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It’s unfortunate that people are no longer well enough educated about the Jewish Holocaust to understand that it truly was different in some significant ways from every other “genocide.”

  
A Norwegian diplomat based in Saudi Arabia has sent out e-mails from her Foreign Ministry e-mail account equating Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza with the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.

One of the picture sets that Norwegian diplomat Trine Lilleng attached to her anti-Israeli e-mail.

The e-mail, sent out by Trine Lilleng, a first secretary at the Norwegian Embassy in Riyadh, includes a juxtaposition of black-and-white pictures from the Holocaust with color images of Operation Cast Lead.

via Norwegian envoy equates Israel with Nazis | International | Jerusalem Post .
 

Let let me set out  a few of the  differences between Gaza and the Holocaust  as corrections to the “Holocaust is just another genocide” meme.

1. For starters, “genocide” means genocide: the attempted or successful murder (“cide”) of an entire people.  Genocide is not the same thing as war or brutal oppression.
2. The German genocide of the Jews was carried out by a European country against the Jewish population of European countries. Many of the occupied European countries were tacitly supportive of the genocide. This is something that Europeans seem to forget with amazing frequency. Germany, France, Italy … many members of the current European Union share a special responsibility for atonement, and for preserving the state of Israel. I will not respect the European Union’s Israel policy until it begins to share this responsibility as a collectivity.
3. While the US , the UK, and Russia, could have done more to mitigate the results of the Holocaust, it was American, UK, and Russian soldiers who rolled into the concentration camps and set the prisoners free. It was the US and the UK that set up Israel and it has been the US that has preserved it. We have done our share, and Europe has not.
4. The German genocide was more successful than most other genocides: in many countries in Europe, the Jewish population was reduced to almost nil.  That is simply not the case in Gaza, where the population is three million.
5. There was a technocratic and bureaucratic character to the German genocide that still remains uniquely chilling. While the oppression of Gaza is horrific, the people there are not being herded into cattle cars and sent to death chambers by functionaries with checklists.
6. The situation in Palestine is not a genocide.  It is not the written policy of the state of Israel to kill every Palestinian. Lest we forget, that was indeed the written policy of the German government during WWII.  The unwritten goal of the Israeli policy is brutal oppression. That is bad, but it is not genocide.