A Persian Court's Game of Chess

Pexel photo 84070.jpeg by Saeid Anvar - with thanks

The U.S.- based National Heritage Foundation (NHS) is pursuing an extensive plan, it claims, to wipe out antisemitism in the USA. The plan is called Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.  Its summary, as expressed on its website, follows:

America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American “pro-Palestinian movement” is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN) that is trying to compel the U.S. government to abandon its long-standing support for Israel. Supported by activists and funders dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and democracy, the HSN benefits from the support and training of America’s overseas enemies and seeks to achieve its goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency. The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism intends to enlist all willing and able partners in a coordinated effort to combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States.

[Disclaimer for the record:  Neither I nor any group of advocates for justice in Palestine with which I’ve been associated are or have been funded by any organization or a foreign nation! The frequently repeated lies of both the NHF and  the Israeli lobby do not add up to truth. We are motivated by truth and non-violent change.  The truth is freely obtained in books written by Israeli scholars and faithfully observing Jews, in statements by Palestine’s wounded and grieving people, by the reports of diverse international humanitarian organizations, the United Nations, and the International Courts.

We feel called, however, by a “higher, divine Power.” Creator provides norms for restoring healthy relating as intended in the Torah’s Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes (etc.), and creates, redeems, and sustains truth and justice.  The Holy One persistently seeks redemptively to “mend” creation and foster abundant living for the whole human family and all Creation. Our motives are rooted in divine truth and justice which call for solidarity with and respect for the oppressed, marginalized, and all the “othered” and demonized peoples, and non-violent truthful resistance to self-possessed powerful and armed oppressors.]

The Racist Bias against Palestine/ians

NHF’s vitriolic and insulting summary damns the whole pro-Palestinian movement non-violently seeking  justice and peace for the peoples of Palestine and condemns as "antisemitism" anything that criticizes the State of Israel and Zionism.  NHF conflates antisemitism with anti-Americanism, anti-democracy and anti-capitalism, with an insidious reference  to a “global Hamas Support Network” – evidence missing.

The NHF strategy to deny the right to protest or even to empathize with the Palestinians’ lot is all too reminiscent of McCarthy era vilification by which the label “communist” was stuck on anyone the Senator didn’t agree with.  The Hamas label is routinely applied to all  subjugated Palestinians, just as when the  Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was deemed a "terrorist" organization for its efforts to resist Israel's oppression.

Statistically the Israeli military is much more deserving of the  "terrorist" label than any Palestinian resistance movement. In the last 100 years, Israel has been waging war on Palestinians to achieve ethnic cleansing and land theft. Massacres of Palestinians in villages and towns, imprisonment and detention of children and adults have been going on since the 1920s.

But because the USA, supported by willing allies, exercises its “Great Power” veto in the Security Council, the State of Israel has had a virtual impunity shield for its continuing criminal war on Palestinians.  Even this year on May 28^th,, the USA again exercised its Security Council veto as the only opponent of a ceasefire and exchange of detainees/hostages.  Against the rest of the world, the USA gave Israel yet another green light to murder, destroy, and exterminate with impunity.

NHF is mounting a patently obvious effort in North America to ensure that growing criticism of the State of Israel’s genocidal, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and colonizing actions in Palestine are stifled and suppressed, so that Israel can continue its criminal warfare. Labelling virtually all criticism as "antisemitic" awakens guilt for historic anti-Judaism.  The current “bubble” legislative action in many cities - including our Ottawa - preventing demonstrations near houses of worship and other “sensitive” space is part of the strategy.

The NHF Project: Esther campaign, along with Trump’s flagrant violations of law and ethics, are signs of growing fascism in the USA and in western societies like Canada.  The USA veto in the Security Council and America’s immense provision of war material and money for Israel are key obstacles to law and order, peace and justice in Palestine.  The complicity of USA allies, including Canada, fortifies the Israeli lobby.

The NHF and the IHRA*

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) core definition of "antisemitism" is the ambiguous tool the NHS Esther Project is using freely “to combat antisemitism."   It states:

"Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."*

As many commentators and scholars have noted, this core definition and its guidelines leave the door wide open qualifying almost any critique of the State of Israel and its policies and actions as "antisemitic."  This label is the key weapon.   The intended result of the label is to trigger a variety of unjust, oppressive, illegal reactions against truth-tellers and human rights advocates as they work to resist the illegal, immoral, and criminal actions of the State of Israel acting against Palestinians and their land.  Either keep silent about Israel's crimes or you will experience the weaponized spear of antisemitism.   For the NHF there is no room  for friendship with Jews, while opposing Israel's genocidal war on Palestine.  (see Chris Hedges piece on “Trump’s useful idiots”:  https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/trumps-useful-idiots?r=3kndst&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email )

Why the Name "Esther"?

The Esther Project is named after the principal character in the biblical book of Esther. The narrative focuses on the Jewish people. It makes no reference to God – the only book of the Bible to do so. It is a highly political biblical tale inviting moral evaluation. (Book of Esther, Chapter 1-10)

The summary:  King Ahasuerus of Persia dismisses his first wife because she refused to “dance” for the kings’ drinking guests.  Esther a beautiful Jewish woman is chosen to be his new consort. She is portrayed as a courageous champion of her people in the court of her royal spouse. 

Meanwhile, the king's Prime Minister, Haman, an enemy of Jews, connives to convince the king to issue an edict that would ethnically cleanse an unnamed  “certain people scattered and separated among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not appropriate for the king to tolerate them." The unnamed "people" are the Jews.

At great risk to her life, Esther appeals to the king and is successful in describing the plot. Her intervention changes the king’s mind. For his conspiracy, Haman is hanged. Mordecai, Esther’s uncle, is chosen to succeed Haman. He gains power and, with his followers, “struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them and did as he pleased to those who hated them.” Haman’s ten sons and 500 other conspirators are executed. The evil conspiracy is defeated.  The Jewish minority of the kingdom are saved.  It is a cause for celebration both then and now. The Jewish feast of Purim remembers the Queen’s courage and the joyful liberation of her people.

Unfortunately, the story does not end here. The edict is the problem. Once signed and sealed by the king and proclaimed, a royal edict cannot be rescinded. This edict to wipe out that exceptional minority from the kingdom must be implemented. So, the politically savvy king grants his new Prime Minister Mordecai and his allies royal leave to carry out the edict in their own way.

The result: As a first phase, "all the Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them ... in the citadel [they] killed and destroyed five hundred people."   And then in the provinces, Jews are empowered to assemble and to “defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods…” The result: the Jewish forces “killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them.” (Esther 9: 5 -17)

The Morality of the Story 

 No wonder the scribes who authored the book of Esther hesitated to name the Holy One in this blood-soaked story.  Yes, there was good reason to celebrate and be thankful.  The people  were saved from the threat  of death.   But their the gratitude became transformed into a blood bath for their neighbours - 75,000 plus.   And by this vengeance they broke the Covenant with God and disobeyed the Torah's core commandments:   do not blaspheme the God, who created you, and do not kill your neighbour, who is also a beloved member of the family.  No faithful scribe could possibly put God into the centre of this story of mass murder - the annihilation of God's children.

Ominously the biblical narrative seems to augur modern history.  Jews, oppressed for centuries and annihilated by the millions by the powerful Nazis, are finally liberated in 1945. The allied world rejoiced in the victory that achieved the end of the Holocaust. 

But today before our eyes we see that the joy of liberation has been transformed into hatred and the genocide of a people who, ironically, had no hand in Europe's Holocaust. Instead, the same allies, who were the source and fountain of the long history of antisemitism devise a scheme that will draw Jews away from European countries and into Palestine, where an Indigenous people have lived peaceably  for centuries on ancestral lands.   They had lived at peace with remnants of  Jewish communities.   

But Zionism wields the sword of vengeance fed by the lust of covetousness to steal the land and ethnically cleanse it of its Palestinian Christians and Muslims and other indigenous people.   And now racist prejudice, guilt, and geopolitics transforms these same liberating allies into  accomplices in the anti-Palestinian plot for the State of Israel’s Zionist plan to be fulfilled. 

Gaza becomes the world’s largest open air concentration camp and many more than 75,000 have already been killed like fish in a barrel, while the illegally-held Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem are steadily being taken over by violent Israeli settlers backed by Israel’s fully-armed, but observing military. 

Jewish scholar Peter Beinart, professor at the City University of New York, reflects on the Esther Project and the biblical story:  “For most of our history, when Jews had little capacity to impose our will via the sword, the conclusion of the book of Esther was a harmless and even understandable fantasy. … But the ending reads differently when Jews wield life-and-death power of millions over Palestinians who lack even a passport. Today, these blood-soaked verses [of the Esther story] should unsettle us.”  (Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, NYC, Alfred A Knopf, 2025. P.12)

 Project: Esther states  that  its intention is to combat antisemitism.  The story of Esther and her people is an appalling example for achieving this goal.   The Project appears simply as the means to stifle and silence voices seeking justice and liberation for Palestine, while the Israeli terrorist machine continues the racist extermination of Palestinians regarded as enemies.

There is a theological basis for both my unsettledness and rage. I seek truth, justice, peace, and end of the century-long cycles of bloody war and costly lawful resistance.  Justice and peace for all.

For Christians, this seeking leads into scripture. As friends and companions of Jesus, Christians have to take seriously the scrolled scriptures of his day and the communion with the Spirit of God as his sermon in Nazareth attests:  The Spirit of Adonai is upon me, because (God) has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. (Isaiah 61:1ff; Luke 4:16- 19; also Matthew 13:54-58; Mark 6:1-6).  This is core Judaeo-Christian theology.

There is room in God’s world for neither antisemitic nor anti-Palestinian racism.  The Ten Commandments and the entire Torah, the Beatitudes, the Way of Jesus, the prophetic witness - all reveal a God who despises phony "isms", false religion, racial hatred, and deification of nation states.   God hates evil especially when blasphemely  carried out in the Divine name.  God commands care for the neighbour, demands respect for the earth as the home of humans and creatures - all this because there is only ONE HUMAN FAMILY – each and all “created in the image of the Holy One.”  To kill anyone is to blaspheme and desecrate God.

It is for this reason and the sacredness of human life that I have absolutely no joy but absolute despair in the recent murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, unarmed employees of the Israeli embassy, by a lone shooter on the street  in Washington DC, and the ghastly death and injury of citizens by a blazing torch bearer in Boulder, Colorado.  These too are acts of blasphemy and desecration. My heart goes out to their families and friends who loved them and had high hopes for their future together. 

At the same time, I realize that the evil genocide being lived in Palestine is not unconnected to these particular violent, evil acts in DC and in Boulder, Colorado.   Revenge, murder and brutality, genocide against Palestinian civilians - all spill over in torrents that drown out truth, justice, tolerance, respect, peace, and mutual awareness of our kinship.  The hatred generated by sin has evil consequences. The perpetrators will be judged and punished.  Will the perpetrators of Israel’s racist genocide be prosecuted,  judged and punished?  If the international justice framework is upheld (as the European Union has just done) then the perpetrators may well face conviction and punishment. 

The world’s people of goodwill and justice will have to work hard to counter the tsunami of racial hatred so that a gentler humane, spirited wave of respect and peace may rise in  God's human family.   The National Heritage Foundation's Project: Esther is not the way to erase antisemitism, it will spawn more.

Oh God, by your Spirit redeem and transform your wonderfully diverse human family, we beseech you in Jesus’ name!

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*See the controversial flawed Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism  https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/canada-holocaust/antisemitism/handbook-definition-antisemitism.html . 

Compare that with the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism at www.JerusalemDeclaration.org, a more faithful attempt to distinguish antisemitism from critical truth.