"I've compromised a lot, but I'm not bending further. We're watching faceless, headless, limbless, burned, crushed, and mangled bodies in inconceivable gore every day, over and over. ... I am not going to play this western media game of tiptoeing around the feelings of our tormentors. Nazis were not so cruel.

"Holocaust is an English word in the English dictionary. It is frankly not big enough to capture the annihilation, torment, degradation, and horror being inflicted on Palestinians for decades now.

"I really don't care if they run my piece or not." Abulhawa sent a further email shortly afterwards: "I'm sick of this hypocrisy. they cannot fathom our humanity. That's the issue. They do not see us as human. If our people in Gaza were Jewish, or other Europeans, no one would hesitate to use that word and worse."

"I think Betsy reserves th[e] word ["holocaust"] for one people only. ... In [the] western imagination, there is nothing more horrific than the mass slaughter of their own western citizens. Brown people don't count." Several genocide scholars who spoke to Novara Media said they were comfortable with Abulhawa's use of the term holocaust to describe events in Gaza.

"Of course I anticipated they'd reject my piece. ... They don't publish us [Palestinians] unless we accept watered-down versions of what we say so they can pretend to have a semblance of journalistic integrity while they push state and corporate propaganda."

"The Guardian considers the article did convey the harrowing footage and powerful survivor interviews and condemned the attack's perpetrators. But the unacceptable terms in which it went on to criticise the documentary were inconsistent with our editorial standards.

"This was a collective failure of process and we apologise for any offence caused."

"Is there a double standard between running Howard Jacobson and not running Susan Abulhawa? Clearly there is, yes," said one long-serving staffer. "If you're prepared to run Howard Jacobson then it does seem out of kilter, if your only objection is about that language, then yeah. I understand why that decision might've been made, but does it seem that there is an inconsistency there? Yes." The roots of this discrepancy reflect a broader media ecosystem,

"to have quashed [Jacobson] would've been an admission of antisemitism in the eyes of a certain readership, I guess, and in the eyes of the editorial board of the Guardian. I think [the Guardian and Observer] were in an invidious position, because they had a [controversial] article on their hands, and I think they did entirely the wrong thing, [but] put it the other way and they reject Jewish writer's opinion piece." Another

"Obviously this is a question of double standards. A Palestinian writer is spiked on the basis that describing a genocide of her own people in [what editors felt were] excessively inflammatory terms isn't acceptable, then you have someone who isn't Israeli who has written a piece which doesn't even try to refute the violent killing of 16,000 children as if [people who draw attention to that fact were] committing a hate crime? I think the Guardian is playing a very dangerous game with its own readership." They added that Viner allowing the publication of Jacobson's piece suggests that the