So...What's the Gaza Blockade For?

Over at the Atlantic, Megan McArdle points out:

Many of my commenters seem to think that the point of the Gaza blockade is simply to keep war materiel from reaching insurgents in Gaza.  That is not the reason for the Gaza blockade, though it may be one goal.  But the strategy is much farther reaching than that:  it is to topple Hamas by immiserating the people who elected them.  Check out some of the war materiel being blockaded:

She shows this image:

And she concludes:

You cannot understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if you are determined to believe that every single thing one of the two sides does is the brilliant and imminently necessary exigency of an existential conflict, the brilliance undone only by the perfidy of a biased media that refuses to tell the true story. People, especially large groups of them, are more complicated than that. And both sides in this conflict are attempting to play a long game. To my mind, at this point both of them are playing extraordinarily badly. But that's a blog post for a different day.

Yes, it's more complicated than often presented, and this is one of those policies I think in the long term is counterproductive for the Israelis. On the other hand, I think she's being a bit glib on playing down the existential threat to Israel.  One only needs to look at MEMRI to see what the Imans tell their followers about Israel, and what's on Palestinian TV to see Palestinian children indoctrinated to think of Jews as less than human.  Still, Israel needs to accept political reality, or as Jeffrey Goldberg, a pro-Israeli blogger states:

The problem with Gelb's argument is not moral, but practical: We all understand the reality that Israel will be judged more harshly than other nations -- it has always been so, though only recently has this been true on the Atlantic website. Israel is not big enough -- and the world's fourteen million Jews are not strong enough -- to reshape this particular reality. So we have to learn to live within the reality created by others. This doesn't mean that Israel must go and commit suicide, as much of the world (including the Turkish humanitarians) would like it to do. But it means -- and I repeat myself here -- that Israel should approach its problems with elegance and subtlety. 

His original reference is to the actions that Israel took in stopping the flotilla, but it applies to the Gaza blockade as well.

Update: The comments over at Megan's blog are well worth reading. One noteworthy one:

I choose the side that wasn't laughing and dancing in the streets on 911 (and then tried to lie about the fact, even threatening those who provided the proof).