Festival of Lots
On celebrating Jewish survival while a Palestinian village burns
Tonight is the start of Purim, a holiday sometimes called the Jewish Mardi Gras. Like any good carnival, the holiday is celebrated with costumes, parades, satirical plays, gambling, and, in some places, getting black-out drunk. There’s also a tradition of giving baskets of food to relatives and friends, often containing the holiday’s signature pastry, hamantaschen.
This year, both our synagogue and our kid’s preschool gave us Purim baskets. The theme for this year’s baskets was “Purim from the Promised Land!” so all the prepared foods were Israeli brands. The one from the synagogue also came with a little Israeli flag for the kids to wave. This year, I was even more uncomfortable with that package than I’d normally be.
That is because this Purim comes on the heels of Israeli settlers burning and ransacking Hawara, a Palestinian village south of Nablus. The Feb. 26 riot was in revenge for the killing of two Jewish settlers from the nearby illegal settlement of Har Brakha by an unidentified gunman earlier that day. The settlers killed at least one Huwara resident and injured over a hundred more. Hundreds of homes, businesses, and cars were torched.
Much of the American and Israeli press has referred to these hours of terror as a “rampage.” To me, and plenty of others — Jew, Muslim, and Christian alike — it was more easily identifiable as a pogrom. Not only were the settlers given free rein in their attack by the Israeli army, which even gave them time to hold evening prayers in the burning village. But their work was blessed by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who affirmed afterward that “the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out.”
As Racket readers know, Smotrich was accused by Israeli officials of having planned a terror act in protest of the removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. He has also called for the complete annexation of the West Bank without citizenship rights for Palestinians. His position as head of a consolidated Civil Administration makes him effectively Benjamin Netanyahu’s viceroy of the West Bank.
I would love to say that all of this goes against the “spirit of Purim” or even the history of the Jewish state, but none of that would be true. They are, alas, very much in line with a revanchist tradition that runs back to the ancient holiday. But, as often happens in a culture as contradictory and complex as ours, that same holiday also suggests another possible path forward.
The simple story of Purim, as told to kids in the diaspora at least, goes like this: In the ancient kingdom of Persia, there was an evil royal advisor named Haman who came up with a plan to exterminate the Jews. A wise Jewish man named Mordechai convinces his niece, Esther, to marry the king. Esther simultaneously reveals to the king both Haman’s plan and the fact she and her uncle are both Jews. The Jews are saved. There is much rejoicing.
The actual story, as related in the Book of Esther, is far darker and far weirder than that: