Specifically for whom? It seems the dreaded “H-word” boundary has been crossed. Most people are hesitant to draw parallels between what happened to Jews in Europe and what Israel is now doing to Palestinians in the land some call “holy.”

There are a number of reasons to avoid the comparison, though, it could be argued, most of them are rhetorical. But it’s been a long week in which 100+ in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli military’s “hot summer” siege and the occupation government says there’s only more to come. In the Guardian, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned that the Palestinians could be in for a “holocaust.” Is someone showing their hand?

Other reports back up the fact that the Israeli official used the word.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzeTYbQOUJo[/youtube]

Vilnai later said he didn’t really mean “holocaust” once it was discovered that people were paying attention.

Back at the Guardian, we learn that “Shoah” is Hebrew for the Jewish Holocaust. “It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war,” the report says, “and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.”

One can’t blame them. It’s not a word to be taken lightly or thrown around too loosely. But when it does get bandied around by an aggressive force, aren’t we obligated to pay attention? As we look at Rwanda’s early radio calls to rise up and kill people in the mid 1990s, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–1916, the early signs of Hitler’s Final Solution, we can see that these campaigns are all well advertised in advance, and most are stoppable at early stages.

We can see the layout in Gregory H. Stanton’s “The 8 Stages of Genocide,” and it’s easy to stitch his outline to the Palestine/Israel situation. There are easy outs in the debate. Yes sir, there are certainly more catastrophic amounts of killing going on around the globe. We can kill far more in Iraq on such short notice as a week’s time. But the same could have been said of any genocide before it reached its own climax. There were other genocides that were simply further along.

In the past, U.S. leaders have enjoyed the popular opt-out of having bad intelligence or no advance notification. President Clinton still denies having advance notice of what was going to happen in Rwanda. Most U.S. congress critters who supported the invasion of Iraq still say they were deciding on what looked like good intelligence at the time (though every weapons inspector on the ground in Iraq at the time would disagree). In Afghanistan, the U.S. and UK have managed to do what the Soviet Union did, and it’s turning out like any other science experiment in which one replicates a process to check if the same result will emerge.

Those watching the annexation of Palestinian land and have been critical of it, have lost academic tenure and have been hounded for simply daring to call it illegal, against international law or, daringly, a “slow-motion” ethnic cleansing. Someone inside israel’s power structure has upped the rhetorical stakes. No one should be able to say they didn’t see it coming.

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