Barack Obama backs Israel remaining a Jewish state

Until Vice President Dick Cheney's famous accident last year when he mistakenly shot his partner during a quail hunt, it was Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States (1889-1893), who provided the previously most amusing presidential hunting-related incident. While in Maine, he aimed at what he believed to be a raccoon, only later to discover that he had shot dead a pig belonging to a local farmer.

The anecdote was brought up by an analyst scrutinizing with amazement the numbers coming out of Iowa voter surveys one week before the primary for their party's presidential candidate. The three-way Democratic race is very close. Hillary Clinton has managed to garner between 24 to 30 percent of the vote, John Edwards, 18 percent to 26 percent, and Barack Obama - 25 to 33 percent of the vote according to the opinion polls.

Some will say the numbers show Obama is in the lead; others will assume that such a split can only show one thing: any raccoon can turn out to be a pig.

Like all election campaigns - and this one even more so - the main question is who will turn out at the polls. In the case of Iowa, going to the polls means leaving home on a very cold evening for a few hours, because they don't actually vote, they caucus. Since every pollster choses the formula by which likely voters are defined, the question of who will win depends on that precise formula more than the answers given by those polled. Out of the many pollsters covering Iowa, only one managed to predict the outcome in the correct order of the 2004 elections. The last poll of Selzer & Co. puts Obama at the top, Clinton second and Edwards third.

The two leaders in this poll, who are also neck and neck in New Hampshire, appeal to different age groups. Obama hopes he will be able to do what Howard Dean, the front-runner who lost in 2004 in Iowa, could not: bring more young people to the polls. Obama invested a great deal in high school students, who will be able to vote if they turn 18 before election day. The problem: In 2004 only four percent of Iowa's 150,000 registered voters were under 21.

Obama is now at a turning point in his campaign. Will he manage to persuade America that he is a real player? Dean was defeated by the more experienced John Kerry; many believed, and still do, that this would also be Obama's fate in running against the more experienced Clinton. And so the moment of truth is coming closer, and with it the beginnings of a solution to the Obama puzzle.

Israelis who are following the elections and Obama have had difficulty understanding his approach. He is certainly not naive, as some thought at the outset. He is an idealist, but more sober than could be gleaned from his first public appearances, which swept away his audiences. Many American Jews, particularly younger ones, tend to support him, but a survey of the American Jewish Committee showed that he has a long way to go in the general Jewish community. Among the three leading candidates he has the least support in the Jewish community, with the highest percentage of those who say they disapprove of him.

Obama did try once or twice to reassure those who are concerned over his cool policy toward Israel, and he may succeed in doing so. He spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and he promoted a law allowing funds to be pulled out of companies doing business with Iran. Last week in a foreign policy forum in Des Moines, Iowa, whose main points were publicized on the blog of the Institute for Public Affairs of the Orthodox Union, he spoke again about Israel.

His key statement was: "The Palestinians would have to reinterpret the notion of right of return in a way that would preserve Israel as a Jewish state. It might involve compensation and other concessions from the Israelis but ultimately Israel is not going to give up its state."