*This article first appeared in the Jerusalem Post
“Israel is accused of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people by a United Nations agency, experts, governments, and non-governmental organizations during its invasion of the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Gaza war.”
These are the closing words of Wikipedia’s authoritative entry on the State of Israel. Their narrative is consistent with so many others describing Israel’s war on Gaza as genocidal, vicious and indiscriminate, and portraying Israel as a cancerous Jewish tumor created by interlopers intent on dispossessing innocent Palestinians while expanding their power, presence and control at all costs and with utter disregard for Arab lives.
But aren’t the Jews the nation that brought the world the Book of Books, leading and shaping its values of kindness and caring not just in the past but in the present, supporting general social causes in their communities and in the world at large at a level of charity beyond other Americans at all income levels? Aren’t Jews the nation obsessed with advancing every area of medicine, science and technology, and sharing their knowledge, skills and energies to the betterment of all mankind?
Which one is it? Are we a light unto the nations or hospital-bombing baby-killers? Will the real Jews please stand up, pull off their masks, and identify themselves?
This was the mask that had to be yanked off during the climactic exchange between Queen Esther and King Achashverosh in the puzzling moments before Haman’s downfall. After dramatically and urgently revealing to the king that her nation had been condemned to annihilation, Achashverosh responds with palpable surprise, asking her who had the audacity to do this. Really?! Did he not realize that Esther was referring to the antisemitic decree issued at Haman’s instigation just days earlier?
Achashverosh, of course, knew Haman well, but it was only at this moment that he got to know the Jew.
Like every antisemite, Haman promoted a conspiracy theory, a narrative of demonization that described the Jews as a fifth column embedded in every corner of the world, playing by their own rules, and contributing nothing but harm to society. Achashverosh — like millions of gullible leaders and citizens of the world throughout history — swallowed this whole and granted Haman free reign to excise the Jewish disease from his kingdom.
But then Achashverosh wandered past that false narrative. The night before Esther’s party he had been reminded that he owed his life to Mordechai saving him from an assassination attempt, and now he had learned that his beloved Queen Esther was also Jewish. It simply did not compute. This was not the nation that Haman had described and that Achashverosh had readily agreed to destroy. “Esther, who would have the audacity to want to destroy you and your nation?!”
No different that in the story of Purim, the many antisemites of the world inexcusably and maliciously distort the narrative of the Gaza war to make the Jewish people unrecognizable, portraying them and the Jewish state in the most vicious light, ignoring both the ongoing existential threats that Israel faces and its readiness to live in peace and prosperity with its Arab citizens and neighbors similarly committed to peaceful coexistence. The world continues to hate and attack a fiction, a caricature of the Jew and of Israel drawn by malevolent antisemites, not realizing that if they follow that lead they will rid the world of its Mordechais and Esthers, its greatest forces for good.
It is time to tear off the mask.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer is executive vice president of the Orthodox Union (OU), the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization.
