"Supporting Israel" means aggressively supporting whatever militarist action its leaders take or aim. "Supporting Israel" means perpetually undermining negotiations on a final state settlement to the end of a universally recognized illegal occupation. "Supporting Israel" means perpetually accepting the next excuse on why this (insert contemporary name) group of representatives or leaders of the Palestinians are not legitimate enough to make an agreement with. "Supporting Israel" means cheering every brutal crackdown in Palestine or Lebanon, and then pretending to be appropriately shocked that emerging from the violence are more violent leaders, rather than flower-bearing Gandhian movements. "Supporting Israel" means happily letting Israelis continue to die in ongoing violence while you declare yourself proudly and nobly uninterested in any option but the unilateral surrender or defeat of any of its neighbors.

If you happen to agree with that shifting minority of Israelis who oppose their own government's and society's idiotic, murderous, and self-defeating militarism, then you are NOT "supporting Israel", because "Israel" is not a nation made up of human beings, but a warhawk plaything for its enthusiasts, a cipher which exists to carry out their fantasy that someone punish Arabs and Muslims from within their own domain.

And people who have been covering the region for generations, like Robert Fisk, can narrate the tiresome script, as it's always the same, over and over and over:

...it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed.

Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game".

Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.

To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.

As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers.

As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will.

Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html

Israeli Jews tpp still stubbornly refuse to embrace the war party thrown by so many. Many of them are Israeli military leaders, who have seen first hand the cruel destabilization that stupid militarist actions leads to in the name of 'toughness':

Yossi Alpher, a former official at Mossad and a military commentator, agreed that Israel was seeking a ceasefire on more acceptable terms. But he was critical of the tough economic blockade Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip in recent years, limiting imports to humanitarian supplies and preventing all exports, a policy that has all but wiped out private industry and brought Gaza's economy to collapse.

"The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results," he said. "It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment."

He said that in future Israel would have to choose either to recognise Hamas was around to stay and to talk to the movement, however unpalatable that might be for most Israelis, or to fully reoccupy the Gaza Strip, topple Hamas and bear all the costs involved.

Some have even spoken publicly against the current bombing in Gaza. Tom Segev, one of Israel's most respected historians, has been particularly critical, arguing that the premise of bombing to secure a peace agreement was false.

"Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over," Segev wrote in yesterday's Ha'aretz newspaper. "Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/29/israel-gaza-military-strategy

I'd hasten to point out that even if starving Gazans to death had some desired political effect, it would still be wrong, but like the best Bush Jr. administration policies, Israeli militarism can combine cruel deadliness with counterproductive idiocy in equal measure.