Hidden Hand Thwarts Plot of Modern-Day Haman

There is a historical parallel hidden in plain sight in President Trump’s plan to relocate two million displaced and largely homeless Gaza Palestinians to a peaceful, prosperous alternative location. That historical parallel is often missed in discussions of the issue.

President Trump’s Plan Is the Mirror Image of the Plan of the Palestinians Themselves

To understand the historical parallel, there are a few facts of the Palestinian narrative around the Gaza issue that need to be remembered. In fact, the current outraged discussion of President Trump’s Gaza plan by academic and diplomatic so-called “experts” as well as in the legacy media, misses (in some cases intentionally) a few basic facts of the conflict in Gaza: First, the Palestinians themselves — long before October 7th, 2023, and even more vocally after October 7th — advocated and continue to advocate the same solution for the Jews in the Jewish historic homeland Israel, as President Trump is advocating for Gaza, except in reverse: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free.” What they mean — and it’s no secret anywhere, including on college campuses — always has been that the land of Israel should be “free of Jews.” The few “moderates” among them officially advocate mass population relocation (such as a “return to Europe”), with a token Jewish presence if at all, while most cheer the Hamas October 7th massacres and the Palestinian Authority “pay-to-slay” support of terror (also paused this week, again in large part thanks to President Trump). Now, the Palestinians’ own population transfer solution has been simply reversed and applied to them instead.

A second fact that is often overlooked is that the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza claim that Gaza was not in fact their home, but that they were refugees in “refugee camps” seeking to displace the Jews in Israel and to conquer — via a Jihadist “Intifada Revolution” — the historic and eternal Jewish capital of Jerusalem. Thus, according to their own claims, Gaza is not their land, just a large refugee camp or “open-air-prison” (albeit of their own terroristic and jihadist creation).

A third overlooked fact is that the leadership of Egypt and Jordan — each with approximately one-fourth of the population density of Israel — both categorically refused entry to Arab residents of the Gaza Strip and Yehuda and Samaria, respectively. (See, for example, my colleague Eugene Kontorovich’s piece in The Wallstreet Journal during the Biden Administration’s support of Egypt’s closed border to refugees.) This was a deliberate policy to keep the Palestinians in a state of cross-generational refugees in refugee camps for generations longer than any other refugee population in the world. It was in large measure the refusal that created — again deliberately — hostile enclaves of terrorist ideologies within the borders of Israel.

Those three salient facts, when taken into account, show that the only difference between President Trump’s plan and the Hamas/Jihadist and indeed Palestinian Authority plan was that President Trump — in contrast to them — is in fact a good-hearted, kind, and merciful leader. So unlike Hamas and the PA, President Trump is suggesting relocation to a peaceful locale in the region, to allow the Gazans (who are already according to themselves, refugees) to move on with a peaceful life rather than languishing in refugee camps, where they have been deliberately kept to suffer by the Palestinian leadership and by surrounding Arab countries with whom they have cultural and religious and linguistic affinity and indeed identity. By contrast, a genocidal “final solution” has always been the stock-in-trade of the bloodthirsty leadership of the Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas himself, who wrote his doctoral thesis in Russian university on denying the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Meanwhile, Egypt and Jordan’s obdurate refusal to take Palestinians into their countries is now being turned on its head under President Trump’s plan, and the very countries that sought to create an underclass of permanent terrorists will be receiving those same people under the President’s proposal, people whom those countries themselves fear due their own creation of a terrorist underclass.

An Underlying Historical Pattern

In light of those background facts, the main dynamic of President Trump’s plan is too often overlooked. That dynamic is a historical one. President’s Trump plan should not be seen in a historical vacuum. Instead, the plan is yet another example — hopefully to be carried out successfully — of a historical pattern in the long and ancient history of the Jewish people. That pattern goes as follows: The plans of genocidal enemies of the Jewish people consistently redound against them to foil their plans, and even more than that, it is their own genocidal plan that is the very tool for their own destruction. This is a historical pattern that played out biblically in Ancient Persia, when Haman the Agagite — the second-in-command of the Persian ruler of the entire known world at that time, Artaxerxes I (in Hebrew Achashverosh) — sought to “destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day.” (Book of Esther 3:13) He engaged in several actions throughout the biblical story that are seemingly unrelated: For example, he erected a scaffold on which to hang Mordechai (the leader of the exiled Jewish people at the time). The Midrash tells us that he even went so far as to measure the height of the scaffold using his own height as the measure of the scaffold’s height from the ground. And in the end, it was that very scaffold that the King used to hang Haman himself “that he had prepared for Mordechai.”(Book of Esther 7:9-10). (By contrast, the Babylonian Talmud relates (in Tractate Gittin 57b) that some of the grandsons of Haman actually engaged in a process of introspection and repentance and converted to Judaism and studied Torah in Bnei Brak, just as notable grandchildren of German Nazis have done in the present day as — perhaps — some of the Palestinians will do in the future.)

Even more dramatically, it was Haman’s own genocidal plan that redounded against him when Queen Esther related to her husband King Artaxerxes I that Haman intended to exterminate her people: “‘If your Majesty will do me the favor, and if it pleases your Majesty, let my life be granted me as my wish and my people as my request. For we have been sold, my people and I, to be destroyed, massacred, and exterminated.'”… Thereupon, King Artaxerxes I demanded of Queen Esther, ‘Who is he and where is he who dared to do this?’ ‘The adversary and enemy,’ replied Esther, ‘is this evil Haman!’ And Haman cringed in terror before the King and the Queen.”  (Book of Esther 7:3-6.)

The denouement of the story is well-known: The Jews were allowed to defend themselves wherever Haman’s henchmen attacked them. “And so, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month — that is, the month of Adar — when the king’s command and decree were to be executed, the very day on which the the enemies of the Jews had expected to overwhelm the Jews, the opposite happened, and the Jews overwhelmed [their enemies.].” (Book of Esther 9:1) Miraculously, the Jews thrived and survived against all odds, and the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem on the Mount of Zion was resumed at that time and ultimately completed. Even more importantly, seeing those incredible miracles of salvation, the Jewish people all took upon themselves out of love to learn and keep the Torah, ushering in a new era of learning within the Jewish people, a people that has been called the Torah Nation: “The Jews accordingly assumed as an obligation that which they had begun to practice and which Mordechai prescribed for them.” (Book of Esther 9:23)

This historical dynamic is expressed in many places including by the Psalmist in Psalm 91: “The One Who Dwells in the high hiddenness [the Divine Guardian of Israel says]… You will see it with your own eyes, you will see the punishment of the wicked.” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains the Divine Guardian’s sentiments as expressed by the Psalmist as follows: “You will learn from these calamities that occur in history that all evil actually prepares its own ruin.”

The current proposal of President Donald J. Trump echoes the King’s decree of that ancient day. It is unclear how the proposal will play out. But we as the Jewish people here in Israel have already experienced miracles in the last war, which was envisioned by the modern Hamans of our time as a war of extermination and which instead redounded upon them to their own destruction, whether in the case of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Mullah dictatorship in Iran. It was their own bloody plans that led to their own destruction, from their unprovoked and cruel use of force to their use of beepers as a “security measure” and far beyond. A Divine hidden hand guides the implacable enemies of the Jewish people to their own destruction using their own tools as the means to their own destruction.

In seeing this modern miraculous event, of which President Trump, the great nation of the United States, and the Jews of Israel are protagonists, we can only hope that we, too, will be inspired to return to the living waters that are our source of life, the Torah and the Mitzvot (Divine commandments) that have been given to us — in the words of the Men of the Great Assembly who established the order of Jewish prayer — out of “great love… for the people of Israel.”

The holiday of Purim falls in exactly one month’s time in the Jewish calendar, and with proper spiritual preparation, we as a people as well as the entire world suffering from radical Jihadist depredations, may merit a similar redemption as the one that our ancestors experienced over three millennia ago in those days, in our time. This has already occurred to a great degree, as heroic hostages like Agam Berger emerge from Gaza to tell the tale of their Sabbath observance and observance of Jewish fast days, inspiring others to grow in their spiritual practices as well, while soldiers battling terrorists lay Tefillin and wear Tzitzit for the first time in their lives, and Yeshiva students and Kollel men dedicate themselves with even greater enthusiasm to studying and putting into practice the Torah of Israel. With this great spiritual reawakening of the Jewish people, we have every reason to think that the covenantal relationship between us and our Creator will lead to further miraculous demonstrations of His protection of the nation of Israel.