Did I ever write about Uri Gordon? (looks like I did, here) As an Israeli anarchist/peace activist, he has this (among other things, I'm sure) to say about the Gaza bombings:

As Qassam attacks by Hamas or some other Gazan militia inevitably continue throughout the aerial bombardment, the army moves to Stage Two. A column cuts through the middle of the Gaza Strip. Advance positions are taken. Yet the opponent fails to come out fighting. And so the living city is rent asunder, in a war-game with no strategic objective, only to spend ammunition looking for the enemy with zero casualties. As they tunnel their way through living-room walls into Gaza City, Israeli conscripts throw explosives ahead to protect themselves from possible ambushes and mines. Hamas store weapons in mosques and apartment buildings and carry out dozens of punishment beatings on alleged collaborators. Most of the dead are civilians, maybe a third are children. Thousands of homes are destroyed. Ambulances and hospitals are fired upon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the 10 metre-high walls that surround Gaza, Israeli war-resisters meet a brick wall everywhere they turn. Jewish Israelis have a knee-jerk nationalist loyalty when they perceive Israel is being attacked.

The response is essentially: What do these bleeding-heart peaceniks expect us to do when we are attacked? They didn’t protest Hamas’s rockets which have been pounding Israel for the past 8 years whilst the children in Sderot wet their beds in fear (Sderot is the Israeli town next to Gaza which has suffered most from Hamas rocket attacks). What do these Europeans know? They just hate Israel and Israelis and don’t think our lives are worth anything. All the hatred in demonstrations against Israel across Europe, with calls to kill the Jews, just shows me that, if we don’t protect ourselves no one else will come to Israel’s defense.

The fears of annihilation, fed by well-fanned collective trauma, are close to the surface and easily manipulated by politicians and pundits. Dehumanization of the enemy helps explains the simple indifference to the shameless attacks on Palestinians in Gaza by all three major candidates currently competing in coming elections.

In the name of the Jews, the Israeli state drives Palestinians from their lands, imprisons them and punishes them with blundering brutality. The Revisionist policy dreamed up by early fascist Zionists of “Facts on the Ground” is a total success – Israel’s perceived choice today is between Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The Israeli elections are seeing the meteoric rise of Avigdor Leiberman whose party, Israel Beitenu, promises to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel and Leftists of their citizenship if they fail tests of loyalty to the state. This isn’t swear-word fascism – this is the real thing. Still on the table is Kadima’s “realignment” plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from the “Palestinian” side of the segregation barrier. This is a de-facto annexation of 6 per-cent of West Bank territory which, crucially, would leave the in two landlocked islands, an internal enemy non-state which can now be disciplined on the same terms as Gaza.

The last six decades have seen the (at least) fifth ethnic cleansing event to take place on this soil. But so far it has been ethnic cleansing with somewhere to run. In Gaza it was verging on something different. The Gaza war was an intentional threat to commit ethnic cleansing with nowhere to run. The Israeli state was threatening to commit genocide and everybody knew it.