It would be really hard to beat the subtlety and cogency of this post by Noah Millman on Israel's now-accelerating assisted suicide. What Noah understands is that the pulverizing of Gaza, the embargo and the blockade are all enormously popular with the Israeli Jewish public, even as they immiserate and further embitter well over a million Palestinians. Even the relatively secular left is on board:

I get notes all the time from family and friends in Israel. These are generally liberal, secular people. None of them are settlers. None of them vote for Likud, to say nothing of parties further to the right. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment among people I know in Israel was in favor of the Gaza war, in favor of the embargo and blockade, in favor of a policy of collective punishment against the people of Gaza.

And let's not delude ourselves: the reason so many of us find the policy toward Gaza repellent is that it is quite obviously an attempt to collectively punish the people of Gaza for voting for Hamas, and then for lobbing missiles after Israel's withdrawal. That was the element of the 2009 war that was so horrifying to those of us on the outside, and that is why this blockade, designed to maintain total control over 1.5 million people (and to benefit various Israeli economic sectors), is so disconcerting.

And it is, of course, self-reinforcing. Has the war and the blockade hurt the idea of Hamas? Au contraire. It has legitimized it. When you end up killing civilians to prevent access to toys and wheelchairs, you have lost any desire to win the war of ideas and have retreated instead to the logic of force. The Bush-Cheney administration is, in other words, alive and well ... and in Jerusalem, and backed by the opposition, because it is backed by the people. This is one of the problems with democracy, as Millman notes: