Oops

So what do you call an Israeli politician (the Justice Minister, no less) who compares the suffering currently being inflicted upon Gaza residents to those experienced by his own family under the Germans during World War II?

An anti-Semite? No, I didn't think so. Yosef Lapid, who lost many relatives - including his grandmother - at Auschwitz, broke a long-standing taboo against invoking the Holocaust in the context of the Palestinian conflict, drawing rounds of angry denunciations of the following statements he made on Israeli radio in reponse to pictures of the continuing demolition of houses in the Gaza Strip:

"[I was] talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother.

"I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague."

Now I don't pretend to have all the answers here, especially where the Middle East is concerned. But when people who survived the Holocaust start to compare their government's actions to that of the one that caused the Holocaust, then maybe - just maybe - a little soul-searching might be in order.