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This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”

Under an agreement signed toward the end of the Bush administration, annual U.S. military assistance to Israel has been boosted from $2.5 billion in 2009 to $3 billion in 2011, meaning that almost a quarter of Israel's actual defense expenditures comes from the United States, according to Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Obama's Iron Dome money would be on top of that largesse, already the most military assistance to any country.

“Our play does not mean we hate Israel,” said Abdel Qader Ismail, 24, a former employee of the military intelligence service, with no trace of irony. “We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but not on the land of Palestine. In France or in Russia, but not in Palestine. This is our home.”

So if the present policy has failed utterly — even backfired by possibly bolstering Hamas — let’s start over. It’s time not just to ease the siege of Gaza, but to end it once and for all.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.

The Israelis claim that Insani Yardim Vakfi is a dangerous organization with terrorist links. They have yet to offer any evidence to support that charge.

The idea was that the West Bank would prosper while Gaza would fester.

Originally, Israel hoped the closure would put enough pressure on the local economy that Gazans would grow frustrated and oust Hamas. But the group's hold on power remains firm. Israel has tried to use the closure as a bargaining chip in negotiations for the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, to no avail.

One of the primary rationales for the blockade offered by Israeli officials is the need to create a material and political gap between the West Bank, run by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, and Gaza, run by Hamas. And political surveys have shown a preference for Fatah and discontent with Hamas among Palestinians. But the latest events, the American officials say, have given Hamas a dangerous lift.

Under a moonlit sky, Huwaida Arraf, a graduate of American University's law school, watched from a small ship early Monday as Israeli commando boats pulled up to the Mavi Marmara, a vessel filled with about 600 activists hoping to breach an Israeli blockade of Gaza.