The Maccabees were religious fundamentalists who treated women like property and killed people who were not sufficiently Jewish, just like the Taliban kill people who aren’t sufficiently Muslim.
They violently overthrew the Greek/Seleucid government because they wanted to establish their own theocratic state. Hilariously, the Hannukah story sometimes gets cast as a battle for religious freedom (because the Greeks were supposedly making the Jews bow down to Greek god statues… the horror)
The seleucids weren’t quite a civilized democracy (understatement), but they showed infinitely more tolerance for other religions than the Macabees; I would rather live under them than the completely backwards theocratic state that Hannukah celebrates.
(Note that there were many other Jewish groups at the time, by the way, who lived at peace and were educated and “assimilated,” much like many modern Jews and Muslims… not the Macabees; such assimilated Jews were often targets of the Macabees.)