From the London Guardian:
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.I'll grant that all politicians occasionally fall victim to foot-in-mouth disease, but still....
Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.
You can't comment on these issues without being accused of being "for" or "against" one side or the other. But if I put on my "conspiracy theorist" hat I am left wondering... did he come up with that term on his own, or is that how Israel's generals and cabinet ministers are describing their incursion plan behind closed doors?
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a huge slip-up to make without any such context. Yet it would not surprise me at all if the same military planners who have brought us one campaign after another meant to teach one group of Arabs or another "a lesson they'll never forget" has escalated to the point that they are analogizing their next "lesson" to the Holocaust.
Let me be clear - I don't think the execution would be analogous to the Holocaust, in that they are not planning a "final solution" in the WWII sense. The plan is more likely to turn vast amounts of Palestinian infrastructure, state and civilian, into rubble as a collective punishment for the rocket attacks. Similar to the "lesson" they recently "taught" the Lebanese.
Although I understand the need to suppress rocket attacks and the like, I think these incursions worsen the situation... but nobody cares what I think.