From Haman to Tehran: In the Shadow of Persia |
As we approach Purim, the Jewish calendar brings us back to a story that feels less like distant history and more like a recurring pattern.
The Megillat Esther tells of Haman, royal advisor to King Ahasuerus, who persuades the king to authorize the extermination of the Jews throughout the Persian Empire. His fury is triggered by one man: Mordechai the Jew, who refuses to bow.
Everyone else bows. Mordechai does not.
That refusal becomes the catalyst for one of the greatest reversals in Jewish history. Queen Esther, who has concealed her Jewish identity, reveals herself and exposes Haman’s genocidal decree. The gallows prepared for Mordechai become the instrument of Haman’s own downfall.
V’nahafoch hu — it was reversed.
Purim is not fantasy. It is a memory. And its themes echo across centuries.
For decades, Iran’s Supreme Leader elevated Israel’s destruction into doctrine. Iran shares no border with Israel, yet the regime invested immense political and military resources into confronting and undermining the Jewish state. Through proxies and ideological warfare, it supported campaigns targeting Israelis, Americans, and Jews worldwide.
Consider Argentina as an example.
The 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was an act of terror against a sovereign diplomatic mission. It was abhorrent. It was murderous. It was indefensible.
Two years later, the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center murdered eighty-five civilians in a building devoted to social services and communal life. It too was abhorrent. It too was murderous. It too was indefensible.
Both attacks were equally evil.
But the question remains: why was a Jewish community center targeted thousands of miles from the Middle East?
An embassy can be framed — however cynically — as geopolitical. The AMIA building cannot. It was not a battlefield. It was a Jewish address. The answer, it was always about Antisemitism.
If anti-Zionism is purely political, why target Jewish civilians in Argentina?
The Purim story already understood this distinction. Haman’s decree was not about land or policy. It was about eliminating a nation.
In the Megillah, Haman is linked to Amalek — the archetype of obsessive, generational hatred. Amalek’s defining trait is not rivalry. It is annihilation.
Yet Jewish history teaches another truth: power can threaten — and power can also protect.
Centuries after Purim, the Persian king Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple.
President Donald Trump may be viewed as a modern-day Cyrus, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a modern-day Mordechai the Jew— a contemporary echo of Mordechai HaYehudi.
Whether or not one agrees with all of their policies or decisions, the enormity of their actions cannot be discounted: the elimination of Haman-like figures such as Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and Supreme Leader Khamenei carries profound implications for the security of both Israel and the United States.
In all of this, the timing suggests something deeper — a divine hand, almost hidden. Interestingly, God’s name also does not appear once in the Megillah. The Divine presence in the Purim story is concealed, operating through courage, strategy, and unlikely alliances. History unfolds through human actors, yet something larger may be guiding it all in the background.
Another powerful idea is that Anti-Semitism is not new. It shape-shifts. It rebrands itself. It adapts its language while preserving its core fixation: the delegitimization — and elimination — of Jewish sovereignty and Jewish life.
And yet, every generation that has sought to erase the Jewish people has instead become another chapter in their endurance.
The Jewish people do not merely survive history.
And sometimes — we reverse it.