Its subject is the Middle East because, well, that’s where peace and goodwill go to die. The Middle East is always the center of our most heartfelt holiday wishes, because it’s the one place on earth where the idea that we might all come to love one another is truly hopeless.

Think about it. Who else is fighting anymore? The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. It’s not coming back, even if John McCain and Mitt Romney, for whatever mysterious reasons, would like to revive it. Northern Ireland is quiet as a pub on Sunday morning. Eight hundred years of conflict, finito. Even the FARC, down in Colombia, seems to be making peace overtures—a 50-year civil war, coming to an end.

Nor are there many good prospects for future conflicts. People talk about a military showdown between the United States and China. Right, the greatest trading partners in the history of the world are going to go to war with each other. And sure, there’s always a bloody civil war, or two or three, in Africa, which, apparently, we don’t much care about because they’re black people and they don’t have any natural resources that we need that urgently. And even those fights seem to be losing steam.

Nope, pretty much the whole of human conflict has been reduced to that broad swath of civilization extending from northern Africa across the Fertile Crescent and over the Himalayas. That is, almost everywhere Islamic nations abut other cultures, but especially at the epicenter, between Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Already this holiday season, we’ve been treated to the now-perennial sight of dead Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip being carried through the streets, and frightened Israeli children huddling in bomb shelters. It’s been the usual tit-for-tat maneuvering that has come to pass for Realpolitik in that part of the world. Hamas lobs a few hundred missiles into Israel, which counters with bombings and drone strikes. A cease-fire is arranged, a body count taken, and both sides and their allies hurry to total up the political points won and lost: who suffered the most, who was the most intemperate, who looked worse in the eyes of the world. There’s as much spin involved as there is in the wake of a presidential debate, with each side’s spokespeople rushing to get out their interpretation.

What doesn’t seem seriously disputed now is that it is all primarily for domestic consumption. Neither side expects the other to give up or go away anytime soon, or over the next few decades, or ever. Instead, there is a terrible kind of symbiosis here.

Hamas fires hundreds of missiles willy-nilly into a civilian population, then hides behind its own people to ensure maximum Palestinian civilian casualties as well—surely one of the most reprehensible tactics in human history. The justification for decades of Palestinian terrorism has usually been that they lacked the military hardware to fight the IDF directly, but given missiles by the smuggled truckload, the targets remain the same, i.e., anybody. In fact, for decades the Palestinians and their allies have basically claimed the right to kill just about anyone, anywhere in the world, in order to force attention to their cause. But, Palestinian terrorism has usually served a much narrower political purpose: to drown out more moderate voices, pre-empt competing radicals and draw the material support of Arabian royalty looking to appease their own Islamists by contributing a few more millions to the cause.

For Israel, as The New York Times’s analysis spelled out this Sunday, the latest attacks leave Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government feeling “very comfortable,” after Mr. Netanyahu’s extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing effort to influence our presidential election. Hamas’s actions give Israel an almost free hand in the West Bank, while the government’s thuggish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has already denounced the Palestinian Authority’s bid for observer state status at the United Nations as “diplomatic terrorism,” and even threatened to collapse the Authority in retaliation. Such a turn of events can only please Mr. Netanyahu’s Christian fundamentalist backers in this country, who care so deeply for the state of Israel that they expect it to disappear any day now in a bloody apocalypse that kills half of all the Jews in the world and convinces the other half to convert to Christianity.

Looking at this sorry mess of opportunism, one can only conclude that the last, most violent area on earth is being done in by ... the religions it has spawned. Or rather, by those strands of dogmatic, fundamentalist religion promoted by a handful of leaders in all camps who likely don’t even believe much of what they say themselves anymore, but feel it necessary to keep the most vicious and ignorant of their supporters nestled into suicide vests and settlements.

I don’t mean to be cynical. I remain convinced that all faiths convinced that God commands their own immediate occupation of the Holy Land can come together for a greater cause. I know, I’ve seen it happen. It was captured in a wire service photograph I used to keep on my refrigerator.

There, assembled behind a table as if at the Last Supper, were the high holy men of nearly all the major faiths represented in Jerusalem: Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, etc. They were all done up in their most impressive garb. One of them, I remember, was wearing something that looked like a giant coonskin cap on his head. Another was arrayed in an outfit that resembled a Klan hood.

What had they all come together to do? Denounce a planned gay pride march.

That’s right, folks. After five thousand years of killing one another in the name of God, the one thing what they could all agree on was that homosexuality is an abomination.

Don’t expect the parade of dead or terrified children to stop any time soon.

And God bless us, every one.

These are indisputable facts, but they bear repeating from time to time. Mr. Netanyahu reminded Americans that as they look out on an unstable and uncertain Middle East, there is, in fact, an "anchor of stability" in the region--Israel, America's friend and ally. It's hardly a secret that many in the region have nothing good to say about the United States, and some--a small but potentially deadly minority--wish to bring harm to America's borders. The same people wish to wipe Israel off the face of the map. America's enemies, the prime minister noted, are Israel's enemies as well.

Mr. Netanyahu drove home the point by referring to the sudden death of a man responsible for the loss of innocent lives throughout the region and, indeed, the world. "Congratulations, America. Congratulations, Mr. President. You got bin Laden. Good riddance," the prime minister said.

Mr. Netanyahu's congratulatory remarks should have reaffirmed another simple truth. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are just as eager to bring death and destruction to Israel as they are to the United States. But there is one difference: Israel lives in a far more dangerous neighborhood.

The prime minister's speech was a welcome reminder of all that Israel and the United States have in common. With any luck, the White House was paying attention.

"Jewish Donors Warn Obama on Israel," said The Wall Street Journal. "Obama's Jewish Backers on Edge Over His Mideast Peace Plan," proclaimed the Los Angeles Times.

The denunciations were swift and final. President Obama, it seemed, had made a fundamental error in calling for Israel to return to its 1967 borders, with land swaps. Donors, according to the new narrative, would soon be switching their allegiances to the G.O.P.

But conversations with nearly a dozen of the top Jewish fund-raisers in New York reveal a much different reality, as rainmakers say they continue to back the president they overwhelmingly supported three years ago.

"This is nonsense," said David Pollak, a former chairman of the state Democratic Party. "I think anyone who would not give money to Barack Obama because of remarks he made the other day wasn't giving money to him in 2008."

Last August, hedge-fund manager and Obama megabundler Daniel Loeb sent a kiss-off letter to his friends in financial services, expressing his sense of being betrayed by the administration and comparing the treatment they were getting to that of a battered wife. Mr. Loeb's sentiment was echoed by several Wall Street Democrats and taken as proof that the financial industry was turning its back on the party.

A similar letter from a major Jewish donor was feared to be forthcoming. But so far, only Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment executive, has publicly declared that he was finished donating to the president. There was just one problem, though: Mr. Saban was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton and had never given money to Mr. Obama. Furthermore, Mr. Saban pledged to keep supporting down-ticket Democrats.

Mr. Obama's New York supporters said most of these accounts rely disproportionately on voices like that of Mr. Saban, or, more often, the heads of major national Jewish organizations, who have long been lukewarm about Mr. Obama.

"You've got all the professional Jews who are mouthpieces and speak for themselves. They don't like Obama," said one real-estate executive who has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats. "There are people who talk to the press all day long, and they probably didn't support Obama last time."

The stakes are high for the Obama campaign. According to some estimates, nearly 60 percent of the money raised by the Democratic National Committee is donated by Jews, and any drop in support for the president's re-election could endanger the campaign's ambitious goal of raising $1 billion.

Earlier this week, a few dozen members of Obama's regional finance committee met with Jim Messina, the campaign manager for the Obama 2012 effort. According to one bundler present, they discussed how Obama can win, even if the economy remains in the tank, and how the campaign can attract the smaller, grass-roots donors. The topic of Israel didn't come up once.

"You have concerns among Democratic supporters of Obama, but they are concerns among friends," said Robert Zimmerman, a prominent fund-raiser. "And there is no trust or confidence in the Republicans."

Jewish fund-raisers say that they fear for Israel's future too, but continue to support the president, mainly because his Middle East speech didn't contain anything Mr. Obama hadn't already articulated. Plus, they point out, Israel is just one issue among several, and Mr. Obama remains more palatable than any of his opponents on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to the environment and preserving what remains of the social safety net.

"I have friends who are concerned, who wish Obama hadn't said that," said one bundler. "But at the end of the day, are they going to support Mitt Romney? I don't think so."

If they run into resistance from Jewish donors, bundlers said that they will lay out the many reasons they continue to support the president--reminding any reluctant supporters that Mr. Obama's speech only repeated the peace plan that has been accepted doctrine going back to George H.W. Bush, and that it's supported by Hillary Clinton, who remains a trusted figure in the Jewish community. And they will point to Mr. Obama's well-received address at AIPAC as proof that most Jews line up solidly behind the president, despite what the press might say.

The fund-raising has been a bit slow in the early going, according to several fund-raisers, but is expected to pick up once there's a real Republican opponent to contrast with the current president.

"The message is going to be simple, whether you are a Jewish donor, a black donor, a Hispanic donor, whatever," said one fund-raiser. "Re-elect Obama or this country is screwed."

dfreedlander@observer.com

The so-called Arab Spring has brought enormous change to the region, and nobody knows how street protests, state violence, demands for democratic reforms and outright civil war will play out over the short and long terms. But one thing is certain, now more than ever: Israel remains the region's only stable democracy. The Israelis continue to stand with the United States in the war on terrorists who continue to plot against both nations and their allies.

Washington and Jerusalem will not, and probably should not, see eye to eye on every regional issue. But ultimately, the bonds formed over the past 63 years should never be allowed to fray. The United States stands for universal values of liberty and democracy. Israeli, alone in its very rough neighborhood, continues to exemplify those values.

The fates of both nations, in war and in peace, remain intertwined. That's something to remember as Israelis and their friends here recall the astonishing events of the spring of 1948.

According to an Associated Press report published in today's International Herald Tribune:

Of course, at the risk of inflating New York's often irritating sense of exceptionalism, New York City is indeed a different matter when it comes to foreign investment.

As the article points out:

Undaunted by the political instability, sporadic violence, and relatively more modest style of dress that prevails in even the relatively peaceful, liberal Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, Mango’s president of expansion Isak Halfon told Women's Wear Daily that the one million people in the city of Arbil are “starving for something like this.”

Unlike Mango’s Western branches, the Iraqi flagship won’t carry the typical skin-tight, midriff-baring, cleavage-flaunting, provacative attire, but a conservative line designed by Lebanese designer Zuhair Murad, tailored to the Middle East. The mini-skirted manequins and pouting coquettes found in store windows in places like Soho, for instance, will give way to the demure tunics and long-billowy dresses found in Mango branches in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

With 84 locations in the region, stretching from socially liberal bastions like Lebanon, to Gulf countries where the hijab is mandatory, the Barcelona-based fast-fashion chain is no stranger to the Middle East—in total it accounted for 13 percent of Mango’s $2.08 billion 2007 revenues—and 22 new stores will open there during the next year.

To put things in perspective, Mango only has 20 American stores and much less ambitious U.S. expansion plans of about five or six new locations annually.

Mango has learned to weather tumult elsewhere in the Middle Eastern. It briefly closed two Beirut branches during the Summer 2006 war in Lebanon, but the stores have more or less remained open since, even after a car bomb exploded in the parking lot of a neighboring mall last spring.

Despite its solid Middle Eastern track record, the question remains whether safety concerns will curb the buying habits of Arbil's aspirational consumers.

The names on editor Martin Baron’s desk were expected to include business columnist Steven Bailey and Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Stephen Kurkjian.

Mr. Baron declined to comment on his timetable or on how many staffers had submitted paperwork.

“I’ll make the decision in consultation with the appropriate people,” Mr. Baron said.

It’s been 14 years now since the Times Company bought The Globe, spending $1.3 billion. Instead of Northeastern regional synergy, the result has been mutual disappointment—and an ever more newspaper-colonialist management style.

In January, the Times Company wrote down the New England Media Group—which includes The Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette—by $814 million and announced that 125 jobs needed to be cut from the two newspapers. Besides the 19 editorial cuts—17 in the newsroom and two on the opinion side—55 jobs in advertising and finance at The Globe are due to be outsourced to Bangalore.

And while the business jobs are going abroad, journalism jobs are being brought home. Also in January, Mr. Baron announced that the paper would be closing its last three foreign bureaus: the Jerusalem-based Middle East bureau, Berlin and Bogotá.

In case the paper’s four foreign correspondents would rather not cover Woburn, the Times foreign desk has already spoken to them about possible positions, according to a Times source with knowledge of the newspaper’s hiring practices. The potential poaching targets are the Berlin bureau’s Colin Nickerson, Bogotá’s Indira Lakshmanan and the Middle East–based husband-and-wife team of Anne Barnard and Thanassis Cambanis.

Back in the Bay State, staffers with 10 years’ seniority at the newspaper were informed that they were eligible for buyouts some six weeks ago. Globe sources said the terms were similar to those offered 18 months ago, when employees accepted packages ranging from about $150,000 to $200,000.

While that buyout met its target, the new one is oversubscribed. A Globe staffer said that reporters and editors are losing confidence in the newspaper’s future under the Times Company, and that they feel this might be the last chance to take a buyout for several more years.

The sense of encroachment grew stronger on March 14, when a story from the West Bank appeared in The Globe with a New York Times Wire Service tagline. The article was by Times reporter Steven Erlanger, himself a former Globe reporter. The following day, the Boston Phoenix’s Web site noted that it had been the first use of Times wire copy in The Globe’s news pages.

The Globe has been occasionally running Rob Walker’s “Consumed” column, which originates in the Times Magazine, since July 2006. But till this month, though The Globe had used foreign stories from The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and even the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, Times news copy had been off-limits.

On Feb. 8, when Times Company C.E.O. Janet Robinson and Globe publisher Steve Ainsley held a town meeting at the paper, a staffer raised the prospect of using Times wire copy in The Globe. At that time, Mr. Ainsley said that he didn’t see any reason not to, but that it would be strictly a newsroom decision, according to several staffers who were present.

Two weeks later, Mr. Baron spoke to Globe staffers, principally about the buyouts, but also to discuss the use of Times stories.

“A few years ago, [using Times copy] was such a big debate,” one staffer said. “But now so much is happening here that it just got overshadowed by the general tumult.”

Not to belabor the obvious, but my father was saying that these big sociological questions are going to be brokered and renegotiated beneath the surface, quietly, and Jews and gentiles will adjust to a new reality. Smart guy, my dad.

I bring all this up because I just watched Obama in Springfield. You can prepare all you want for a big moment, but then the moment happens, and we're all changed. I'm excited. And I have to think one of the consequences of Obama's globally democratic dream is that, without it being explicit, without his having a fight with big Jewish backers—without fireworks—U.S. policy in the Middle East is going to shift.

I'm an optimist. But I think what's happening right now in the Jewish community is part of it. Jews are being forced to confront the contradictions in Zionism (as playwright David Zellnik says, describing his play, "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl"). Despite the AJC's best efforts, all Jews are Wrestling With Zion (to quote the title of Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner's great anthology on the subject that the AJC attacked). This is the water we're all swimming in now, questions about Zionism; and I'm betting that without fireworks, the next generation of Jews is going to think differently about this, the ground is changing under them.

I'll cite one little fact that I think makes my point. In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

Harris then says this is not true of Richard Cohen, but he has nonetheless made "disturbing" comments about Israel.

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Today in the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg echoes the charge that the AJC is unfair to Richard Cohen—while by and large defending the report, by adding his own attack on anti-Zionists and non-Zionists:

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Cohen undertakes a broader defense of the AJC's targets: "It's sad that the American Jewish Committee commissioned and published Rosenfeld's report. I can't imagine what good will come out of it. Instead, it has given license to the most intolerant and narrow-minded of Israel's defenders so that, as the AJC concedes in my case, any veering from orthodoxy is met with censure... Shame." Cohen gets at the great (backfired) achievement of the AJC paper and its coverage in the Times. It has ennobled the critics, and not just the critics Gorenberg, who made aliyah, wishes to defend.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.

Well, gee. That's actually what movement means, a rearrangement of the political hierarchy (of which that reporter is a part) to include a formerly marginalized group. The women's movement. The settlers' movement. The evangelical movement.

Now here are a few more straws in the wind, demonstrating that the formerly-marginalized progressives are movin' in.

—In Australia, the Age today does a piece on perestroika in the Jewish community (saying that author Antony Loewenstein is leading a breakaway to challenge the Israel lobby), and The Age's sidebar exposes as objectionable a regular practice in the Jewish community: Zionists use the word "self-hating" to describe Jews who dissent from the program;

—The Times piece on the American Jewish Committee's report on these matters of 1/31 devotes real space to a book that nettled the AJC: Wrestling With Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. This wonderful book, which includes a great number of Jewish writers who are uncomfortable with Zionist ideology (and some who aren't so uncomfortable with it), came out nearly 4 years ago. It was never reviewed by the Times, mentioned only once in passing. Now it is mentioned prominently in the Times, and in a positive light. Change.

—In Washington last week, Theater J held a reading of the heterodox historical play I saw performed in N.Y. last spring, David Zellnik's amazing "Ariel Sharon Stands on the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl". The reading went well, before a good-sized crowd in the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. No one jumped up and screamed antisemitism, they wanted to talk about Zionism.

—In yesterday's Washington Post, an aggrieved victim of the AJC (as opposed to one of the victims who's reveling in it), Richard Cohen, says "Shame" on the AJC for "promiscuously" throwing around the word anti-Semite.

—Australia again. Today's Australian features a sharp opinion piece by TAMU's Michael Desch, a Holocaust scholar, who hops on the self-hating thing again. Dismissing "Jews who deviate from the pro-Israel line" as "self-hating" is the kind of "dirty pool" regularly practiced by the lobby.

O.K. So it's a movement. We're gaining traction. What do we stand for?

I'm not a political organizer, but I feel that if a conference were held tomorrow, the issues on which these people agree would be: Israel's occupation is wrong and fueled by parochial and often-racist religious ideology, efforts to suppress that view in the U.S. (the lobby) is not healthy for the U.S., Israel, and children and other living things.

The issues on which we wouldn't agree are: Is Zionism discredited? Is it still possible, or desirable, to have a 2-state solution?

The fascinating thing about this is that it essentially revives a battle over Zionist aims that took place 60 and 70 years ago within the Jewish community but that was eventually suppressed after the Holocaust. Through the 20s, 30s, and 40s, Zionists tried and ultimately succeeded in organizing American Jewry along defiant principles: they belonged to a "people" whose peoplehood transcended the nations they were in, they were homeless, liberal emancipation in the west was a failed hope, they had to support a nation in Palestine. Most Jews were against these ideas, or indifferent. The American Jewish Committee, at that time dominated by German Jews who were, like myself, integrationists, or assimilationists—i.e., they wanted to be like other citizens of the nations they were living in—tried at times to distance itself from Zionism. No more.

The conversation is being revived because the underlying issues were not resolved; and everything that anti-Zionists said would happen did happen: endless violence in the Middle East, and incredible and unfair pressure on Jews in other countries to support Israel and fund Zionism. The progs have had enough.

Again, I'd emphasize that a number of events outside the Jewish community, many of them embarrassments, led to this wave: the Rachel Corrie censorship of last February at the New York Theatre Workshop, a censorship no one would stand up for once it was exposed, but that no one at NYTW would rectify either; the Walt-Mearsheimer paper a month later, published in a foreign land, not here (and followed by the Tony Judt piece in the Times in April supporting W&M when leftwing Jews were afraid of W&M, thereby giving the paper (warning, here comes Yiddish) hecksher, Kosher certification); the Lebanon war, followed by many international human rights reports critical of Israeli tactics; Jimmy Carter's frankly pro-Arab book, featuring that glory of Jewish civilization on the cover, the apartheid wall; the Iraq Study Group calling on a revival of the peace process in a crucial arena of the Middle East... I'll shut up now, I'm even boring myself.