When Israel acts to defend its civilian population, as it is doing now with the Gaza operation, there is a weary inevitability to the discordant voices comparing the Jewish State with Nazi Germany, or making the related argument that Israel should, in the light of modern Jewish history, simply know better.

On the BBC’s “Have Your Say,” where the comments are filtered through a moderator, the Nazi analogies are in full flow. “Given what the Jews suffered in the Second World War, you would think that they would want to negotiate. About time they got out of Gaza completely,” says someone called Seymour. “Gaza is effectively an Israeli death-camp; the people are starved of food, water and medicine and now killed. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” chimes in one Stephen Mulligan.

There are the empirical errors, to start with. The “Jews” did get out of Gaza completely, in 2005. It takes two sides to negotiate, and Hamas won’t talk to any Israeli - and why should it, given that its stated goal is Israel’s extermination? The use of the term “death camp” suggests that Israel’s stated goal is to kill every man, woman and child in Gaza. But for the BBC, it would appear anyone who says so is just expressing one of many legitimate opinions, rather than engaging in monstrous defamation without a scintilla of evidence to back it up.

These comments are, we should note, provided free of charge, by people fired up with emotion and with an axe to grind. One expects more reflective fare from those who are actually paid to give their opinion. Very disappointing, then, that in The Daily Telegraph, Sean Rayment comes up with a slightly milder version of the “Jews should know better” line. He doesn’t mention the Holocaust, but says instead that “this attack is both disgraceful and disproportionate, and Israel, a nation which has endured much suffering in its relatively short history, should recognise this.”

The clue to why this should be the case lies in the article’s title: “Israel is addicted to violence.” The point about an addiction, as we know, is that you don’t control it - it controls you. And so, if you are addicted to violence, then there are theoretically no limits on how you deploy it. Anything, including genocide, becomes possible. Is that what Sean Rayment thinks the Israelis are capable of? Or was he just, in the parlance of British satirists, feeling “tired and emotional” when he wrote this piece?

Wade through the reportage from Gaza and you cannot, if you are reasonable, conclude that Israel’s purpose is to visit as much death and destruction as it can on the civilian population. To invert the Nazi analogy, this is no blitzkrieg. Civilians are among the dead but, as the IHT’s correspondent noted, most of those killed “were members of the security forces of Hamas.” Among them was the Hamas Chief of Police - by any standards, a legitimate target. Ynet reports that a number of Qassam rocket launchers were hit; as this is a defensive operation, seeking these out and eliminating them is a legitimate and welcome goal.

So why make the Nazi comparison? This has very little to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with the Israelis. It’s a discursive strategy to turn them into villains with no parallel. There are other cases where the actions of a state and an army could conceivably be said to ignore the lessons of suffering - I gave one example from central Africa here - but no-one ever says this. Why? Perhaps because the long history of western racism means that we cannot conceive of Africans behaving in any manner other than violently. Perhaps because there is a perverse pleasure in sticking the historical knife into Jews. Perhaps because there is no logic to the argument that, since you yourself have suffered, you are morally obliged to become a pacifist; you could equally argue it the other way.

As Eamonn pointed out below, there will be more of this sort of commentary in the coming days. And there will be, in particular, another push by the BDS movement to do what it has thusfar miserably failed to do - turn Israel into a twenty-first century version of apartheid South Africa. This is precisely what the Electronic Intifada - which doesn’t think Israel has a right to exist - is urging.

Just as the western anti-Zionists are falling back on their old strategies, so Hamas is reverting to its own archive. Amid the talk of a “third intifada,” Hamas officials have been threatening over the last few days a renewal of suicide bombings. In doing so, they can expect the support of such luminaries as Omar al Bashir, head of the properly-described-as-genocidal regime in Sudan. Hamas being Hamas, it is deaf to anyone who might propose a historic compromise and an abandonment of its ideology. That is why there will be more grim news from Gaza as the days go on - and why Israel has no choice but to defend itself.