THE JERUSALEM POST seems to be taking something of a Scrooge line on Hanukkah this year:

Hard times now, hard time then
By ELI KAVON

In the Zionist imagination, the holiday of Hanukka is a celebration of triumph, glory, and a golden age of Jewish power and sovereignty under the leadership of the Maccabees and their descendants.

While Ahad Ha'am and Max Nordau were early Zionist thinkers and activists who disagreed on almost every aspect of the emerging movement, the one element they agreed upon was the importance of Hanukka to modern Jews. Both men admired the Maccabees and placed them in the center of their ideologies. Looking back in history, however, the idea that the Hasmonean kingdom of Judah and his descendants were all-powerful and truly independent is, in part, a myth.

Yes, Judah Maccabee led a successful rebellion against the mighty Seleucid empire, he retook the temple in Jerusalem and reestablished it as a cultic center, and he founded a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Yet, the history of the Maccabees after the triumph of Hanukka in 164 BCE is, for the most part, dismal and depressing.

[...]

Well, history is like that.