Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ken Layne finds more photographic proof.

Lake Anna, Virginia, 12 pm

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:

Israel’s policy-making no longer seems to me to be particularly related to concrete policy objectives at all. Neither the Lebanon war nor the Gaza war had actual military goals. Both were essentially wars for domestic consumption. Hezbollah and Hamas were firing rockets at Israel, and Israelis were understandably furious. “Something” had to be done about that, to let the Israeli public know that their leadership felt their fury. So the government did “something.”

That reminds me of the Iraq war. I supported it for exactly the same emotional reasons that many Israelis do their forever war in Gaza and the West Bank. It's understandable emotionally, and Noah helps explain how. But it is crazy as a rational policy to achieve actual concrete ends. In the end, occupying Muslim Arab countries is a mug's game.

The question we have to face is whether Israel is now too far gone to be rescued. The enormous opportunity offered by the election of Obama has been thrown in the face of the US and the world. The alienation of Europe and Turkey seems driven by willful obstinacy and near clinical paranoia. And the knee-jerk response of the AJE has only made matters worse. I'm not sure, as Millman notes, that the US could do much good anyway. Pressure backfires; diplomacy doesn't work; and the truth is: Israelis cannot really absorb the fact that they have to give up the dream of Greater Israel or become a pariah state. 

That's why, in my view, the settlement question was the right one to start with. A temporary freeze on construction was the minimum necessary to see if the Israelis are serious about some kind of resolution. The Israeli public simply isn't. And no Israeli government can over-ride such a massive consensus, even if it wanted to (which it doesn't). At some point, the US will have to decide how to deal with this. We should, of course, do all we can to be reasonable and argue for a comprehensive deal. But we should not delude ourselves into believing Israel will ever accept it.

ITN has a report on a lone gunman shooting twelve people dead in 30 separate crime scenes in Cumbria:

A live-blog with more gruesome details here.

I'm not the only one asking – and not the funniest either.

On the Daily Show last night, I learned of BP's astonishing record of malefeasance and safety corner-cutting. From ABC News:

OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.

BP is responsible for 97 percent of safety violations. No wonder Andrew Revkin says the announcement of a criminal investigation "felt way overdue":

Last Friday, two former special investigators from the criminal investigation division of the Environmental Protection Agency, quoted by the Web site Truthout, said that criminal, not civil, inquiries should have been the priority from day one. Here’s a vivid excerpt:

Scott West, the former special agent-in-charge at the E.P.A.’s Criminal Investigation Division, who spent more than a year probing allegations that BP committed crimes in connection with a massive oil spill on Alaska’s North Slope in 2006, said the company’s prior felony and misdemeanor convictions should have immediately “raised red flags” and resulted in a federal criminal investigation. “If the company behind this disaster was Texaco or Chevron I would have likely waited a couple of days before I started to talking to people,” West said. “And the reason for that is those corporations do not enjoy the current criminal history that BP does.”… “BP is a convicted serial environmental criminal,” West said.

Speaking of the North Slope, Palin, in response to who knows what, tweets:

C'mon., Extreme Greenies-who-lock-up-our-lands…see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?

More on the 2006 onshore spill here.  (Photo by Johan Lammers.)

"Spoiler alert: Sarah Palin loves Israel and hates the media," Alex Pareene, on her Facebook response to the flotilla.

David Runciman has a fascinating post-mortem on the British election. He notes that there were, in some respects, three separate votes – in England, where the Tories had an 11 point margin; in Scotland, where Labour actually gained a little; and London, where Labour's vote held up rather well. What explains this strange pattern? Anti-incumbency. In England, Labour ruled and the Tories fared well; in Scotland, the Scottish Nationalists have been in power in Edinburgh's Assembly and Labour did well; in London, my old mate Boris Johnson is the Tory mayor, and he created a little backlash as well.

If this is any harbinger for the US, all incumbents may be at risk, and not just the Democrats (as the primaries have so far shown). But for Britain, there are darker implications. In Runciman's deft phrase:

At present Labour can only govern England from Scotland, and the Tories can only govern Scotland from England.

So what happens when the English Tories impose stiff spending cuts on Scotland? Or Northern Ireland? That's the problem with devolving real power to Scotland, as Labour did. The country starts to develop an entirely different politics and entirely different political conversation, and the UK starts to feel as incoherent as the EU:

In this respect, British devolution is a bit like that other great constitutional project launched for the new millennium, the euro. It worked fine to start with, when it was awash with cheap credit and good intentions. But when the money runs out, the cracks start to show.

(Photo: The English flag, by Paul Gilham/Getty.)

In her column today, she doesn't offer any substantive proposals for the president to stop the oil-gush. His language has been full of rage; he has launched a criminal investigation; he is obviously exasperated; and this is a narrative he simply cannot control. Almost from the start it was clear that only relief wells could stop this, and they take time to drill in that kind of depth.

Maureen has long wanted Obama to be what he isn't. We have a temperamental WASP in the White House. And the whole point of a WASP president – like GHWBush – is that they are best judged over the long term of results rather than the short term of emotion. I can quite see how emotionally, Obama is losing this p.r. war. But since he literally cannot win against a narrative determined by physics, it seems to me that columnists should be pointing out the reality of reality rather than the "reality" of "narrative."

An Israeli celebration of the attack on the Mavi Marmara outside the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu is not acting in a vacuum. It is the Israeli public that supports him and his policies.