Laila El-Haddad:

Is it only when Israeli deputy minister Matan Vilnai used “shoa” to describe what will come to Gaza that some media outlets took note. Here was an Israeli government official himself invoking the Holocaust, of his people’s most horrific massacre, in reference to the fate of Gaza. But it was not necessarily because Gazans may suffer the same fate that they were perturbed, but rather that this event, this phrase-genocide or Holocaust- could be used with such seeming levity; that using such a loaded term may somehow lessen the true horror of the original act.

It is as though what has been happening in Gaza-what continues to happen, whether by way of the deliberate and sustained siege and blockade, or the mounting civlian death toll, is acceptable, and even encouraged.