Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned on army radio that the Palestinians “will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves”. Though Israel has been ethnically cleansing Arabs from their land for over half a century, this is perhaps the first time the term “holocaust” has been used by an Israeli official to describe their policy towards occupied Palestine.

The term holocaust, or shoah in Hebrew, is reserved exclusively for the extermination of the Jews during World War II by the Nazis. By associating the Jewish Holocaust with the current ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Gazans in his analogy, Vilnai unwittingly placed the Zionist regime in the role of the Nazis. The irony that the Jewish State would promote a holocaust against a scapegoated ethnic group was also lost in the pro-Israeli Western corporate media.

As reported, over 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombings in one day, yet the exaggerated threats of homemade rockets and death of one Israeli in nine months have caused enough outrage in Israel to freely threaten an escalated holocaust against Arab civilians. “It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice,” Vilnai said. “We’re getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we’ve used a small percentage of the army’s power because of the nature of the territory.” Officials say the Israeli army is awaiting the government’s order to launch a large ground offensive into Gaza in the next week or two.

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