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Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm

broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. In December,

Masia Gessin, an American Russian and Jewish writer, faced an uproar in Germany over a New Yorker essay in which

they compared Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto.

Gessin, whose family members were murdered by the Nazis, wrote, quote,

The term open-air prison seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron,

the British Foreign Secretary, who was then Prime Minister.

Many human rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description.

But is in the Jewish ghettos of occupied Europe, there are no prison guards. Gaza is policed not by the occupiers, but by a

local force. Presumably, the more fitting term, ghetto, would have drawn fire

for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews.

...