Holocaust is a Strong Word.

The office of Israeli Deputy Defense Minister can't take any calls, they are busy doing damage control. When referring to fixing the problem in Gaza and possibly toppling the Hamas government, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians with bringing a Holocaust upon them. "Shoah" in Hebrew, is usually reserved for referring to the Nazi Holocaust which murdered over 6 million Jews and which aimed to entirely exterminate the Jewish people. You would think the subject of mass genocide would not be taken lightly by the Israeli government officials, who represent and lead a state largely created as a refuge for Jews fleeing European genocide. A spokesman for Vilnai assured the stunned public (domestic and international) that the minister used the term in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide." But for a state which has already been accused of being racist and brutal towards the Palestinians living under the military occupation, Israel can not afford to make a slip like this. Already Arabist and Islamist blogs have taken this statement as Israel saying what it has always meant. They are seeing this as a confession, not as a slip of the tongue. I have a bad feeling that unless Olmert personally apologizes for this mistake or fires Vilnai, this statement for many will come to represent how Israel views the future of Palestinians. After all, even though the Iranian government later blamed a mistake in translation, all that the world remembers is Ahmadinejad's statement of "wiping Israel off the map".

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned...How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not legally recognize this regime"-Iranian Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki addressing the uproar following Ahmadinjad's statement.

But ask anyone, and they won't know the follow up statement. No discussion about the intricacies of language, the fact that there is no such idiom in Persian, or that Ahmadinejad meant ending the regime, not ending Israel as a state. No one talks about that, they only remember the words they read in translation. I fear that similarly, no one will talk about the nuances of the Hebrew language and that "holocaust" or "shoah" can refer to disaster and not explicitly genocide. Those who wish to will understand what they read, what they were hoping to hear, a genocidal confession, which will only be an excuse for continued fear, hatred, and a abysmal absence of hope for peace in the conflict.

For Further Reference:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959532.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html
http://www.irandefence.net/archive/index.php/t-1492.html