Jews celebrate Purim this week by recounting a thwarted Persian plot to annihilate the Jewish people. As modern Iran marches toward a nuclear weapon, the story, told in the Book of Esther, carries added weight.
It also provides a window into the thought process of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave President Obama a copy of the book when they met in Washington on Monday.
As the story goes, Haman, the king’s chief adviser, convinces the king to grant his authority to a decree ordering the extermination of Jews. Eventually, the king — under the influence of his secretly Jewish queen, Esther — has Haman hanged.
But even the king doesn’t have the authority to reverse his prior order to kill the Jews. Instead, he tells Esther and her father figure, Mordecai, that they can write a countervailing decree of their choice and sign the king’s name to it.
Mordecai and Esther choose to give Jews the right of self-defense. As the Book of Esther reads, “the king granted the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them. …”
In the end, the Jews triumph only by taking up arms against their would-be destroyers.
Today, roughly 43 percent of the world’s 13 million Jews live in Israel, most of them concentrated on a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea. Over in modern Persia, the leaders of Iran’s radical Islamic regime have threatened to wipe Israel off the map. They are seeking a nuclear weapon and denying the Holocaust that killed six million Jews.
Even though academics may debate whether Iranians are serious, Israelis cannot feel secure if their enemies have acquired the means to carry out their promise to annihilate them.
The choice facing Israelis is grim. Soon — some say within months or even weeks — the Iranian nuclear program will advance to the stage where Israel will no longer have the military capacity to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
As the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick put it, at that point, “Obama will effectively hold the key to Israel’s survival. Israel will be completely at his mercy.”
Sadly, Obama has given Israelis little reason to trust him. When he entered office, he sought engagement with Iran, while scolding Netanyahu for letting Jews build homes in the Jerusalem area in the same neighborhoods as their families. He supported sanctions only after being forced to by Congress. Three years later, diplomacy has failed and sanctions aren’t slowing Iran’s nuclear program.
In a campaign-style speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday, Obama tried to portray himself as a friend of Israel, declaring, “when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”
Just two days later, even after meeting with Netanyahu, he explained that his statement “was not a military doctrine” and blasted those who were “beating the drums of war” with Iran.
Put bluntly: Israel cannot let its security hinge on Obama’s election-year rhetoric, especially if he gets re-elected. This is a reality that Netanyahu seems to recognize, something he implied by giving Obama the Book of Esther when they met and strongly articulated in his speech to AIPAC on Monday.
“Today we have a state of our own,” he said. “And the purpose of the Jewish state is to defend Jewish lives and to secure the Jewish future. Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our very survival. Never again. That is why Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.”
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
