MKs Carry On Ancient Hanukkah Tradition Of Comparing One Another To Greek Enemy

Each one interpreting the Hanukkah story in keeping with his or her rhetorical or political sympathies.

Jerusalem, December 24 – Figures from across the political spectrum joined today in the venerable festive practice of characterizing opponents as latter-day manifestations of the same values or personalities the Hasmoneans defeated in the wars that gave rise to the Festival of Lights.

Representatives of every faction in the Knesset indulged today in the time-honored tradition of calling one another “Hellenists” or “Wannabe-Hellenists,” each one interpreting the Hanukkah story in keeping with his or her rhetorical or political sympathies.

Likud MKs pointed to perceived enemies both within and outside the party, calling them “Antiochus” after the Seleucid emperor who oversaw repression and persecution of traditional Jewish observance during the second century before the Common Era. They saved the harshest epithets for pro-Netanyahu or anti-Netanyahu rivals, with each faction deeming the other a modern day instantiation of the Jews who sought to assimilate into the wider Greek culture and erase the particularist Hebrew tradition even before the Seleucid takeover of Judea.

Conservative religious parties such as Shas, United Torah Judaism, and several representatives of the United Right found easy targets in the aggressively secular or anti-religious political figures of Meretz, Labor, and a handful of Blue and White lawmakers with similar sympathies on the status of religion – Jewish religion especially – in the public sphere. The most common trope to feature in this context cast opponents of any endorsement of religion in government as just the latest iteration of the Seleucid authorities who sought to eliminate key elements of Jewish practice and theology.

Figures on the left, for their part, called those who would impose their interpretation of Judaism on the rest of the population the real enemy, congruent with their attitude of seeing the Hanukkah story as a struggle against freedom of religion – or freedom from religion, if necessary. Others from the same segment of the political map drew analogies instead to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party supporters, comparing them to the Hasmoneans whose rule later devolved into corruption, infighting, and instability that eventually created the political vacuum into which the Roman Empire swept and began the process of eliminating Jewish sovereignty entirely.

Even non-Jewish parties joined in the observance. “Jewish expansionism and hunger for conquest are what ultimately did them in,” declared MK Ahmad Tibi of the mostly-Arab Joint List alliance. “We can see the same processes at work with Zionism, and not even the most ‘progressive’ segments of Israeli polity are immune to it as long as they insist on wanting Jews to have their own culture and state.”

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