EVER since Esther disguised her Jewish roots to seduce the king of Persia more than 2,000 years ago, Jews have celebrated her deception once a year with the festival of Purim, not least by dressing up as their worst enemies. Favoured costumes of Israel's Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, have been the garb of Cossack horsemen, who once launched pogroms against them in eastern Europe. The enemy of choice this year might have been the Israeli army, but nervous rabbis pre-emptively banned anyone from dressing up in khaki uniforms.
A decision in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, to criminalise ultra-Orthodox Jews refusing to abide by Israel's military draft has brought relations between the country's 800,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews and the 5m others to their worst level since Israel was established in 1948. Anti-Zionist graffiti litters the Haredim's bastions in Jerusalem. Haredi protesters have replaced the silent middle Hebrew letter in Israel's name with another one, rendering it as Yesh-raal-"There's Poison". And earlier this month hundreds of thousands poured onto Jerusalem's main highway for a mass communal prayer-cum-protest, closing it to traffic for hours. "Let us study the Torah," they cried, mockingly asking how any Jewish state could prevent students from studying it. One ultra-Orthodox sect vowed that it would flee Israel if the authorities attempted to enforce the law. "We owe our survival to the Torah, not to squadrons of fighter-jets," said a protester.
