The biblical book of Esther culminates in the mass revenge by Persian Jews on the anti-Semites who were planning to slay them in accordance with Haman’s plans. To many modern readers, this description of a two-day orgy of violence is a source of discomfort or even embarrassment, with some synagogues omitting the passage from the public reading of Esther on the holiday of Purim. Yoram Hazony, however, argues that this segment of the book conveys a powerful lesson about the difficult moral territory that must be navigated by those in positions of political power:

Some have suggested that [the Jews’ leader], Mordecai, . . . had the option of restraining the fury of the promised Jewish onslaught: there was no longer much question of a real anti-Semitic assault, and if he feared there would be an anti-Semitic resurgence should he relent, he could have opted just to arrest or execute a few hundred gang leaders across the empire. Would this not have sufficed? Mordecai obviously did not believe such a minimalist response would have been enough, and his decisions are straight out of Machiavelli’s textbook of power politics. . . .

[According to Machiavelli], a minimalistic response to a genuine threat all but ensures two undesired consequences, both of them deadly. First, the defeated enemy will nurture the hope of revenge, and continues to be an active threat as he seeks an opportunity to reassert his challenge. Second, the mildness of the response encourages others to take advantage of what can be perceived as hesitancy or weakness on the part of the ruler. The only hope to avoid future outrages is thus the assertion of overwhelming power in the first instance. . . .

The trouble . . . for the contemporary reader is that today we are not supposed to permit ourselves any kind of pride or satisfaction over a victory that involves wholesale bloodshed, even if we do recognize it as having been necessary. . . . Among Jews, such disregard for power and force is always strongly present. It was the prophets of Israel who introduced into the world the ideal of an end to violence among nations, with Isaiah calling for swords and spears to be beaten into agricultural implements, and Jeremiah going so far as to call for a “new covenant” to be instilled in every breast at birth, so that men should no longer desire iniquity. . . . Yet the narrative [of Esther] is unambiguous in making the power and control that the Jews consolidated in the fighting a cause for celebration—and one of the book’s central moral themes.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.