Norman Geras - who features in Z Word’s inaugural podcast - writes that Israeli minister Matan Vilnai’s use of the word “shoah” in the context of the current conflict in Gaza “invited misunderstanding in a context where there are many people only too ready to misunderstand.”

Commenting on those signatories to a letter in The Guardian rushing to portray Vilnai, and by extension the Israeli government, as following a Nazi strategy, Norm observes:

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.

Meanwhile, Vilnai, who has been widely criticized for his choice of phrase, had this to say: “You can use other words, absolutely…but that shouldn’t divert us from the main point, which is that they are bringing a disaster on their people because of their actions.”