Drawing up league tables of genocide doesn't seem right somehow.

The "holocaust" was indeed unique, because of the way it applied industrial and bureaucratic techniques to the process of killing groups defined as undesirable - Jews, but also handicapped people, homosexuals, and most especially Gypsies (where the age-old persecution has continued in various forms over the past 60 years, and no term equivalent to "anti-semitism" has been available as a way of tryimng to draw a line).

But all genocides tend to have unique aspects. Cambodia with its Killing Fields, Ruanda with its "kill-your-neighbours-or-else" technique of devolved slaughter, the Atlantic Slave Trade, the process of colonisation in America and Australia, where natives were liable to be seen as vermin to be extirpated...

There is an error people often fall into of talking as if these differences did not exist, and as if you could simply equate one historical crime with another historical crime.   But there is also another error, which is to use some particular quality of one such crime as a way of seeking to diminish or deny the reality or significance of another crime.

The tragedy of the Palestinians, in which their country was indeed "wiped from the map", is not the same as that of the Jews and the Gypsies and others who were mechanistically murdered in the Holocaust - but it is not negligible, something to be shrugged off as one of those things that happens. In many ways it has a great deal in common with other episodes in the history of the persecution of the Jews, where communities have been brutally uprooted and exiled.