Peter Beinart’s Vicious Distortion of a Jewish Holiday

‘One is required to become ‘spiced’” — that is, intoxicated — “on Purim.” Thus teach the sages of the Talmud. How spiced? (Only a Jew could respond to such a command with such a question.) “Until he does not know the difference between Cursed Haman and Blessed Mordechai.”

Jews feast and drink on Purim, celebrated today, to recall the story of the Book of Esther. In ancient Persia, the charming Jewish orphan for whom the book is named wins King Ahasuerus’s beauty pageant and becomes queen of a massive empire, while keeping her Jewishness secret. Her uncle Mordechai refuses to prostrate himself before Ahasuerus’s top vizier, the Amalekite Haman, enraging Haman to the point that he petitions the king to allow a genocide of the Jews. Through Esther’s machinations and a quick succession of slapstick reversals, all is turned upside-down. Haman is hanged on the gallows he built to kill Mordechai, and the Jews turn their swords on their enemies. Good triumphs over evil.

It would take barrels of wine, then, to confuse Mordechai, the Purim story’s paragon of righteousness, with Haman, its cartoonishly evil villain. Is that really what the sages demand of us? (Out of sheer righteousness, I try to cover the bases by fulfilling this sacred commandment to its fullest extent each year.)

That, or our sages were teaching an important lesson about how easy it is to find yourself justifying evil and condemning the righteous. It would be a lesson worth repeating for moral midgets like Peter Beinart, the self-identified observant Jew who soberly endeavors to turn Purim into a day of somber reflection for the Jews’ many misdeeds. Our celebrations after killing 75,000 of our enemies as recounted at the end of the Book of Esther were mere prologue, writes Beinart, for “the slaughter being committed in our name in the Gaza Strip.”

Rend your garments this Purim, instructs Beinart: “Establishment Jewish discourse sanitizes Israeli behavior in much the same way many Jews sanitize the book of Esther. Our communal story . . . is wrong because it denies the evil that Jews commit.”

No sanitizing is necessary, though, because we know that not all killing — “slaughter,” if you prefer cheap moralism — is alike. It is the sophist’s oldest trick to confuse what Haman attempted to do to the Jews with what the Jews eventually did to their enemies.

William F. Buckley Jr., as recounted by longtime think-tank president Ed Feulner, once made the point especially clear:

I recall many years ago during a televised debate, Bill’s opponent foolishly declared that the U.S. invasion of Grenada was the moral equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bill instantly replied: “That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around.” The opponent’s position dissolved in the laughter.

Laughter is a natural response, and the right one. There is something profoundly silly about abstract moral reasoning without accounting for the reasons that people, and nations, do what they do. It leads to absurd conclusions, like confusing Cursed Haman and Blessed Mordechai. Yet it provides eternal temptation to those who seek false equivalencies, whether in ancient Persia, Cold War strategy, or the contemporary Middle East, rather than accepting that some parties are more righteous than others.

Yes, Haman wanted to kill and Mordechai wanted to kill. But their reasons for wanting to kill could not be more different. And the miraculous reversal of the Jews’ fortunes in Ahasuerus’s kingdom two millennia ago did presage current events in the Middle East — but in a way that is worthy of celebration, not lamentation.

Haman had no trouble finding “enemies” of the Jews who were prepared to commit a genocide. His message to goons throughout the kingdom was that they would finally rid themselves of the “one nation, scattered and separate among the peoples of the world,” whose “rites are different from all others.” It caught on because the Jews were supposed to suffer, to be second-class citizens at best, and victims of pogroms at worst, down to each last man, woman, and child.

Haman’s own bloodlust stemmed from a sense of lost honor. Mordechai’s stubborn refusal to submit signaled that the Jew was out of line. The Jews were getting uppity, perhaps a little too confident that they would soon be returned to their homeland after a painful exile.

When the Jews turned the table on the would-be génocidaires, then, they did not merely act in self-defense against an activated force prepared to kill them. They showed that there were good reasons and bad reasons for killing other people. One’s shattered pride was not a good reason. Defending one’s people against those who would do them harm at the drop of a three-cornered hat, by contrast, was.

Contrary to what Beinart suggests, the Jewish Queen of Persia does not advocate this violence frivolously. As a close reader of the Book of Esther will note, she requests self-defense in plaintive tones, echoing language from the Book of Lamentations. Esther understood what Beinart refuses to: Sometimes the only thing worse than killing your enemies is not killing them, and having them kill you.

Beinart extends his moral drunkenness through a long, half-baked analysis of the suffering in Gaza today. He is right to think it a tragedy that so many people suffer terribly during wartime. But he stoops to some remarkable depths to blame the Jews. He brazenly excuses Hamas’s use of human shields as “typical of insurgent groups,” as if that makes it less evil — never mind that in fact Hamas uniquely excels in this particular evil. And he egregiously compares Hamas’s well-documented commandeering of schools and hospitals to “the Israeli military locat[ing] its headquarters in central Tel Aviv.” What begins as farcical moral analysis ends as parodic twisting of the facts. How many drinks deep are we, at this point?

Ultimately, Beinart thinks none of Israel’s violence is righteous because the Jews started it; it all began with “the mass ethnic cleansing [Israel] committed in 1948.” We could repeat the actual history of Israel’s founding and discuss all the times Israel offered its Arab neighbors everything they claimed to want and were met with violence. But facts will not shake Israel-eliminationists because they are enraged by Israel’s very existence. They have made it clear that the “occupation” they seek to overturn is not the Jewish presence in the West Bank; and they certainly can’t mean Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every last Jew in 2005. It is the Jewish presence between the Jordan and the Mediterranean — all of it.

In other words, Haman’s honor was wounded once again, and he cannot stomach living next to Mordechai. The Arabs lost an offensive war against the Jews in 1948 and then staked their pride on reversing their defeat with more wars and waves of suicide attacks, a bloody trail culminating in the Hamas atrocities of October 7.

If they wanted to live alongside the Jews, they could have chosen that path a thousand times over. They don’t, and it’s no secret why. They share Haman’s view of the Jews: uppity, on the brink of destruction, a people where they don’t belong, a stain on Muslims’ honor. That Israel has fended off the violence of pride with the violence of defense is not proof of Jewish “evil.” Just the contrary.

Certainly Jews should not wantonly kill innocents in pretended self-defense. And blessedly the Jewish state does nothing of the sort. What it does do is kill those who want to destroy it. And it should continue to with the solemnity owed to a campaign of Jewish defense, as Esther’s pleading embodied, and without being crippled by the fear that being strong somehow undermines its moral standing. Only a moral drunkard could confuse a righteous campaign of self-preservation for a depraved effort to annihilate another people.

In Esther’s day, “many from the nations of the land became Jewish,” seeing Jewish triumph as a victory of the blessed over the cursed. If today the same story alienates Beinart and his ilk, so be it. Let them boast of their principled defense of the enemies of the Jews, which only amounts to false moral equivalencies that prolong Palestinian suffering under jihadist kleptocracies — while insisting that all would be resolved if the Jews laid down and died. Let them cast their lot with Haman and his descendants.

I, for one, read the Book of Esther in the joyous tones it deserves. My lot is with Esther and Mordechai, and all they stood for: For our enemies, nothing but death; for our friends, l’chaim.