Lubna Masarwa

Jerusalem Bureau Chief

I woke up at 2 a.m., 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 onto the streets of Jerusalem on Wednesday in defiance of instructions from the police and the Home Front Command.

On the other side of the city, the Aqsa Mosque was closed for the fifth day in the middle of Ramadan, under the pretext that there is a war on and that it is too dangerous to allow prayer in public.

For a brief moment, a carnival atmosphere developed in Israel.

Knesset member Son Har-Melech dressed up as an executioner. Her party is a leading backer of the death penalty bill currently going through the Knesset for Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder.

Was this a holiday or a war?

Etsiq, who works in a food shop in one of Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods, has his own theory about why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose this time to bomb Iran.

It was to echo the killing of Haman in the Purim story.

This Jewish holiday commemorates the failure of Haman, an official in the court of the Persian king Ahasuerus – commonly identified with Xerxes I – to kill the Jews of his empire.

The story is told in the Book of Esther, which is read during the holiday. Haman was eventually hanged after the intervention of Mordechai the Jew.

“We like wars,” he said to me when I asked how he was doing.

“It’s also good for the food business.”

Etsiq is far from alone.

Social media was full of images of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei digitally transformed into today’s evil Haman.

One image depicted him with the ears of Haman – a reference to hamantaschen, the pastries Jews traditionally eat on this holiday.

Many Israeli media sites 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 two thousand years,” he said, adding: “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 the language and stories of the Bible to justify a vision of a Greater Israel.

Revenge for a biblical past

On the eve of Purim, Netanyahu visited the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem, in which nine people were killed near a bomb shelter.

Afterwards he posted on X: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’,” Netanyahu wrote, referring to the biblical enemy of the Jewish people – a comparison he made about Hamas in October 2023 – adding: “We remember, and we act”.

Before the premier appeared, one of the residents of the area discovered that a complete tallit – a Jewish prayer shawl – had survived the missile strike.

“Everything here was burnt, and only the tallit and the Yalkut Yosef did not burn,” he said, referring to a book of Jewish religious rulings. “It’s a miracle, so let us pray together”.

A religious purpose in attacking Iran was referenced by government ministers too.

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 replied: “This time we are not only remembering and reading – this time we are doing”.

In a coalition built largely of religious parties, other members of Netanyahu’s government expressed similar views.

Michal Waldiger, a Knesset member from the Religious Zionism Party, told an Israeli radio station: “We are making history. We are entering ourselves into the Bible”. She added: “These are special and holy days for the people of Israel. Everything is turning for the better”.

This narrative – of Jews taking revenge for a biblical past – has become so powerful 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”.

Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition and a symbol of secular Israel, also invoked biblical language when he said: “Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the Land of Israel is biblical”.

The idea has been given intellectual as well as political framing.

Eitan Lesri, a former adviser to Netanyahu, wrote on the News 14 website that Israel now faces a threat “originating from that same historical arena – this time in the form of the regime in Iran”.

Lesri concluded: “The campaign of Purim of the year 5786 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”.

A religious struggle

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 land 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.

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