If you want some indication of how extreme parts of Israeli political opinion have become, then read the chilling piece by Gilad Sharon, the son of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, in today's Jerusalem Post.

After writing that the civilians of Gaza "are not innocent" since they elected Hamas, Sharon declares:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

While Sharon's invocation of Hiroshima is shocking, he isn't the first prominent figure to make the comparison between Gaza and Japan. Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister and the leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu (which recently merged with Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud) said in January 2009, during the last major Israeli assault on Gaza, that Israel

must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.

His remarks were widely interpreted as a reference to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Would Israel ever consider such a solution? It sounds unthinkable, but Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed in October 2009 that Lieberman "had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza" (see the final line of this Guardian report).