The high-tech security fence built to wall off the West Bank and the near-hermetic sealing of Gaza since withdrawal in 2005 are in the end attempts to shut out reality. Palestinians have become a vague abstraction to the vast bulk of Israelis not within the range of Hamas rockets: out of sight, out of mind. Israel, shamefully, has even prevented international journalists getting into Gaza to tell the story as they see it.

In this context, the hallucinogenic appeals of the government of caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, asking them to realize Hamas is their common enemy, become more understandable.

or this:

As for Ehud Barak, the third of the sound-bite-mouthing Israeli troika and leader of the Labor Party, his talk as defense minister of deepening and broadening the Gaza campaign has not been unrelated to an attempt to deepen and broaden his appeal among Israelis who see him as a peacenik. The subtext of political maneuver ahead of Feb. 10 elections has been one of the more repellent aspects of the Gazan carnage.