Matan Vilnai could certainly have chosen his words better than he did when he used the word 'shoah' last week to refer to the disaster that Israel could bring upon Gaza. The word in Hebrew means, precisely, disaster, but is now also linked by longstanding usage with the Shoah - the attempted destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Vilnai has subsequently acknowledged that he might have chosen a different word. That he did not is a culpable oversight for an Israeli politician. He invited misunderstanding in a context where there are many people only too ready to misunderstand.
But what is one to call it when a group of more or less well-known signatories several days later, when there has been ample time to register the danger of a misconstrual of Vilnai's meaning, when the ambiguity of reference has been widely aired, can write, brazenly, as follows?
In a clear threat of genocide and ethnic cleansing the Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, has said that the Palestinians are risking an invasion of Gaza and a "shoah" (Hebrew for disaster).Despite showing their knowlege of the word's general meaning, they are happy to run with 'a clear threat of genocide'. These signatories include such upstanding exemplars of leftwing solidarity with the persecuted and oppressed as Victoria Brittain, Mike Marqusee and Michael Rosen. They and their co-signatories are unembarrassed to associate themselves with a disgusting symbolic inversion through which it is the Israeli Jews today who... conduct themselves like Nazis.
There is more that could be said about this shameful letter but I have said much of it here and here already.