Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked the biblical story of Amalek to justify regional violence
Lubna Masawra – Middle East Eye March 5, 2026
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.
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Lubna Masarwa is a journalist and Middle East Eye’s Palestine and Israel bureau chief, based in Jerusalem.
as long israelis can go on street for demonstrations
the iranian missiles are too little !
The Synagogue of Satan will come up with any excuse to start a war.
Israel, you’s finished.
You people do know the Bible is fiction from cover to cover. Acting on myth is insane.
Pretending you are a Jew is insane. Bibi Netahyahu parents are both Polish. You all know that right?
These fake Jews out of Eastern Europe claim Abraham as their father. That is laughably insane on several levels. Abraham never existed.
It should be of no surprise that Abraham never existed, Abraham is a blatant ripoff of an earlier religion out of India, Brahma marries his sister Saraswati, that myth is written as Abraham marrying his sister Sara. Sara(h)s maidservant Hagar is the Ghaggar River in India. King David is a metaphor for the Dravidian speaking peoples of South India. Isaac is also a ripoff, Ishaak, the great friend of Shiva. Yet modern people believe those OT stories literally. They are not, they are rewritten mythologies, fake the first time and double fake in the second rehashing. This implies the entire OT is fake, not literal, not historical. Thus there are no descendents of Abraham because he did not exist. Plus, no god chose no tribe, that is just tribal propaganda meant to establish dominance of that tribe over the goy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/leading-archaeologist-says-old-testament-stories-are-fiction-1500431.html
The God of the Bible doesn’t exist either. Jesus is pure fiction, read Caesar’s Messiah.
IMO if Israel is completely nuked that would be a very good thing.
Bringing up Jewish kids in host goyim environments in which most human relations, at least in principle, are based on tolerance for religious and ethnic differences, with the ideal of an inclusive neighbor principle, but then teaching the children, “They hate us. They want to kill us.”, and not to let those Christian moral restraints hinder their advancement, appears to be the very basis of Jewish solidarity and “success”. It is not just smarts and merit. What follows axiomatically from that kind of indoctrination is that it is okay to hate and kill all outsiders, allegedly for your own protection, and to use any means you can for your own advancement. That kind of exceptionalism is the same reason why criminals, and the organizations which hatch them, rule over virtually every Western nation, and why even our fake religious leaders cast a blind eye to Gaza and the latest Jewish-led evil onslaught against their neighbors. .
As a result, there can be no basis with such indoctrination for any forgiveness for past persecutions, nor with the prevalence of internal tribal favors and powers over the much softer, open and neutralized goyim. Nor do we see any willingness to abide by the universal moral restraints which enable honesty, fairness, trust, and good will to flourish in any society basing its morals and laws on the more universal neighbor principles emanating from its Christian heritage. What we now have is a highly-organized and ruthless money-power network run by ruthless criminals, the worst of the worst, ruling over our nations and our lives, which is especially the case with their systematic neutralizing of the Christian moral authority, and turning the standards of the cross of Christ into play doe and jelly.
I can remember when I was about 7 while walking to school on one side of a boulevard with my sister who was 8. We were on our way to the local Catholic school and wearing our navy-blue and white uniforms. In BC, at the time, most of the majority could not figure out which minority they hated the most, Catholics or Jews. Across the boulevard there were three Jewish kids, around the same age as us, getting into their family car with their father to go to the local public school. The Jewish kids started to heckle us yelling “cat lickers” with a few other demeaning remarks, with no effort of the father to silence them. Then all of a sudden my sister turned around and yelled out, “You dirty Jews.” To me it was like a thunder bolt, and I stopped dead in my tracks. The Jewish kids also were stunned. Somehow from either the Sisters at our school, or from my parents, I just knew it was verboten to say such a thing. Although, I was no model Christin urchin, some power immediately intervened, and I turned around, waved my arms, and yelled out, “Sorry! Sorry!”. The year was around 1951 and we all knew about the war, except that my sister was one who always fought back with her tongue. Had not I been given the grace to apologize for my sister at that time, likely the Jewish kids would have been even more resolved in despising Catholics, confirming in their minds that all Christian teachings were bogus.
The problem is that in the Jewish mindset there is no recognition of their faults when it comes to their subjugation and exploitation of the goyim in their midst. China which is very much in bed with Israel and Jewish financial & development interests, coincidentally also has a very narrow neighbor principle when it comes to minorities in their midst. They are better behaved in foreign affairs than the US only because they have less power, but they are equally as grasping as the modern amoral Jewish and American mindsets. Where Western empires behaved in the same exclusive and unjust way to the peoples they conquered in the past, at least the moral contradictions always came to light and the injustices were tempered and eventually were addressed. Of course, the rich and powerful are always the most amoral and dishonest, but without the constant effort to expose and oppose their evils, there is no basis to depose any of them and their crime lords running our nations and ruining so many lives.
It is wrong, of course, to commit genocide against the Jews but when it comes to their own advancements there appears nothing in their moral strictures to condemn their doing it. That ruthless state of mind is the same as what Hitler adopted when he cast off his Christian restraints in order to embrace the sociopathic Nietzschean “will to power”. It empowered him and his followers to walk over the faces of others with no sense of wrongdoing or remorse. Stalin was the same. Netanyahu is simply another little Hitler. Trump is simply a blackmailed and totally-controlled puppet and a criminal with absolutely no moral integrity. Carney of Canada is a criminal bankster globalist stooge of the same order.
The war against Iran is motivated by greed, but the silence of the major Christian leaders in condemning Israel and the US is deafening. Insane Christian Zionists in the US are fueling the conflict ostensibly as if it will bring on the so-called “final days”. It is as if the Jewish and Christian occultists and alchemists can conspire to materialize various ancient prophecies to occur in our time. Then again, we also know that the Muslims are equally unforgiving and ruthless when it comes to anyone leaving their faith, and to those of other faiths in their midst. The Jews want to own and control not just the Levant but the areas of North Africa and Iran, and the evidence is that they want to get rid of or enslave all of the inhabitants whom they deem as inferior and subhuman, and whom they can conquer. The Muslims appear to want the entire area to be Muslim. The only Christian voice we hear is that of the heretical and insane Christian Zionists who appear to be using the war and resulting chaos not just for a return of Christs, which is a pretext, but more indirectly to fuel another violent crusade to rid the area of the Islamic heresy. With the silence and complacency of the major Christian denominational leaders, it would appear that they are backing the operation to neutralize Iran as a source of Muslim resurgence, and to subjugate the people of Iran to the globalist powers which are presently ushering in the New World Order top-down controls over the various multipolar spheres of power.
Meanwhile nothing abates the hate and the killing. God says, “My ways are not your ways.”, but no one theses days seems to care who God really is, and what he is saying. He is saying that evil methods produce evil ends, and that there can be no peace without his love in our hearts.
God foretold and in the most brutal manner evicted the jews from Jerusalem and the lands He gave them two thousand years ago. In 1948 a group of gutless fools gave Jerusalem back to them, stupidly sidelining Gods decree. That was never going to end well. Giving a pack of sociopaths a biscuit and telling them they can’t have the packet just means you’re going to have to protect the pantry and EVERYTHING else that’s in it. They will believe it their right to dunk so they will need the coffee, milk and sugar? And these are far worse than any other sociopaths. They are their own sycophants!
If that image at the top didn’t have a caption, I would have thought that a pig had explosive diarrhea on my screen. Then the caption clarified that it’s actually an image of Satan’s colostomy bag.
That wicked khazarian polack deserves to experience nothing but paralyzing fear and excruciating pain every second of its existence.
The majority of everything is fake, theyr laughing at you. This theatre only exists in the pixels on your screen. Zero, and i mean zero heat signatures on Nasa satellite imagery over Telaviv or Tehran. This ones all about testing how well they can con you over your phone. Its why they own n control all the media. If theres an Israeli involved, its a lie. First jewish oresident and all the stereotypes are confirmed. Theatre for the goyim. Enjoy the show.