On Purim's History of Violence

On this day in 1994, Baruch Goldstein went into the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron and open fired on 800 Palestinians worshiping during Ramadan. He killed 29 Palestinians and injured another 125. Born in Brooklyn, Goldstein lived in one of the illegal settlements in the West Bank, and was part of the religious Zionist party known as the Kach, a right wing party related to the Kahanist party. To this day, Goldstein’s grave is a pilgrimage site for Zionists and on it is written “He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land.” 

The legacies of his actions and those of the Kach and kahanists are very real and even more alive today. Though the Kach was designated as a terrorist organization for two decades, iIn 2022, the US removed the Kach party from the list. In recent elections in Israel, this party won a number of prominent seats as part of the Nitanyahu’s coalition government. If you have heard the names Itamar Ben Gavir, Bezalel Smoltritch - they are from this same political party. 

We are currently living in a time where right-wing, Zionist, proto-terrorists are setting the agenda for Israeli politics. People may deflect by saying: it’s just Netanyahu, or Ben Gavir, this isn’t actually a problem with Israeli politics. I would respond with the fact that this kind of anti-Palestinian violence and Jewish supremacy is baked into the very nature of the Israeli government and we are seeing the worst of it today.

An important piece of information for those of you who do not know, today is a Jewish holiday called Purim. As a kid going to Jewish Day School. I was taught the following: Purim is a celebration of Jewish survival. In the book of Esther, the book that we read out loud on Purim, Haman, the minister to King Ahashverus and a member of the Amalek people, wanted to kill all the Jews because Mordechai wouldn't bow to him. A Jewish woman named Esther, with the help of her uncle Mordechai, married King Ahashverus and was able to convince him not to kill the Jews. In return for his evil deeds, Haman and his sons were all killed and everyone lived happily ever after in Persia. We celebrate by eating cookies, giving gifts to our friends and donning costumes and getting drunk.

What I have learned since is that this is a holiday with a dark, Zionist side that many want to hide. Now I could go down a very deep text-based discussion referencing the Babylonian talmud and talk for a while about word choice, why we do or do not recite certain prayers on this holiday and why certain customs, such as the obligation to drink, are woefully misinterpreted, but I don't think that this is a crowd of talmud-heads. If you want to have this discussion, find me later. 

What I do want to talk about are two chapters of the book of Esther. In Chapter 8, the King gives his ring and all of his power to Mordechai so that he can “destroy, massacre, and exterminate” all of the Amalek in Persia. In Chapter 9, the Jews go on a rampage and kill 75,000 as a way of getting retribution. They believe that they are justified in this violence due to a commandment that comes from the book of Samuel where following an Amalek attack on the Jews they are commanded to Zakhor - Remember. Specifically, remember what Amalek did to you. Since the establishment of the Zionist state, Israelis have used this holiday as an excuse to reign violence on Palestinians, who have been framed to be descendents of Amalek. Baruch Goldstein, in his mass murder, is just one prominent example of this practice, though I hate to label it as such. 

Rabbi Elliot Horrowitz tracked violence against Palestinians on Purim going back to the 80s when in 1981, Jewish settlers brought down the roof of a Palestinian’s home, and expelled the owners and took over the house. In 2013, Israelis attacked a Palestinian woman and tore off her hijab while security guards did nothing. At the same time, Israelis attacked a Palestinian man named Hassan Usruf and no suspects were arrested. There are decades of the history of Purim violence in Hebron, which has a very specific context for Settler violence that I can also talk about at another time. 

But all of this to say that this holiday that is one of supposed joy and celebration is really one of violence. It is a holiday where the worst parts of Jewish text are on display and the members of the Jewish feel emboldened to carry out racist and genocidal acts against Palestinians.

How can we as anti-Zionist Jews and allies carry and re-imagine this holiday? How can we make up the fact that our religion, our texts, our practices are being used to carry out genocide. To this day, Netanyahu uses the rhetoric of Purim and the commandment of Zakhor to carry out some sort of divine order to finish the establishment of a Jewish supremacist state.

The Book of Esther is the only book in the Jewish bible that does not mention God even once. A Belarusian Hassidic Rabbi, Noach Barzovsky, wrote a book in 1981 called Netivot Shalom - Paths of Peace. In this book, he writes about ethics and tradition as a way of creating a “roadmap that leads inevitably to a higher place for the person seeking it.” In this book, Rabbi Barzovsky writes that the Jewish salvation that is found in purim is an “awakening from below” rather than one that comes from the heavens above. In my mind, this holiday and the forms of retaliation displayed can only be one that is man made because I do not think that any kind of God would ever think that it was okay to just wipe out an entire population.

Jews have lost their way, not just since October 7th, but throughout the Zionist project. They have determined that their own supremacy is more important than the central commands of Torah to build a world of peace.  And while it is easiest to ignore all of the pieces of text that embolden the genocidal violence that we have seen over the past 76 years, it is essential that we call it out, that we understand how it is, and why it is that Zionists feel entitled to violence, entitled to Occupation. Why is it that anti-Zionist Jewish voices like ours are de-legitimized by people like Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL who have determined that what makes someone Jewish is whether or not they support an apartheid state. Whether they support  a regime of violence as opposed to if they believe and practice in a religion.

So today, while we could reimagine our texts differently as many have done, and say that we are not the Jews who use fable to justify genocide, and say that we are not the individuals perpetrating violence against Palestinians, we are part of a group that is. Often, I do not know how to sit in the reality of the fact that the texts taught to me throughout my lifetime have such disturbing and violent facets to them. Though I understand that my religious upbringing is what calls me to fight for a free Palestine, it is also being used by others for genocidal ends. 

To end with a quote from a Jewish Currents article published this week, I offer you this: Given the calamity of the present moment, it feels insufficient to embrace a tradition that “fixes” the problem. Part of me actually feels more partial to confronting this disturbing biblical text directly—the pain of reading it matches more faithfully the pain of this moment than the satisfaction of an erudite explanation that explains it away. “Only that which hurts incessantly is remembered,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals. This is another way of understanding Zakhor: We remember Amalek because it hurts on every level—Amalek’s attack against the Jews, the bloodthirst against the Amalekites that followed, and the legacy of living on with this commandment.