For some radical-chic types in Park Slope, however, the above practices and causes apparently are too pedestrian for their outrage. Instead, they have decided to channel their energy against Israel.

A group of Park Slope residents has been agitating for a boycott of Israeli-made goods in the neighborhood’s food co-op. The pro-boycott residents say they wish to show their opposition to Israel’s policies in Palestinian territories. If they have made a statement about Palestinian policies in Israel’s territory—the policy is to launch missiles from Gaza into southern Israel whenever Hamas leaders feel the need to kill Jews—it has not been recorded.

The proposal was scheduled for an initial vote on March 27, after The Observer went to press. If the measure passed, it would go to a full vote among co-op members.

Truthfully, the result of the vote doesn’t matter. The fact that such an absurd idea even got this far is troubling enough. The anti-Israel contingent in Park Slope is part of a larger movement designed to portray Israel as a villain for simply defending itself against random attacks launched by terrorists intent on wiping Israel off the face of the earth.

These efforts are more than sad. They are tragically misguided.

That’s curious, to say the least. You almost have to wonder if the candidates appreciate just how much Israel values the lives of its citizens, especially its citizen-soldiers. The Republicans almost seem to think that the deal was a sign of weakness on Israel’s part. “You can’t negotiate with terrorists, period,” said Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

No nation knows more about the effects of terrorism than Israel. But Jerusalem’s decision to trade 1,000 prisoners for a single solder was hardly a sign of weakness. It was, in fact, born of strength, solidarity and, ultimately, decency.

True, some of the Palestinians freed from prison in Israel were and remain death-worshipping fanatics who may well seize another opportunity to kill or injure Jews. Israeli families torn apart by the actions of some of these prisoners certainly were upset about the exchange, about seeing killers allowed to go free. Worse, they were accorded hero’s welcomes once they were beyond Israel’s borders.

Even still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the right decision, for the right reason. Israel cannot and should not sleep while one of its own remains in the hands of its enemies. We do not know and may never know how Mr. Shalit was treated by his captors. But the gruesome record of some Islamic terrorists would suggest that he has been liberated from a hell on earth.

And that is precisely what Mr. Netanyahu’s government achieved: liberation of a soldier, a fellow citizen, a Jew. Liberation was not without cost. But it was a cost well worth paying.

It certainly is possible that no U.S. politician, even the most well-meaning, can appreciate the value that Israelis traditionally place on the lives of their fellow citizens. Israel has made other, seemingly one-sided deals before to win the freedom of another Israeli. And if others fall into hostile hands, Israeli will make the same deal.

These deals don’t weaken Israel. They make Israel stronger, for they reaffirm the embattled nation’s commitment to basic human values. Those who wish to understand the Middle East should be paying close attention.

No friend, no true ally, would ask another state to put its very existence in jeopardy. But that is precisely what the president has asked of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly said that the pre-1967 borders are "indefensible." So, too, is the president's proposal.

It's important to bear in mind that Mr. Obama's remarks were carefully thought out and discussed internally before they were issued on the eve of Mr. Netanyahu's visit to Washington. All the more reason to conclude that this administration simply does not appreciate the gravity of the security issues facing Israel. If Mr. Obama's remarks had been made in haste, if he had uttered them in an unscripted moment, they might be explained away as a mere gaffe. But this was no gaffe. This was an expression of the president's genuine convictions.

That's the troubling part.

Israel is surrounded by hostile, undemocratic states and an array of terrorist organizations that are nothing if not brutally candid about their objectives: they wish to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. They would do it, if they had the means and the weaponry. No other country on earth is so embattled. No other country's sovereign territory is so vulnerable to so many threats. Successive administrations in Washington have appreciated Israel's predicament, even if they occasionally disagreed with specific policies and tactics.

The Obama White House, however, has been an exception. Not long after Mr. Obama took office, Washington called on Israel to suspend new settlement construction in the West Bank, a pronouncement that did nothing to win Mr. Netanyahu's confidence in the new president's policies and attitude. The relationship between Washington and Jerusalem has been tense ever since, and, from Israel's perspective, rightly so.

Mr. Netanyahu apparently was caught off-guard by the president's proposal. Published reports said that he desperately sought changes in the president's remarks, but he was rebuffed and humiliated. These are not the actions of a true friend.

Mr. Obama's subsequent speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been interpreted as an attempt to soothe wounded feelings, even a slight pull-back from his original remarks. The president insisted that the U.S. and Israel continue to share the same basic values and reaffirmed Washington's commitment to keeping the crazed rulers of Iran from getting their hands on nuclear weapons. He insisted that Israel could not be expected to negotiate with Hamas, or with a government that includes Hamas, as long as the terrorist group refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist.

While these sentiments are welcome, they are simply statements of the obvious. The U.S., threatened as it is by Islamic extremists who already have killed thousands of Americans, could hardly insist that Mr. Netanyahu's government engage with the would-be mass murderers in Gaza.

The AIPAC speech, then, changed nothing. It asserted obvious truths. It did not take the sting out of the president's earlier remarks. Former mayor Ed Koch, a lifelong Democrat, realized the enormity of the president's dangerous and incomprehensible new course. "If President Obama does not change his position, I cannot vote for his re-election," Mr. Koch wrote. The former Mayor spoke for many when he added that the president's AIPAC speech "did not reassure me."

Nor should it have. The pattern is clear. Mr. Obama has been shifting Washington's policy of unwavering support for Israel to a more confrontational posture. His position on borders and his formula for land swaps is more in line with the Palestinian position, not with Israel's. That is a significant and highly unfortunate change in U.S. policy.

Next on the Palestinian agenda is a United Nations resolution recognizing a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The move is expected in September, when the General Assembly meets in New York. The Obama administration must do everything in its power to make sure the resolution dies from lack of support. Opposition from Washington isn't enough. The U.S. must work behind the scenes with allies in Europe and elsewhere to make sure that this effort to isolate Israel fails.

At this point, it is probably too late to think that the Obama administration will have a change of heart about Israel. The president clearly regards Mr. Netanyahu and his government as an obstacle to U.S. strategic interests.

Israel's friends in the United States have every right to be angry and sad. Like Mr. Koch, they may be inclined to look elsewhere next year, when the president will be up for re-election. Republican strategists already are trying to drive a wedge between Democrats and Jewish voters, but they won't have to work very hard to achieve their goals. Mr. Obama, in rejecting friendship with Israel, has done the work for his prospective opponents.

He does not deserve the support of those who continue to embrace Israel as a friend, partner and ally.

And so it was with the graffiti-covered faux-bomb shelter/art installation erected in Washington Square Park on Monday afternoon.

At issue was a Sderot-style bunker of the sort used by Israelis when Palestinian militants lob missles over the border. Just what it was doing in Greenwich Village and what it meant depended on whom you asked. To Artists 4 Israel, the group that created the installation with funding from the Birthright Israel Alumni Community, it represented a sad piece of daily life in the Holy Land. To the pro-Palestine protesters who arrived to offer their own take, it seemed a questionable piece of propaganda, on city property. To passersby, a spectacle.

The Observer showed up just a few minutes after the protesters, "got their act together," according to Artists 4 Israel president Craig Dershowitz, "and started saying their usual diatribe about Israel."

"You'll notice, none of them have mentioned the bomb shelter. None of them have mentioned the kids who are living under this threat of terror," he said.

The protesters held signs declaring "Gaza Hungers for Justice" and demanding "U.S. Dollars out of Israel." They chanted, "Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel's crimes" and handed out their own pamphlets.

"For most of the day this has been relatively peaceful," Mr. Dershowitz said. "What we're doing is creating artwork and beauty. So what can you say to that, right? And what can you say to ‘Children should not have to live under threat of rockets?' Who can be against that?"

Artists 4 Israel's literature said that Israeli students, Jews and Arabs like, have but 15 seconds to get into a bomb shelter when a warning is sounded. The protesters' literature included information on how to boycott Israeli products, divest from the country and encourage the U.S. government to cut funding.

"Artistically, it's kind of sad because they're appropriating New York hip hop art to serve the Israeli propaganda agenda," said Andrew Felluss, a music producer with the group Artists Against Apartheid, who was handing out the opposition's literature. "It's a little disturbing." 

The shelter itself was small, about five-by-five. The graffiti was contributed by COPE2, SKI, 2ESAE and KA, graffiti artists who, according to Matt Mindell, a representative for the Birthright Israel Alumni Community, had visited Israel on a trip funded by Artists 4 Israel and were "trying to reenact what they experienced on a daily basis." None of the artists are Jewish, he said.

"A bomb shelter shouldn't be about death or getting destroyed, I guess is what they were trying to say," said COPE2, who hadn't actually been to Israel yet, but plans on going on a junket soon. "It's just both sides. It's like, damn, could this end? Especially when kids are getting involved and getting killed."

COPE2 said he has both Jewish and Palestinian friends and that he added his work to the shelter because of his close friendship with Dershowitz and Dershowitz' commitment to the project.

Inside the bunker, a flatscreen TV was mounted on one of the walls showing footage shot during the bombings. A man was available to answer questions.

Only a few minutes after The Observer ducked inside, an argument broke out between one of the protesters and the guy answering questions.

The protester, a woman, declared, "This is just rhetoric, these aren't facts," and referenced an event in which she saw the Israelis as aggressors. He retorted that Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East and that "you can be gay and live in Israel, you can't do that in other countries." She countered that Israeli troops had raided the office of a Palestinian news organization. He said the Palestinians did the same thing to CNN. She asked where he got his news and he did the same. They both cried bias.

Outside, a few dog owners clung to a nearby fence, staring at the scene while their pets yipped in the background.

mcoyne@observer.com

We very much hope the skeptics are wrong. While it takes some effort to imagine a magic formula that would bring a lasting peace to the region within 12 months, at least the two sides are talking.

History suggests that talks are not always wise, and that negotiated settlements do not guarantee peace. The world would have been better off if Neville Chamberlain had absented himself from Munich in 1938 and sent the Royal Air Force in his place.

But history also suggests that breakthroughs can and do happen, sometimes quite unexpectedly. Twenty years ago, few people would have predicted that Northern Ireland would soon have a legislative assembly in which militant Unionists and onetime IRA members shared power. The arrangement has not worked perfectly, but at least bombs no longer shatter the night in Belfast.

The settlement in Northern Ireland was the result of direct talks facilitated by the Clinton administration. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, of course, far more complicated than other conflicts in other regions of the world. But complications should not be an obstacle to negotiation, not at a time when the alternative seems to be growing animosity and mistrust.

It is incumbent on the Obama administration to show that it has the vision and the patience to follow through on its ambitious goal of a settlement within a year. This is an opportunity for the Obama administration to prove that it is serious about the issue and serious about its close ties to a longtime friend and ally. If Washington has nothing new to propose and discuss, the fault will not be with the two parties at the table. Yes, talks are preferable to war, but Washington must make sure that the talks are meaningful and not simply make-work.

Ms. Amanpour spent much of the next 8 months reporting on those questions, and tonight at 9 p.m. on CNN, she'll unveil her findings in a two-hour documentary titled "Generation Islam."

The documentary focuses on a range of efforts being made in Afghanistan and Palestine to turn young Muslim children away from violent extremism. Along the way, Ms. Amanpour introduces viewers to a handful of Westerners devoted to the task and employing a range of tactics, from building new classrooms to constructing skate-boarding parks to creating TV shows. At one point, viewers are even introduced to something called "Muppet diplomacy."

Not long ago, we wrote about the surge of Western reporters returning to Afghanistan as the U.S. steps up military operations in the area. Ms. Amanpour said she decided to focus on children in Afghanistan and Palestine based on the administration's priorities.

"President Obama has identified two special envoys, one for Afghanistan/Pakistan," Ms. Amanpour told The Observer recently via phone from France. "And one for the Middle East peace process. That's why we chose those areas, because they are central to American security and to the efforts of the new American administration."

"And also because, both among the Palestinians and the Afghans, it's such an overwhelmingly youthful population," she added.

So are the efforts working?

"The big aggregate news that is good and optimistic is that militant-ism and extremism is declining," said Ms. Amanpour . "Whether it's in Afghanistan or Pakistan, the percentages are plummeting. That's where the opportunity lies. Now is the time to grab that opportunity."

"Nation building is not a luxury," she added. "It's an absolute imperative. And it can be done. The payback of success is huge and long lasting."

Ms. Amanpour believes that the U.S. today needs something equivalent to The Marshall Plan, which would help in part to intensify and coordinate civilian efforts to win over the young, impressionable members of the Muslim world. "What I came away with is a belief that if that is done, it is 100 percent assured of success," said Ms. Amanpour. "The people want it. The people are willing."

"The individual programs that have been attempted are successful," she added. "What I don't want is for people to say, 'Oh, she's just picked out a few stories that are hopeful.' I want to get across the idea that it is hopeful. That you can be optimistic about it. But it doesn't come cheap, and it doesn't come easy. It requires real patience. It requires being in there for the long haul."

In September, Ms. Amanpour will debut a new, eponymous hour-long program that will air weekly in the U.S. and will focus on international issues. For Ms. Amanpour, the show can't start a moment too soon.

"The lack of foreign news on American television is unconscionable," she said. Americans need to know what's going on in the world and what's being done in their name by their soldiers and also by the civilian effort. The notion that the most powerful country on Earth is cut off by their own media organizations from the real information about what their country is doing--it's untenable. It's wrong."

Washington Square News, the student newspaper, wrote that the occupation amounted to "a catered, self-indulgent dance party," while NYULocal, the student blog, headlined a post "How a Fringe Group at NYU Went From Being Disliked to Loathed - The Story of the TBNYU! Kimmel Occupation." And so a narrative was born: Self-righteous rich kids take over N.Y.U. lunchroom for self-indulgent, politically naïve aims. Let's face it—earnestness discomfits New Yorkers nearly as much as emotions unnerve Brits.

But while the students here and abroad may be mockable, they have managed to make themselves unignorable. The protests at N.Y.U. were, for all the attention they received, actually a faint echo of a much more widespread rash of campus manifestations in Britain. And with a global economic squeeze, the Israeli invasion of Gaza and, counterintuitively, the election of Barack Obama as rallying points, they appear to be growing more insistent, abrasive and ubiquitous than at any point since at least the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"All of the Italian higher-education system is virtually shut down, and I was in Barcelona over Thanksgiving, and students had occupied the buildings there," said Andrew Ross, the chair of N.Y.U.'s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. "In Paris there's been a lot of activity along those lines. You know, I think there are local differences, but basically they're protesting against the economic squeeze that is being passed down onto the education system in each of these countries."

On Jan. 13, more than five weeks before N.Y.U. students built a barricade of overturned tables and chairs inside a student cafeteria on Washington Square South, students at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies staged a sit-in, protesting the university's ties to Israel and demanding the university divest. In quick succession, students groups staged similar protests at the universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, Manchester and East Anglia, and at the London School of Economics and King's College London, among nearly 20 others.

Stateside, reaction has been more limited—in January, Students for Justice in Palestine, a group at Hampshire College, issued a press release claiming it had convinced the school to divest from the State Street Fund, which holds shares in companies that invest in Israel. (Hampshire College says that the divestment had nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with investments in places like Sudan and Burma.) And there was a spirited demonstration at the University of Rochester, which is, like Hampshire and N.Y.U., a private school.

Mr. Ross, who is a member of a group called Faculty Democracy—its politics seem to be pretty close to the student activists'—sees a link between the incidences of protest and economic distress in the form of unusually high loads of student debt. He said he was not surprised by last week's events at N.Y.U., where annual tuition is nearly $40,000.

"The group that was at the core of the takeover has been very active for at least two years on petitioning the administration on the issues on fiscal transparency," he said. "They've gotten nowhere."

At 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 80 students occupied Kimmel Hall, N.Y.U.'s student center. Some brought blankets and playing cards, others brought computers and paint and food for the long haul. They created barricades from overturned furniture and settled in for the night. Videos from Thursday afternoon showed the typical trappings of college protests: a motley crew of students high on the adrenaline of spurning authority; signs emblazoned with slogans like "Negotiate Now" and "Disclose our Budget"; demands broadcast unintelligibly through a megaphone. Crowds of student supporters gathered below, including, to the delight of many onlookers, two topless coeds. On Thursday evening, two successive waves of students broke past police barricades, adding reinforcements to the dwindling crowd inside (many protestors had left for class or work), prompting altercations with security after which one campus guard was briefly hospitalized for injuries to her head and body. Before it ended, some of the demonstrators broke a lock to access the balcony and, according to the university, damaged some wall-hangings in the cafeteria. Eighteen students were served with suspension papers.

"We have to have a civil discourse about our priorities and the things that matter most to us, and I find it difficult to see where any of the matters that they brought up required the destruction of university property or injuries to an N.Y.U. security guard," said N.Y.U. spokesman John Beckman in an interview afterward. "That seems to dishonor the tradition of recent discourse that we're proud of."

Emily Stainkamp, a preternaturally articulate 18-year-old from Greensboro, N.C., and a Take Back NYU! leader involved with the protest plans since their inception, calls the Kimmel occupation her "baby."

Late in the afternoon of Saturday, Feb. 21—the day after the three-day student action was finally, anticlimactically broken up by an almost surreally restrained group of campus security workers—she sat bleary-blue-eyed, and newly suspended, in the sloppy National Lawyers Guild offices near City Hall. She was waiting to meet with an attorney from Legal Aid. Her light brown hair, parted on the right, was disheveled. The pink-purple nail polish on her fingers was peeling. Under her plaid button-down, she wore a faded T-shirt, and a stud pierced the skin beneath her lip.

The daughter of a machinist and a customer service representative at an office supply store, Ms. Stainkamp says that she loves New York City, and N.Y.U.

"The classes that I have taken through the Social and Cultural Analysis Department have been wonderful," she said. "I've had good experiences here, and it's where I want to be."

Yet Ms. Stainkamp said she is troubled by the university's lack of transparency and responsiveness: "I want to be part of a university that listens to me and allows me to take part in the way the university conducts itself."

Her complaints jibe with those of Drew Phillips, 22, and Duncan Meisel, 21, fellow members of Take Back NYU!, who earlier that day sat down at Esperanto Café on MacDougal Street to discuss the evolution of last week's events.

Mr. Phillips is a philosophy honors student who speaks in a husky voice with the slow cadence of his native Missouri. His short blond beard and unkempt coif frame a lean face prone to ironic smiles. His roommate, Duncan Meisel, is a lanky Texan, from Austin, who majors in political communication and tends to stare downward as he speaks.

Messrs. Phillips and Meisel, now roommates in Chinatown, met in October 2007, when they got involved with student activism.

"We want to make this place an institution that reflects the education that it teaches its students," Mr. Phillips said. "They're telling students that we should believe in democracy and that transparency is the only way to hold them accountable. But then they act in a way to keep secrets from their students in a very top-down manner. And I think that's hypocrisy."

And so the group circulated petitions, got a woman named Caitlin Boehne elected to the Student Senate, challenged the university's president, John Sexton, at town hall meetings and held town halls of their own. They say administration officials declined to engage them.

After the group had, in Ms. Stainkamp's words, "exhausted established channels," and after taking note of the protests both abroad and at home, Take Back NYU! opted for more forceful action.

They scouted locations, ultimately choosing the Kimmel Center for its symbolism (the center replaced what the students claim was a much more student-friendly Loeb Center), and because they would be able to disrupt business as usual without disrupting classes. In February, they formulated their list of demands.

"We sat in my common room in my dorm and kind of shouted out the things that we wanted to see at the university and wrote them on sticky notes and stuck them on my wall and tried to organize them," said Ms. Stainkamp, who until she was suspended was living in University Hall on Union Square South.

The students wanted amnesty, the public release of the university's budget and endowment, the right for student workers to collectively bargain, more generous labor contracts for all N.Y.U. employees (including those at the school's Abu Dhabi campus), the creation of something called the Socially Responsible Finance Committee, which would investigate the school's investments, 13 annual scholarships for Palestinian students, "tuition stabilization for all students" and general public access to the university's main library. 

At the end of the protest, N.Y.U. declared in a press release, "None of the students' demands was met."

Now that the students are wending their way through the judicial administration process, intriguing questions linger. Students are always under financial distress, so why now? Also: Why Gaza?

Leia Petty, 27, a Brooklyn College graduate student who sits on the national committee of the Campus Antiwar Network, said that Barack Obama's ascension to the presidency played a role.

"I've been a student activist for a while, and I've never experienced what I'm experiencing now," Ms. Petty said. "There's a massive economic crisis, and there are failed wars in the Middle East."

She said that before Mr. Obama's election, "people were very cynical that change was possible, that activism mattered, that protest mattered."

About the relentless, universal focus on Gaza, she said that the Israeli actions were particularly "bloody and barbaric."

Mr. Ross, the professor, said, "It doesn't surprise me that the plight of the Palestinian people is something that's on students' radar and is something they're energized by. It's one of the great causes of our time."

Be that as it may, it still doesn't answer a question raised by star trial lawyer and self-appointed Jewish spokesman Alan Dershowitz, in response to Hampshire College's divestment.

In an irate op-ed on The Jerusalem Post's Web site, Mr. Dershowitz—whose son attended Hampshire and who, unrelatedly, is the author of a book titled Chutzpah—claimed a disproportionate focus on the actions of the Jewish state. (He has since softened his position about Hampshire's actions.)

Samuel Freedman, a New York Times columnist and professor of the Columbia School of Journalism, also sees an imbalance-one that has been a long time in the making.

"There's a highly mobilized student movement around the Palestinian issue that was building up a lot of strength and influence on campuses before September 11, and I always felt if it hadn't been for September 11, that the Israel divestment issue would have been a huge campus issue in 2001 and 2002," Mr. Freedman said. "It was sort of abated by (a) September 11, and (b) the really horrifying series of suicide attacks against Israel in the spring of 2002, which I think put a dent in a lot of pro-Palestinian activism.

"But now, the Iraq war isn't as huge of an issue, it's a long time since September 11, and it's convenient and easy to create sympathy about the deaths of civilians and the attacks on civilian institutions, without really pondering what provoked those Israeli attacks, and without pondering the degree to which Hamas wanted to put civilians in harm's way precisely to create a sympathetic emotional climate to their cause," he said.

Activists like Ms. Stainkamp are not unaware that the singular focus on Israel's activities has led to very public questions about the underlying motive. She describes it as a price the protesters feel obliged to pay.

"I've been accused of being an anti-Semite, as a result of this and other activism that I've done for Palestine," she said. "I think that's sad, but certainly not something that should deter action from happening around what's going on there."

"This is not going to be the last occupation in the United States or New York," she added. "You're going to see more and you're going to see more soon."

That logic also explains why so many of his supporters on the left have remained silent, save for some grumbling among themselves that occasionally spills into the blogosphere, while Mr. Obama has systematically distanced himself from the concerns of Muslim and Arab-Americans.

The fact that two Muslim women wearing head scarves were prohibited from standing behind Mr. Obama at a Detroit rally made national news, but it was hardly the first – and it almost certainly won’t be the last – slight from Mr. Obama. Last December, Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim American ever elected to Congress, volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama’s behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was told not to.

By contrast, Mr. Obama has bent over backward to satisfy Jewish leaders that he understands and is sympathetic to their concerns about Israel. He made a high-profile visit to a synagogue in Florida last month, where he fielded questions from congregants and repeatedly affirmed his support for Israel, and held a similar session with influential Jewish activists in Cleveland back in February.

He also addressed AIPAC’s annual convention the day after clinching the Democratic nomination (where he declared that Jerusalem “will remain the capital of Israel and it must be undivided”) and has leaned heavily on prominent Jewish supporters for cover, treating them far differently than he’s treated Mr. Ellison. Nor has he hesitated to toss aside backers whose views are upsetting to the pro-Israel advocates, most notably Zbiegniew Brzezinski.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has refused to set foot in a mosque, has given no major (or minor, for that matter) speeches about the concerns of Muslim or Arab-Americans, and has adamantly refrained from expressing to those groups any of the solidarity he professes to feel with the pro-Israel crowd.

Still, Obama supporters on the left who have latched onto him as the last great hope for a less reflexively hard-line Middle East policy are sticking with him. They’re convinced that a President Obama will be free to act in a way that candidate Obama can’t.

Certainly, there’s reason to believe that he wants to. Back in his Illinois days, Mr. Obama eagerly reached out to Muslims and Arabs. He and his wife frequently broke bread with Rashid Khalidi, a scholar and Palestinian rights activist, and he even dined with and attended a speech given by Edward Said. In private, some people who knew him back then have said Mr. Obama was frank about his sympathy for the Palestinian plight – and the impracticality of discussing it in a campaign. Plus, there’s his background, which includes ties to Kenya and Indonesia, two countries with sizable Muslim populations.

The problem is that, even if this calculation is correct and the real Barack Obama has yet to reveal himself (at least on Middle East issues), it’s tough to see how he’d have any more latitude as president.

From a political standpoint, Mr. Obama has handled Middle East questions deftly this campaign. Because of his cosmopolitan background and his middle name, he has faced knee-jerk suspicions that he is either a Muslim or somehow insufficiently tough on “the terrorists” – or both. To counter this, he can’t be “pro-Israel” enough – and he can’t distance himself far enough from Arabs and Muslims.

But his election won’t magically undo his vulnerability to these suspicions. If a President Obama were, say, to challenge Israel’s posture toward Iran, or to speak out firmly against Israel's settlement policy? A good chunk of the electorate, including those who don’t follow Middle East issues but do respond to the noise around them, would fall back on those not-so-buried suspicions. Offering reassurance would be impossibly difficult for Mr. Obama.

The old saying that only Nixon could go to China, roughly translated, means that only a hard-liner has the cover to pursue a dove’s agenda. In his heart, Mr. Obama may identify with the peaceniks on the Middle East more than any presidential candidate in memory. But as his campaign has shown, he might not be in a position to do a thing for them.

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Two comments. First, that Dershowitz should bring this up shows that those who favor a single state in Palestine have gotten the issue on the agenda. Dershowitz's line is is now the talking point. Leon Wieseltier made a similar statement about Judt, with a similarly-angry tone, in the New Republic a few weeks back.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.

For another point of view on this, read Elik Alhanan's two-state position (near the end of this long post). Meantime, below is an excerpt of Judt's piece: