During those ominous early hours and indecisive days of the war of Yom Kippur, many American Jews were surprised by the depth of their fears concerning the fate of Israel. Such Jews had thought of themselves as powerful, detached, integrated into the larger American society. Suddenly they could not be certain that their colleagues and friends shared the secret dread they began to feel: the nightmare of another possible holocaust.

Christian leaders have sometimes seemed to treat Israel as though it presented an anguishing moral problem: “The question has two sides. There are complexities. Jewish military spirit seems a trifle pushy. Think of the poor, Third-World Arab refugees.” One anguishes about sorting out the truly moral thing to do.