This Chanukah, we need solidarity not unity

While the story of Chanukah is often taught to young children as a classic “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat,” the history is far more complex.

Chanukah started as a civil war between Jews: aristocratic urban Hellenistic Jews who benefited from collaborating with their Seleucid overlords and rural radical anti-Hellenizers like the famous Maccabees.

Long before the Seleucid army intervened, there were plenty of Jews who were more than happy to adopt Greek culture, even to the point of undergoing painful and primitive foreskin reconstruction.

But those foreskins didn’t save them when Antiochus invaded Jerusalem to put down a rumoured “uprising”.

The historian Max Dimont’s describes Antiochus’ blundering intervention: “He marched his armies out of Egypt into Jerusalem, where he senselessly slaughtered 10,000 inhabitants without inquiring into their party affiliations.”

The glib modernism of “party affiliations” only enhances the farce of the whole debacle. Dimont paints a portrait of an egomaniac so blinkered by his insecure, wounded pride that he thoughtlessly massacres thousands of his own supporters in a scramble to maintain dominance.

When arsonists set the Adass Israel synagogue ablaze they too did not inquire into the community’s political affiliations. Had they done so, they would have learned that their attack, described by the federal police as “political”, targeted Melbourne’s least political Jews.

The rest of the Jewish community - both in Melbourne and worldwide - is far from apolitical. Jews have always been a politically active bloc, and since October 7, the global debates over Israel and Palestine have echoed louder and more vehemently within the Jewish communities than ever before.