Nawar Fakhry Ezzi

“If I perish, I perish”  is the famous phrase, which the Biblical heroine, Queen Esther said when she was going to risk her life by talking to the King of Persia to save the Jews from a genocide. In this biblical story, a Persian King took Esther in his Harem and made her his beloved queen without knowing that she was Jewish.



One of his top advisers was Haman the Agagite, who is a descendent of the Amalekites, the infamous historical enemy of the Jews. Haman planned an annihilation of all the Jews in Persia through a decree he got the King to approve by claiming that they were “different” and could be a threat to the Kingdom. When Esther revealed her identity to the King and explained to him that her life would be compromised by Haman’s plan, the King hanged Haman immediately.



The following verse from the Bible narrates the end of the story: “Wherein the king granted the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, both little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for a prey” (Esther 8:11).



The author of a novel, which narrates this story, had a different twist on the verse mentioned. He justified the killing of the children of the Amalekites by claiming that if they grew up they would not spare the lives of the Jews and another ‘Haman’ would be born. Interestingly, the novel ends with a supposed descendent of Esther getting married to the Prime Minister of Israel who is ‘burdened’ by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.



This maliciously implied analogy between the Amalekites and the Palestinians ruined the novel for me. I would hope that Queen Esther, who lived in the fifth century BC as a member of a persecuted minority in Persia, would disagree with the author and would not approve of such a pathetic justification for killing the innocents in Palestine.



It is worth noting that this verse has different interpretations, which takes historical and social factors into consideration. This is not the issue though because the problem is that this justification, which I regarded as the author’s offensive personal point of view seems to actually reflect the underlying theory of Israel’s attitude towards the Palestinians.



This is the only way that can explain the unjustified indiscriminate killing of the Palestinian civilians, especially women and children, who constitute most of the casualties in the current attack on Gaza. Ironically, Israel which has one of the strongest armies in the world, still assumes the position of the victim, while they have turned into “Haman” themselves a long time ago.



A nearly 70-year-old war, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives seems to be just as thirsty for blood as it was the day it was born. Burning Mohammed Abu Khdeir to death by an extremist Israeli group and killing four Palestinian children playing on the beach from the Bakr family were some of the tragic highlights of the on-going attack.



The day before Mohammed Abu Khdeir was abducted, Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Knesset, posted an old article on Facebook by a recently deceased journalist.



She claims that the translation from Hebrew to English has been distorted, but news from different parts of the world has used the same translation in which a call for genocide has been made.



In the article, the killing of the Palestinian mothers have been encouraged and a declaration that “in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” It seems like they had an epiphany that few have reached before them, which is that everybody is equal behind enemy lines. However, according to them, if there is no such thing as civilians, Hamas should not be considered a terrorist organization.



Of course, I do believe in something called ‘ethics of war’ in which we should not even hurt trees as normal people do, but, as the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan already affirmed, this is the mentality of Adolph Hitler, not normal human beings. Even if the translation is “distorted” as she claims, the many massacres starting with Deir Yaseen and the brutal killing of thousands of women and children over the years have conveyed the same message.



Many Jews around the world see the injustice and brutality of this attack and are standing against Israel by publicly opposing the atrocious attack on Gaza. Regardless of which side people might take in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, innocent women and children should not be part of that conflict for obvious reasons.



One cannot help but wonder when did humanity go astray that we justify killing children by anticipating evil instead of hoping that one of them might bring peace to this world?



The writer can be reached at [email protected]