray in one of its two great mosques, without a single untoward incident. Aside from a lone gunman in the West Bank, these Ramadan Fridays have been peaceful in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of Muslims visiting the Old City of Jerusalem today are up to 120,000. An Israeli journalist reporting from the crowded Noble Sanctuary as services let out described the atmosphere as reverent and celebratory.

Meanwhile, the tiny Jewish world—there are 100 Muslims for every Jew—is preparing for Purim, an irreverent, raucous, often drunken celebration of the survival of the Persian Jews, who came under deadly threat some 2,600 years ago. The Book of Esther,  chanted aloud in the evening and following morning in synagogues circling the globe, tells the story.

This year Purim begins tomorrow, Saturday, exactly 24 weeks after the Saturday (both the Sabbath and another Jewish holy day), on which Hamas terrorists committed grotesque mass atrocities against 1200 Jews and others in Israel, deliberately inviting destruction on themselves and the women and children they hide behind. Many say that this was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That it was, but actually the Nazis rarely took the time to rape women with knives or cut off the limbs of children before killing them. The Nazis did torture Jews at times, but mainly aimed at efficient mass murder.

The Book of Esther fits this appalling anniversary. For those who don’t know: King Achashverosh, annoyed with his queen’s disobedience, holds a beauty contest to replace her, and Esther wins. She marries him, becoming his favorite wife, but without revealing her Jewishness. The King’s Viceroy Haman—noisemakers rattle and feet stomp in the congregation at every mention of his name—is even more annoyed at some Jews’ refusal to bow down to him and whispers into the King’s ear a message of mass murder. The King signs his decree but, “the city of Shushan was perplexed.”

Mordechai, Esther’s older cousin and a notable non-bower, whispers in her ear that only she can save the Jews, but she must go to the King unannounced and risk being beheaded by the guard—the usual punishment for surprise visitors. After three days of praying and fasting, sackcloth and ashes, she dresses more suitably and takes her shot. The King stays the guard’s sword and—being a man in love—asks Esther what she wants, “up to half the kingdom.” But she asks only that he and Haman—[noisemaking, foot-stomping]—come to a banquet she has prepared. In that select company Esther reveals to the King that her other guest is planning to kill her and all her people.

The King, more than a little miffed, condemns Haman—[same]—to be hanged on the gallows he prepared for Mordechai. He can’t revoke his stern decree but he issues another allowing the Jews to defend themselves; they do, and they prevail, in perhaps an “over-the-top” way, but “the city of Shushan shouted and was glad. The Jews had light and gladness, and joy, and honor.” This last sentence is part of the prayer said every Saturday night to separate the Sabbath from the workaday, but this year it will inaugurate Purim, commemorating the day after the day that they were supposed to be mass-murdered but, through their own use of deadly force against their enemies, survived and thrived.

Now, all analogies are bad, but please bear with me. Suppose that the city of Shushan represents the people of the world and the King stands in for the secular powers who are indifferent to threats to the Jews. Hamas is Haman, but having announced the decree to kill the Jews, it launches the most vicious surprise attack ever, and follows up with multiple repetitions of the decree.

The city of Shushan—the world—was perplexed for a couple of days, and the King—the secular powers—allowed the Jews to defend themselves for a little longer. But when the Jews’ self-defense took longer and seemed harsher than expected, both the people of Shushan and the King turned against the Jews and decreed that they should stop defending themselves while Haman—who though weakened never climbed the gallows—was openly still plotting genocide against the Jews. Haman thinks: Convince the King and the city of Shushan that the Jews’ self-defense is over-the-top, call them off, and give me a breather to plan my next mass murder.

We even have the equivalent of Esther’s bravery, if not more, in the much greater participation of women. They are the world’s first women tank crews, a group launching and tracking drones at the battlefront, and the crucial defenders of the Nahal Oz army outpost on October 7th. Since that day, women have been flying into Israel from many countries to join or rejoin IDF units and go into battle. Truly, they have not feared the King’s guard and they like facing down the vicious wrath of Haman.

And we can’t forget: the women soldiers who were stationed at the Gaza border to watch Hamas reported in detail what they knew it was going to do, and they were ignored by their male superior officers, right up to the President of Israel. It’s as if Esther had warned Mordechai about Haman, and Mordechai had just shrugged.

As I looked over the planned Purim events at local synagogues this Saturday night, I felt alienated by the usual array of costumed adults mocking themselves and everything, often in ways too vulgar for children. I decided to stay home and read the Book of Esther alone. Then I felt confirmed by a Times of Israel broadcast quoting some Israelis who think there should be no Purim at all this year.

How about this for a compromise? Read the Book of Esther in public as usual, but in a mood that is reverent as well as celebratory, keeping in mind the striking—and ominous—parallels with our own experience right now.

Gaza: What is Victory?

Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.

On November 11, 1918, the last day of World War I, there were higher than usual casualties, because General John J. Pershing—“Black Jack Pershing” as his men often called him—resented the Armistice. He insisted on hurting the Germans further, at high cost to his own troops, and continuing, to the last minute—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—to inflict German losses. He reportedly said: “They never knew they were beaten in Berlin. It will have to be done all over again.” *

A myth arose. The German generals spread the word that their army was “undefeated in the field” but was “stabbed in the back” by politicians bent on surrender. Actually, their defeat in the field was staggering. After four years of what was mostly standoff, a million Americans arrived and, with their reinvigorated allies, swept across German-occupied France and Belgium in three months. The allies occupied a small part of western Germany for a while before they went home. But in Berlin, they never knew they were beaten. Pershing, alas, had to observe in his later years the rearming of Germany and the second world war he had predicted, with all its dreadful costs. His warnings, like Churchill’s in Britain, were ignored.

After that second war, they knew they were beaten in Berlin, and they knew they were beaten in Tokyo too, because the US and its allies took the war into those capitals and insisted on unconditional surrender. Although greatly complicated by the division of Germany and the Soviet role, the US (along with the UK and France) transitioned from military control, including denazification, dissolution of the German army, and occupiers’ rule of law, through municipal elections, to the buildup of a democratic state, officially declared four years after the war. The US State Department explicitly decreed that this governance “does not effect the annexation of Germany.” West Germany regained “near-sovereignty” in 1955, but it remained nominally occupied until 1991, after re-unification. Continue reading

Gaza, Israel, and the United Notions

I was born in August 1946; the first UN meetings were held in London in January that year. So the UN and I are the same age—you might say, nonidentical twins. I have followed it from an early age, and I am glad to report that—despite the small scale and limitations of my lifetime efforts—I have done better with my challenges than my twin has in its equal lifetime.

Per the UN itself, the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s proved “in the worst possible way” that the UN repeatedly failed to prevent this horror, despite being able to do so. It failed to stop and even to recognize earlier genocides in Indonesia (1960s) and Cambodia (1970s) and much more recent ones in Darfur, Iraq and Syria (against the Yazidis), and Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN rights council refused to discuss China’s ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims.

The UN’s failure to prevent small wars—more than 200 in its lifetime and mine—speaks for itself; advocates argue that it has prevented World War III, but that is conjectural. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its Ukraine invasion, although the General Assembly passed it overwhelmingly. The UN has done good work against hunger and slavery and promoting sustainable development, but has consistently fallen short of its own stated goals. More than 780 million people (and rising) face hunger, and there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history.

Continue reading

Gaza War: Some Numbers

Please see below (“Concerning the War in Gaza”, January 14) for my overview of the war, and the disclaimer introducing it, also applicable here. So is this: Every death is a terrible loss, and every civilian death more so.


In 1944, General Curtis Lemay was appointed to command the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) in the Pacific Theater, his predecessor having been fired for a reluctance to bomb civilians. Lemay soon ordered the fire-bombing of Tokyo with napalm, killing as many as 100,000 people in six hours. He repeated this in other Japanese cities, with the estimated total deaths ranging from 241,000 to 900,000. This was before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed another 129,000 to 226,000. These mass bombings were not directed at military targets (few were involved) but were carpet bombings of civilians. To many, Lemay is a hero.

Similar incendiary bombings, also creating firestorms, were carried out by the British and Americans in the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, killing at least scores of thousands. Civilian populations being what they are, most of the victims in all these cases were women and children. Causing terror was their explicit goal, in the service of ending the war. Some considered these war crimes, but they were never tried or punished as such. German mass murder of civilians, using different methods, was of much greater magnitude, and was punished.

In part in reaction to the destructiveness of that war, the 1949 Geneva Conventions greatly strengthened the laws defining and prohibiting war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, a term coined to describe what the Germans did to the Jews, but subsequently applied—in a few cases I think legitimately—to other mass killings. It has more often been misapplied. Continue reading

Is Genocide Now Maladaptive?

David Blumenthal, a good and wise friend who is a Jewish studies professor and a rabbi wrote me recently asking about the former adaptiveness and present maladaptiveness of xenophobia. The operative passage in his letter was, “In the global world, however, survival requires the cooperation of varying and different groups. Humanity, in its groups, cannot survive without the quintessential other. Xenophobia has ceased to be adaptive. So has antisemitism, racism, orientalism, and misogyny.”

I have little trouble agreeing that at some times in the past these behaviors were adaptive for the perpetrators. Continue reading