Iwoke up at 2am, confused about whether the noises I was hearing were air-raid sirens or crowds in nearby synagogues, singing and dancing into the late hours in celebration of the Purim holiday.
Thousands of Israeli Jews came out into the streets of Jerusalem on Wednesday in defiance of instructions from the police and Home Front Command.
On the other side of the city, Al-Aqsa Mosque was closed for the fifth day in the middle of Ramadan, under the pretext that there is a war on and it’s too dangerous to allow prayer in public.
For a brief moment, a carnival atmosphere developed in Israel. Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech dressed up as an executioner. Her party is the main backer of a bill currently going through the Knesset that would impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder.
Was this a holiday or a war?
Etsiq, who works in a food shop in Jerusalem, has his own theory about why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose this time to bomb Iran: to echo the killing of Haman from the story of Purim in the Book of Esther, which is read during the holiday.
Haman, an official in the court of the Persian king during the Achaemenid Empire, was foiled in a plot to kill the Jewish people of the region, and then put to death by hanging after the intervention of Mordechai.
When I asked Etsiq how he was holding up amid the current crisis, he replied: “We like wars. It’s also good for the food business.”
Changing the narrative
Etsiq is by no means alone. Social media has been filled with images of the late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, digitally transformed into today’s evil Haman. One image depicts him with the “ears of Haman”, a reference to hamantaschen, the triangular pastries that Jews traditionally eat on Purim.
Many Israeli media sites have also wondered whether history was repeating itself. Avri Gilad, a veteran television personality on Channel 12 News, hosted his programme on Tuesday dressed as a pilot.
Gilad said a new chapter was being written in the Book of Esther: “It’s amazing that it comes after 2,000 years, and it’s really the same thing… the whole story closing on an astonishing historical scale.”
Bit by bit, Israel is changing the narrative that it exists because of the Holocaust. A new language is emerging that uses biblical stories to justify a vision of Greater Israel.
On the eve of Purim, Netanyahu visited the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem, which killed nine Israelis.
Afterwards, he posted on X (formerly Twitter): “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember, and we act.”
This comparison to the biblical enemy of the Jewish people was also cited against Hamas after the 7 October 2023 attack.
Before the premier appeared, one of the residents of the area discovered a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, that had survived the missile strike. “Everything here was burned, and only the tallit and the Yalkut Yosef [prayer book] did not burn. It’s a miracle, so let us pray together,” the resident said.
Government ministers have also invoked a religious purpose in attacking Iran. Orit Strook, the minister of settlement affairs, said in a radio interview: “When the prime minister called me… I told him that it was fitting that this was happening on Shabbat Zachor, when we read about the erasure of Amalek.”
Netanyahu reportedly replied: “This time we are not only remembering and reading; this time we are doing.”
Borders crossed
In a coalition propped up by religious parties, other members of Netanyahu’s government have expressed similar views.
Knesset member Michal Woldiger from the Religious Zionism party told an Israeli radio station: “We are making history. We are entering ourselves into the Bible. These are special and holy days for the people of Israel; everything is turning for the better.”
This narrative of the Jewish people taking revenge for a biblical past is so strong that secular politicians are using it, too.
Yulia Malinovsky, a Knesset member from the secular opposition party Yisrael Beiteinu, reacted to Khamenei’s assassination by posting: “The modern Haman has been eliminated.”
And Yair Lapid, the opposition leader who has become a symbol of secularism, supported the idea of Greater Israel by saying: “Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the Land of Israel is biblical.”
This idea has been given both intellectual and political framing. Eitan Lasri, a former adviser to Netanyahu, said on the Channel 14 website: “The state of Israel once again faces a threat originating from that same historical arena, this time in the form of the regime in Iran.”
Lasri concluded: “The campaign of Purim… is a struggle between the desire to destroy and the right to live. Just as in the days of Mordechai and Esther, the threat turned into victory; so too in our generation we can turn the threat into an opportunity.”
For 75 years, this struggle was framed as a conflict over land, and as such it had parameters. It had definition and borders. It was a struggle to liberate Palestinian lands from occupation. Land is negotiable; religion is not.
Those borders are now being crossed. If Israelis truly want to turn this into a religious struggle, they must think about the consequences. They should consider the forces in the Islamic world that would rise up to confront them.
The Palestinians are now struggling not just with occupation, but with a growing messianic religious fundamentalism.
To western audiences, Israel still manages to present itself as a western democracy. It claims the religious fanatics are Hamas and Iran. But increasingly, Israel itself is fighting a religious war.