Bipartisanship is the opposite of democracy. If bipartisanship is what we need, than we don't need elections. The Israelis, who have an incredibly messy and ineffective political establishment, have a habit of forming "national emergency" governments that include all major parties and most small ones. They end up canceling each other out, bring out the worst in each one of the coalition members and the country is always worst off when that government inevitably collapses. Elections have consequences, and the winners should put their ideas to work and when the time comes, the voters get a democratic opportunity to decide whether they like the results. If anything, the type of bipartisanship the MSN is demanding of the Democrats (but never of the GOP), which is basically to routinely bow to the party that was trounced across the board in the last elections is profoundly undemocratic.

Israeli society was always introverted but these days it resembles more than ever of the Unionists in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s or the Lebanese Christians in the 1970s. Like Israel, both were communities with a highly developed siege mentality which led them always to see themselves as victims even when they were killing other people. There were no regrets or even knowledge of what they inflicted on others and therefore any retaliation by the other side appeared as unprovoked aggression inspired by unreasoning hate.

At Sabra and Chatila, the first journalist to find out about the massacre was an Israeli and he desperately tried to get it stopped. This would not happen today because Israeli journalists, along with all foreign journalists, were banned from entering Gaza before the Israeli bombardment started. This has made it far easier for the government to sell the official line about what a great success the operation has been.

The Gaza War, during which tens of millions of Americans saw the horrible carnage in the Strip (even if rigorous self-censorship cut out all but a tiny part), has hastened the process of drifting apart. Israel, the brave little sister, the loyal ally in Bush’s “War on Terror”, has turned into the violent Israel, the mad monster, which has no compassion for women and children, the wounded and the sick. And when winds like these are blowing, the Lobby loses height.

The leaders of official Israel do not notice it. They do not feel, as Obama put it in another context, that “the ground has shifted beneath them”. They think that this is no more than a temporary political problem that can be set right with the help of the Lobby and the servile members of Congress.

Israel's leaders are still intoxicated with war and drunk with violence. They have re-phrased the famous saying of the Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz into: “War is but a continuation of an election campaign by other means.” They compete with each other with vainglorious swagger for their share of the “credit”.

The only surprise in this article is the question mark following the headline. As a former IDF officer I can only laugh bitterly at those who still wish to deceive themselves that Israel is a moral nation that doesn't violate international law willfully. The entire 41 year long occupation history is a horror story of war crimes and gross human rights violations that easily equal the S. African apartheid regime, the Argentina and El salvador juntas, latin American death squads and sometimes even the Waffen-SS in its brutality, with the added Israeli brand of profound racism underlying it all. The Israelis have been targeting civilians( as does Hamas), for the sole purpose of terrorizing them into submission for so long, it seems like the American public is the only one still unaware of that horrifying reality-a combination of ignorance, naiveté, the shallowness of the US corporate media and the success of the Israeli propaganda apparatus.

Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer.

Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza – a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.

Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 – or nearly one third of all of the casualties – were children.

This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel's disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatised, many of them for life.

is that Israel's genocidal attacks on Palestinian civilians are a manifestation of the profound paranoia and racism of the average Jewish Israeli. The government wouldn't be able to carry out the systematic suffocation of 3.5 million people for over 40 years if those actions and policies didn't have the tacit support of the general population. With the exception of a few "bleeding hearts" who are considered traitors and "self-hating Jews" by the majority, the average Israeli considers the Palestinian Arabs to be sub-human, or, as some are fond of saying:"cockroaches who need to be stepped on and killed".

Blah, blah, blah. Surely the Israeli propaganda machine can find someone who actually attempts to mask the tired old propaganda better than the bush-league level bullshit you're laying on us.

So you get off stupid-school early on Tuesdays?