Philologos
Mosaic Magazine, Mar. 16, 2023
“Hamas, however, is not a people. It is an organization. And when Netanyahu compared it to Amalek, he was calling for the extermination of an organization every last one of whose combatants Israel does want to see dead and with good reason.”
“The word Amalek is now as common as ‘woke’ was yesterday,” a friend in America wrote me a few days ago. This was after Prime Minister Netanyahu’s October 28 speech to the Israeli people in which he said, referring to their soldiers now fighting in Gaza:
They are longing to recompense the murderers for the horrific acts they perpetrated on our children, our women, our parents, and our friends. They are committed to eradicating this evil from the world, for our existence, and I add, for the good of all humanity. The entire people, and the leadership of the people, embrace them and believe in them. “Remember what Amalek did to you.” We remember and we fight.
The prime minister was quoting the Bible. There, in the 25th chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites on the eve of their invasion of Canaan (the translation is from Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible):
Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt, how he fell upon you on the way and cut down all the stragglers, with you famished and exhausted, and he did not fear God. And it shall be, when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around in the land that the Lord your God is about to give you in estate to take hold of it, you shall wipe out the remembrances of Amalek from under the heavens. You shall not forget.