In Jerusalem, a few blocks away, a giant billboard displaying Israeli soldiers standing in front of a flag is emblazoned with the words: “Happy Purim! ‘The opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power.’” The quote comes from the Book of Esther, which states, “[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” (Esther 9:1).[i] The passage describes how on “the very day” that Haman sought to slaughter the Jewish people, the Jews instead slaughtered their enemies. The meaning of the juxtaposition on the billboard is clear: “We’ll be doing the slaughtering, now.”
Israel certainly is doing the slaughtering at the moment. Its assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’ massacre on October 7th has already killed more than 30,000 Palestinians (the vast majority of whom are civilians), injured nearly 100,000, displaced millions, and forced Gaza to the brink of a catastrophic famine. But beyond its patently vengeful and genocidal language, the billboard also suggests something more subtle about the self-image and contradictions of Israeli society today.
The phrase “the opposite happened,” venahafoch hu, is the watchword of Purim, a day in which the world is overturned, power relations inverted, and one drinks until one cannot distinguish righteous Mordechai from wicked Haman. “The carnival is an exceptional state,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “A descendant of the ancient saturnalia, when everything was turned upside down and the lords waited on the slaves.”[ii] For centuries of Jews living in exile, Purim held out hope for a reversal of fortune and a final redemption.
Benjamin concludes, though, that “an exceptional state really only stands out against an ordinary one.”[iii] In other words, an exception is only an exception if it transgresses a rule. But the ordinary state of affairs today is one in which Israel has exercised military power over Palestinians for decades and is in the midst of executing one of the most brutal wars of the 21st century. In such a context, the “venahafoch hu” emblazoned on the billboard advocates not for an upending of power relations but a reinscribing of them: Israel dominated Palestinians before Hamas’ brutal attack and will continue to dominate Palestinians for the indefinite future. The status quo has not been inverted but preserved, and the public Purim celebrations demand not the exceptional but the ordinary.
And yet, such irony is lost on most Israelis. In public discourse in Israel, Israeli Jews are somehow both the helpless victims of the Purim story and also possessors of one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. Hamas is both the latest iteration of the various vast, oppressive empires under which Jews suffered and also a weak militant group governing a miniscule and blockaded strip of land.
In the West Bank a few weeks ago, a friend and I accompanied Palestinian Bedouins to fill up their water tanks in case they were harassed by settlers or the army. In the middle of the process, soldiers arrived, stopped the Palestinians from continuing to draw water, and threatened to empty the tanks that were already full. One particularly gleeful soldier said to me, quoting the Talmud, “‘I saw an upside-down world: those on high were below, and those below were on high.’ Did you know that they came here as conquerors with Saladin?”[iv] Though his statement was both morally abhorrent and factually incorrect, the implication was clear: we are the conquerors now. He freely admitted what the billboard down the street and the celebrants this Purim do not – the “reversal” has already taken place and what is to be celebrated is the prospect of getting to stay on top.
In a way, Hamas is the perfect outlet for a vulgar interpretation of Purim’s revenge fantasies. The Jews were never powerful enough to overthrow the Babylonians, Romans, or Nazis the way that the Jews of the Purim story deposed Haman (never mind that they themselves were only able to do so with the support of the Persian emperor Achashverosh); Hamas is far more manageable. Paradoxically, it is only because Israel is already far stronger than Hamas that fighting it can serve as a suitable imitation of Purim. The current war recalls those Coliseum matches that reenacted Roman victories by having well-armed gladiators face off against poorly armed ones. The carnivalesque atmosphere of such games was intended not to upend the ordinary, as Purim does, but rather to reaffirm its inevitability. Here in Jerusalem, the mask worn by the gladiator combat is that of Purim itself.
All that said, we should also certainly not advocate for the actual inversion suggested by Purim: one in which the oppressed dominate their former oppressors. The horrors committed by Hamas on October 7th should have been enough to demonstrate the terrible and brutal violence of such a proposal. But other “inversions” are possible – ones in which decolonization means the dismantling of oppressive systems such that the once-oppressed and the once-oppressor can join together to build a shared society. “I believe that perpetrators and victims can live together as survivors,” writes postcolonial theorist Mahmood Mamdani. Against the notion that power can only be undone through endless, violent role reversals, Mamdani insists:
I am not convinced that we are like so many moths fatally attracted to the candle, revolving around it until we perish in its flame… [T]he relation between power and agency is neither determinative or irrelevant, because identities are politically created. Neither history nor identity has to be permanent, and decolonization does not have to be a romantic illusion.[v]
This is doubly true if we recall that even well-armed gladiators were also Roman slaves. So, too, even after the Jews’ successful revenge against Haman, they remained “servants of Achashverosh.”[vi] Jews in Israel have been placed in the position of an imperial beachhead in the service of the West, which repented for the Final Solution by offering the Jews a state in Palestine over the heads of Palestinians, a state that could only ever be sustained by western powers who saw it as a bulwark against a Middle East that was revolting against its onetime-colonizers. As Gershom Scholem, the storied historian of Jewish mysticism, declared as early as 1931:
Zionism set its position intentionally or unintentionally – and truthfully, it was intentionally – by way of declining powers and not rising ones… [i.e.] the imperialism we are wedded to by the “ring” of the Balfour Declaration.[vii]
When Mizrahi Jews were forced out of Arab countries, the Israeli government turned them, too, into frontline soldiers both literally and metaphorically. Now all Israeli Jews –Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Ashkenazi – serve as the tip of a spear held by a West that once murdered them, whether in the Shoah or as part of colonialism. US warships and munitions shipments testify to Israel’s status as an American proxy. Palestinians are the most direct victims of this arrangement, as the carnage in Gaza readily testifies. Yet Israeli Jews, too, will be unsafe so long as Israel is maintained as a garrison on the unraveling seam of empire, as will Jews in the diaspora who are inevitably tied to it.
To craft a shared future in light of this history does not mean ignoring the brutal oppression and dispossession of Palestinians since 1948, the traumas of Palestinians and Israelis, or the enormous difficulties involved in living together. It does mean, though, refusing to accept that the only two possible futures are indefinite oppression or its violent reversal.
Israeli society, however, long ago accommodated itself to the former option. In a eulogy for a guard killed outside of Gaza in 1956, Moshe Dayan presciently stated:
Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today… For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate… Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling.[viii]
Instead of proposing an alternative, though, Dayan insisted that the only way forward was more of the same. “We will make our reckoning with ourselves today,” he continued. “[W]e are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home.”[ix]
In the streets, little Israeli children are dressed up as soldiers and policemen for Purim. Today, I walked by a store selling dress-up riot gear, complete with a nightstick, for three-year-olds. To dress up on Purim, traditionally, is to reconfigure reality – a pauper may be a king, a young child may be a wise elder, a saint may be a scoundrel. Anything is possible. But the children’s costumes on the streets of Jerusalem are not the imaginative fancies of as-yet-possible futures but rather the dull beat of an inevitable one. The children are merely being taught to rehearse the roles prepared for them – they will soon be commanded to put on uniforms, carry weapons, and enforce the occupation and ethnic cleansing. The costumes remind me of an amusement park I once read about in which children play-act as airline attendants, mechanics, and insurance agents, earn play-money that they spend at the play-supermarket, and vote in play-elections in which only the wealthiest children are eligible for election. A way of playing that is not playing at all but rather habituation. The Israeli children dressed in the uniforms they must someday wear are being taught not to imagine possible lives but to embrace their soon-to-be roles as prison guards of another people and foot soldiers of a crumbling West.
Is this the dress-up that God desires? No — this is what God desires: a Purim that prefigures futures that may yet be possible. This is the meaning of the Zohar’s statement that Purim and Yom Kippur are tied together, that Yom Kippurim means Yom Ki-Purim¸ a day like Purim.[x] On Yom Kippur, we read God’s demand “to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke” (Isaiah 58:6) and on Purim we are commanded to dream it and begin enacting it. No more children dressed for combat; no more soldiers watching from above in the guard tower. No more guard towers. No more siege, no more airstrikes. Let the Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners be released. Let there be life here beyond empire and domination, in which those who have survived, oppressors and oppressed, victims and victims of victims, are free to struggle together towards redemption.
[i] All translations of Tanakhic quotes are from the JPS 1985 translation.
[ii] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 26, quoted in Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm (London: Verso, 2016), p. 60.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] B. Bava Batra 10b. “Upside-down,” hafukh, comes from the same root as venahafoch.
[v] Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 36.
[vi] B. Megillah 14a.
[vii] Gershom Scholem, Od Davar (Hebrew), ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1989), 81.
[viii] Moshe Dayan, “Moshe Dayan’s Eulogy for Roi Rutenberg – April 19, 1956,” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/moshe-dayan-s-eulogy-for-roi-rutenberg-april-19-1956.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Tikkunei Zohar 57b.
Thank you for this enlightening commentary. And for showing the bitter irony of how Purim has been corrupted to suit a political need. The observation of Israeli society manipulated to become the pawn of a declining 'west' is astute and well-received. My heart breaks for these people. I hadn't heard of Mahmood Mamdani before now, I will read his work. Cheers.