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After telling her interviewer, the N.Y. Times magazine's Deborah Solomon, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni was asked one of Solomon's trademark accusatory "questions."

"You're the leader of the centrist Kadima Party, which is an opposition party. Yet you don't sound very opposed to the views of the ruling party," Solomon declared.

"On the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself, there is no opposition in Israel," Livni responded.

And with that, Livni had dispatched not just the aggressive and manipulative Solomon, but the editorial pages of countless newspapers, hired-gun obsessives like Peter Beinart and Stephen Walt, the catcallers from J Street, and those who display the cocktail party faux-concern for the Jewish state's democracy.

Democracy in Israel is alive and well. Livni is, as Solomon correctly pointed out, the opposition. What that means is that when the Israeli public disagrees with the policies or opinions of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Livni has a vested electoral interest in joining the public and opposing Bibi.

Indeed, when Solomon later asked Livni if she'll run for premier again after her close race with Bibi in 2009, Livni responded: "I will be prime minister."

An Israeli public opinion poll right after the flotilla incident showed that 92 percent of Israeli Jews supported stopping the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship affiliated with a Saudi-funded terrorist organization. A poll released this week shows that only 28 percent of Israelis -- Jewish, Arab, or other -- hold the Netanyahu government responsible for the deaths of nine of the infiltrators attempting to aid Hamas.

The Gaza blockade itself also repeatedly gets high levels of support in opinion polls. Solomon wants Livni to oppose popular policies simply because she's "the opposition." Livni has taken the democratic approach of siding with the Israeli people she hopes will elect her in the future. On this and many other issues, the Israeli electorate is calling the shots, not Livni.

After Beinart published a run-of-the-mill leftist garment-rending in the N.Y. Review of Books mourning the loss of democracy in Israel because Israelis had elected Likud to lead their country, Commentary magazine's Noah Pollak put him in his place.

"He demands that Israelis make political choices as if life were frozen in 1992, unaffected by almost 20 years of the failure of the peace process and territorial withdrawals," Pollak writes. "For Beinart, Israeli voters have no right to feel chastened and betrayed by the serial refusal of the 'international community' and Western liberals to act against the aggression and terrorism of Israel's enemies. We are dealing, in other words, with someone who not only rejects the laws of democratic politics -- discredited policies get rejected in elections -- but someone who places absurd demands of charity and self-denial on Israeli voters while justifying his intrusion with the fatuous declaration that 'Israel's crimes -- unlike those of Hamas or Ahmadinejad -- are committed in our name,' that is, in the name of American Jews."

I don't mean to pile on Beinart, who has, with the publication of that intellectually slothful exercise in acute narcissism, been finally unmasked and discredited. But Pollak's essay makes an important point that applies to most of the criticism we hear of Israel. These critics, who want Israel to continue to vote in leftist peace processors, stand in opposition to democracy.

Such progressive American Jews took to the streets (and in some shameful cases invaded their bubbies in South Florida like sci-fi drones) to declare that Barack Obama had come to rescue the country from "the failed policies of the past." Those failed policies needed to be rejected at the ballot box, they demanded, and Obama's subsequent election was proof that these were, in fact, "failed policies" and they were now in the trash bin, where they supposedly belong.

Well, two observations the self-proclaimed pro-Israel community should keep in mind. First, one of the cornerstones of those "rejected failed policies" was staunch support of Israel and its democratic process. Feel free to celebrate its rejection; I, for one, will not. George W. Bush has been the only U.S. president since Oslo began who has not interfered in Israeli elections. I rather prefer it his way, thank you.

Second, the very idea that propelled Obama to the White House also carried Kadima out of the Prime Minister's Office and deposited Bibi there instead. Kadima was seen by Israelis as disastrous for the country, and its time in office had followed the astounding violence experienced by Israeli citizens wrought by the policies of the Israeli left's Labor and Meretz. Of course Israelis voted for Likud.

"Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave," Bush said in his second inaugural address.

Bibi's election and Israel's actions are the result of the imperative of self-government. Israel's critics are wrong when they say Israel is losing her democratic character. As Israel seeks to free herself from the shackles of the Oslo process's PC prison, that character has never been stronger.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.