The thing to remember in respect of the accord with Iran is that there are two Persias. One is the Persia of Cyrus the Great and the other benign kings, who were appreciated by the Jews. The other is the Persia of Haman, who sought to destroy the Jews. Haman was, the Bible records in the Megillah, thwarted by the valiant Jewish woman Esther, who had married King Ahasuerus and became Queen. The episode is remembered every year when the Megillah is read and each mention of Haman’s name is greeted with the clacking of a grogger.

What noisemaker will be spun in the future at the name of President Obama? It’s not our intention to suggest that Mr. Obama is the modern Haman. But we have endured two years during which the President’s aides have spoken of Israel’s leadership in gutter language. Now the president has cut a deal with an Iranian regime that could be likened to Haman (and that Mr. Obama himself acknowledges to be anti-Semitic but insists is rational). Mr. Obama brushes aside the protestations of Prime Minister Netanyahu and announces he will plunge ahead at the United Nations without waiting for a decision by our own Congress.

No doubt he savors the fact that he has already divided the congressional leadership. Senator Menendez is under federal indictment. Senator Corker is waffling. Senator Schumer, who likes to posture as a defender of Israel, has already suggested in a private meeting with a delegation of the Orthodox Union that he will shrink from opposing this deal. The Republican leadership of the Senate has agreed to an approval process that requires a veto-proof supermajority to block the accord the president has just announced. No wonder Mr. Obama shows contempt toward the Congress of the United States.

The accord announced this morning illuminates nothing so much as the reason we were opposed to entering these talks in the first place. If history has taught us anything it is that the talking itself is the appeasement. Talking creates its own incentives to appeasement. It did at Munich. It failed to save Eastern Europe at Yalta. It failed, too, at Paris, where free Vietnam began to slip away (to be finally betrayed in the United States Congress). Yet nothing history teaches us can match the feature of the current appeasement, in which tens of billions of dollars will begin to flow to an active enemy of Israel and other Jews throughout the world.

There are those — Leslie Gelb, among them — who suggest that President Obama is playing a longer game. He knows the Iranians got more out of this deal than America, but reckons the nuclear weapons are not so important as the chance to convert Iran more generally to a friend from a foe. We are not entirely immune to that instinct; in the mid-1980s, it was explored by President Reagan, backed by the Wall Street Journal. There no doubt are Iranians who truly yearn for our friendship. They sought to rise up in 2009, only to be crushed in the streets of Teheran by the regime that is now become the contract partner of the Obama administration.

There are those who fault Mr. Netanyahu and the Zionist leadership for speaking out so pointedly, as they have, against the accord struck at Vienna. They know that Israel is going to be the first target of the atomic bombs that Iran is seeking, and there is no reason whatsoever for Israel or any of its friends to shrink from speaking forthrightly. For Mr. Netanayhu and the Zionist leaders know Esther 4:14, which records the words of Mordecai that ring for all of us: “For if you remain silent at this time, relief and rescue will arise for the Jews from elsewhere, and you and your father’s household will perish.”