The former Israeli soldier, blue-eyed, his shirt sleeves pushed up around his biceps, said, "In Hebrew we have a word, Amal. It means, I have nothing to add. I agree with her completely."

(I am sorry not to have these young people's names; I got there late; I will supply them later.)

The news from Israel/Palestine these days is desperate. For the second time in a few months an "errant" Israeli mortar shell has destroyed an innocent Palestinian family in Gaza—

and this time caused tremendous pain in Israel too. Haaretz has castigated the country's military leaders, saying that "more and more pointless military operations... will not lead to anything except to kindling more hatred, we must try a completely different path." At a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin, murdered 11 years ago by an Israeli extremist, novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri, a tank commander, was killed in the last days of the absurd Lebanon war, offered a similar message. The military has long been the most revered institution in Israel, but that culture would seem to be eroding. Last summer a friend said to me that Israelis had to live with the fact that there would be war after war after war. Many Israelis seem now to need to reject this endless cycle of violence.

As a post-Iraq American Jew, I'm attuned to the Jewish/Israeli part in this madness, and so I want to go to something that blue-eyed former soldier said last night: he spoke about the pressure on Israelis from the diaspora Jewish community to maintain militant policies. A Parisian Jew tells him that Israel must never give up Gaza, as he pours another espresso. "Well I am the one who must defend and die for your cause while you are having your baguette," the former soldier said, in a surly tone. "This is something that really gets me going. You know what, it doesn't make me feel good."

He and I later talked about the American pressure. He said that the lobby in the U.S. produces pro-Israel legislation in Congress that is to the right of anything the Knesset could produce. And he noted of the extremist religious settlers who cause such havoc in Palestine—many of them are U.S. exports, called to the holy land by the voice of god and god knows how many other voices. The Palestinian woman had also complained about the American role. "We're not really a happy camper in terms of what America is doing right now..."

Today when Israel is in crisis, and when Israelis and Palestinians are at far greater risk than we are, Americans should examine their part in the craziness. Last summer, we supplied the cluster bombs, despite Human Rights Watch's many objections to the savage devices, cluster bombs that are still doing so much to turn Muslim hearts and minds against us. The Israel lobby made sure that the U.S. would do nothing to restrain Israel. Jerrold Nadler, Upper West Side liberal congressman, said the snatching of the Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah represented an "existential" threat to Israel. That's nuts. Yet it is repeated time and again here, to justify anything Israel wants to do. There are many exceptions to this attitude, including the great blogger Richard Silverstein. But these voices tend to be drowned out by pro-Israel groups that seek to remove the expression "cycle of violence" from our discourse, and replace it with cant: another blow against Islamofascism.

Diaspora Jews have long enabled the violence. This goes back to '48, when (according to The Pledge, Leonard Slater's book) Jews in New York were assembling bazookas and other munitions (in violation of American laws aganst supplying the yishuv with arms) so as to further the "War of Independence." Palestinians and Arab states of course played their bloody part in those hostilities, which they refer to as "the Nakba," or catastrophe, as it resulted in the expulsion of 700,000 Arabs from Palestine.

Last night the former soldier noted that Jews too can perform acts of terrorism. In 1994, a year before Rabin was murdered by a nutbag settler, another nutbag settler, Baruch Goldstein, walked into the mosque beside the tomb of Abraham in Hebron and killed 29 Arabs, before he was beaten to death. For those keeping score, Goldstein was merely performing payback for the Arab murders of Jews in 1929. So Goldstein is now a martyr for the settlers, his grave a shrine.

In the wake of the Goldstein atrocity, Rabin had an opportunity; he could have used it as a pretext to remove the extremist settlers from Hebron, settlers who had imposed an apartheid system on the second-largest city in the West Bank. In his book, The Missing Peace, former Clinton aide Dennis Ross writes that Rabin chose not to. Rabin chose not to. As if it were only his choice. As if the U.S. was not also making a choice, a passive one; as if the American government could not then have demanded the only fair thing, the settlers' removal. For we also were implicated: Baruch Goldstein and his ill wind had arrived in Israel from New York. He had been a doctor here.

You can understand why the Arab world blames us for our part in the cycle of violence, just as we blame extremist culture in Saudi Arabia and Egypt for the ill wind that blew this way on 9/11.

In his book, Dennis Ross (who is associated with One Voice) offers an explanation of how Israeli identity came to be shaped around violence; the Holocaust had taught Jews the lesson that "weakness begets tragedy." In his book, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier, the sociologist Marshall Sklare described the symbolic impact of Israeli militarism on American Jewish identity. "I think in the non-Jewish community people became aware that Jews have guts and stand up and fight—that the Jew is a man, not just a merchant," an accountant told him.

The two young people who were at Columbia last night will be our country's guests for another week or so, doing several more events, including one at Random House today. I hope they get a wide hearing. Neither of them is a symbol.

[Later: The Israeli: Seffi Kedmi, a former pilot. The Palestinian: Aya Hijazi. AMAL: slang for "Ain Mash-hoo Acher L'Geed" ]

The truth is that an expression of piety has always been part of our public dialogue, and "In God We Trust" is no more ominous than a routine "Have a good day" from the telephone operator or the teller at the bank. I don't mind in the least if someone really does trust in God, as long as he or she permits me my more wary precautions against the vagaries of providence. I went to a private school at which the Lord's Prayer was said at the start of each assembly. It was sweet, it was lovely, it provided a link to a proud tradition. Never mind that I couldn't say the words without hypocrisy. I liked the prayer-its beauty touched me, shaped me. Civilization creates many forms that are decorative, positive, appealing, but not necessarily the final word, the last truth, the one and only way. Our Presidential candidates pressing their godliness into each offered hand are not spoiling my day; this is simply form and does not affect our already troubled substance.

The problem here is that caught up in the edifice of faith-sticking to it nowadays like wallpaper to a wall-is this thing called "morality," and some are making very public assumptions that faith and morality are joined at the hip, share one heart and can never be separated. This is dangerous and false. Morality exists without faith, and faith certainly exists without morality. We have no reason to doubt that faith inspired the Spanish Inquisition and co-existed easily with the instruments of torture that were employed. We have no reason to assume that all the plantation owners who went to church on Sundays for 100 years of American history did not have real faith in their God, and at the same time sold, whipped, exploited, starved and chased human beings as if they were chickens. Their faith was strong, I'm sure, but their morality was weak. The grandparents of these white Southerners who want God back in the schools denied black children the comfort of a cool drink from an integrated water fountain. The supporters of Jim Crow all invoked God's will. The officers of the American nation who marched the Sioux and the Cherokee off to the Western plains were not godless men. They gave themselves reasons, they thought they were moral people, but they did a terrible thing; and no amount of prayer, before or after the events, could alter the fact that, while faith was truly present on those slaughter fields, morality-"do unto others," etc.-was missing.

The armies of the world send their chaplains out to the battlefields, although "Thou shalt not kill" is surely a primary rule from God's mouth to our ears. The soldiers at My Lai were not a group of atheists. The guards at Auschwitz, the stock swindlers at the savings-and-loans, the Mafia hit men were not necessarily godless men, they were simply men whose morality failed.

The threat of burning in Hell ever after should have been enough to keep souls from misbehaving, and we know at one time there was a bull market in indulgences. Still, human behavior has been and remains a scandal to the pure of heart. It is hard to control the wildness of man, his propensity for murder and mayhem, for building idols, for destroying what someone else has built, for breaking holy commandments like they were mere human hearts.

We have Jim Bakker and a dozen other well-known preachers-turned-prisoners whose faith did not fail them, though their morality did. We have fundamentalists of all stripes who will cheat on their wives, harm their children, desert their families, steal from their business partners. We have believers like Baruch Goldstein, who kills innocents for his God-given goal. It is not that these folks don't believe in God. They do. It is that their souls are fallen, fractured, unhappy, corrupt, and the result is a long list of abuses, in the dark of home and in the public square.

Morality sometimes is supported by faith in God and His laws, but sometimes it just exists for its own sake. There are good people who give to others, who respect the laws divine and man-made, but who do not believe in a personal God at all-who may, in fact, believe in nature, in biology or in nothing so much as the human potential.

The danger in the political landscape today is that we assume that faith is the barrier to misbehavior when we know it is not-not for individual people or for their governments. To separate morality from faith is not to downgrade faith or its church. Human beings have always needed and wanted a way to believe in their immortality, in the meaning of their lives, in the special destiny of their tribe. Faith-when it doesn't lead to murdering someone of another faith-is as good a thing as any human can have outside of a loving mate. But morality is something else, and the power to resist the sexy intern with the big lips is not programmed into believers or left out of doubters.

They say that America is a very religious country, awash with saved souls who truly believe. At least this is what they tell the pollsters. The polls now say just about everybody has faith, and so the politicians follow the crowd, as politicians are wont to do. This is all right, as long as we understand that religion is like a benign tumor that can change into something dangerous and destructive if exposed to the right pollutants. Religion doesn't guarantee good character, and as much as I love Joe Lieberman for his pixie smile, I don't think his religion promises me that if I vote for him, I'll get a moral man. He better promise me that on his own.

The Republicans got so puffed up while condemning Clinton that they returned the country to Plymouth Rock. They forgot that, all over this great land of ours, real people are always making moral mistakes-fornicating, cheating, doing less than their best-not because they have no God, but despite the fact that they have a God. Likewise, morality-uprightness, goodness, love of others-is something humans can express without a metaphysical truss. In this season of so much God, we might remember that.