© Agence France-Presse
It's called the Scroll of Esther, a tale of palace intrigue featuring a Jewish beauty who charms a Persian king into foiling an evil adviser's genocidal plans for her people some 2,500 years ago.
"Then too, they wanted to wipe us out," Netanyahu told Obama, according to an Israeli official.
Jewish faithful gather in synagogues on Wednesday to read the parchment text, popularly known as the Megillah, on the eve of the Jewish costume holiday of Purim, a celebration of salvation and of turning the tables on one's foes.
"And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto them that hated them," one of the verses says.
Netanyahu, who has called Iran's nuclear program a threat to the Jewish state's existence, made a point of telling reporters after his White House meeting with the president that he had given the Megillah to Obama.
The Israeli leader, in a frosty meeting with Obama last May, lectured the president on Jewish history and criticized his approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Netanyahu has also invoked the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, in citing the dangers he says a nuclear-armed Iran - the modern-day Persia - would pose.
Obama appealed to Netanyahu at their White House meeting to give economic sanctions time to work, amid concern that Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power, could strike Iranian atomic sites.
Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes.
It's easy to go around dramatizing evil purposes. And complaining about those of others usually indicates you have plenty of your own!
The problem is that neither genocide nor war lead to better survival.
The truth does.
And that is what these leaders are not yet willing to talk about.
Some of you may have heard about the theory that most of European Jewry actually descend from a group that were not Semitic by blood, but took up the religion as part of their political craft. This story doesn't have to be literally true. We all know that blood has nothing to do with faith.
So why is this faith tied to blood?
The whole thing is a huge can of worms that makes no rational sense. Obama could breach this problem, if he weren't afraid of the power of the network that hides behind the dogma of zionism. But of course Netanyahu could never get away with talking honestly about all this. And he's the one who most needs to right now.
On the other hand, who knows? Anything is possible, I suppose.
I continue to postulate that, one day, these guys will come clean.