My son texted me a post and then read it to me over FaceTime.

He’s at college. The post was from an anti-Zionist friend of his, comparing what is happening in Gaza to Chapter 9 of the Purim story.

If you know the Megillah, you know the chapter. The counter-violence. The enemies struck down. The numbers.

The implication was clear: Purim is a story of Jewish vengeance — and what is happening now is its inversion.

I didn’t react with outrage. I didn’t argue.

I said something else: If we’re going to do Purim politics, we should at least get the geography right.

The story of Purim takes place in Persia.

Persia still exists. We call it Iran.

And right now, the Iranian people are living under a regime that has shown, once again, that it will use overwhelming force against its own citizens.

What Happened Last Month

In January, protests erupted across Iran. The immediate causes were economic hardship, political repression, and a growing sense among many Iranians that their future is being dictated by a ruling elite that governs through fear.

The state responded the way it has before — with a brutal crackdown.

An internet blackout followed. Communications were severed. Documentation became extraordinarily difficult. Human rights groups reported mass unlawful killings. The official government death toll sits in the thousands. Independent monitoring organizations report higher numbers. Some internal health sources have suggested the toll could be far higher still, though verification under blackout conditions remains difficult.

When regimes shut down the internet during mass unrest, it is rarely to protect their citizens.

It is to control the story.

We do not yet know the final number of people killed. But we know enough.

Enough to know that something terrible happened.

Enough to know that ordinary Iranians — students, workers, women, families — paid the price.

Persia Is Not a Metaphor

The Purim story is not abstract. It is about life under imperial decree. It is about how quickly a ruler can be persuaded that a minority population is a threat to the social order. It is about propaganda, fear, and the vulnerability of ordinary people to palace politics.

It is also, strikingly, a story about women who refuse.

Vashti refuses to be paraded as spectacle. Esther risks her life to intervene in politics she did not choose. The Megillah turns on women who step into danger — or step away from humiliation — in a world ruled by male power.

In Iran over the past years, and again last month, women have stepped forward in ways that echo that moral courage.

Except this time, the story feels less like Esther and more like Vashti.

Women removing their headscarves. Women refusing compulsory modesty laws. Women facing prison and violence for saying no.

Vashti is often read as the prelude to Esther — dismissed, displaced, forgotten. But perhaps she is the more radical figure. She refuses. She absorbs the consequence. She disrupts the spectacle.

Iranian women have done exactly that.

They have said no to enforced invisibility. No to humiliation. No to being props in someone else’s ideological theater.

If Purim teaches anything, it is that palace politics and ordinary lives rarely move in the same direction.

Jewish memory is not only about remembering what was done to us. It is about recognizing patterns of power when we see them.

We know what it means when governments:

• manipulate language to dehumanize,

• criminalize protest,

• shut down communication to conceal violence.

We also know the difference between a regime and a people.

It is possible — and necessary — to oppose the Iranian regime’s hostility toward Israel while simultaneously standing in solidarity with the Iranian people.

This is not geopolitical naïveté. It is moral clarity.

The men and women who marched in January were not chanting for Israel’s destruction. They were demanding dignity, economic justice, and freedom from theocratic control.

They are not our enemies.

They are human beings living under a system that uses ideology to justify force.

Purim and Responsibility

On Purim, we celebrate survival. We send gifts. We give to the poor. We create joy not because the world is simple, but because it is not.

The Megillah does not end with universal reconciliation. It ends with the Jewish community stabilizing life after chaos.

This year, perhaps Purim should widen our circle just a bit.

Instead of turning the story into another proxy battlefield in diaspora arguments about Gaza, perhaps we might remember that Persia is real. That Iranians are real. That authoritarianism is real.

And that when ordinary people rise up against fear — when women refuse humiliation — and are met with bullets and blackout, silence is not neutral.

Supporting the Iranian people does not require us to solve the Middle East. It does not require us to romanticize protest movements. It does not require us to ignore the suffering of Palestinians or Israelis.

It simply requires us to recognize that the struggle for dignity is not a zero-sum game.

• amplify Iranian civil society voices,

• support reputable human rights organizations documenting abuses,

• refuse to collapse an entire people into the identity of their regime,

• and resist letting Persia become just a metaphor in someone else’s argument.

My son’s friend wanted to use Chapter 9 as a warning.

Maybe Purim offers something else instead.

A reminder that regimes fall. That propaganda fails. That refusal matters. That survival and moral responsibility can coexist.

Persia is not only a setting in our story.

It is home to millions of people — and especially millions of women — who deserve freedom, safety, and the chance to write their own future.

That is something worth remembering when we open the Megillah this year.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)