As so often in Israel, gallows humor explains something essential about the national temperament. In the case of TimeOut’s cover, the relevant temperament is Israel’s unity in supporting the war against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in south Lebanon. Anyone who finds it surprising that 95 percent of Israelis endorse the aerial bombardment of Lebanon with its hundreds of civilian casualties, as a recent poll by the newspaper Maariv found, should consider the implicit punch line of TimeOut’s visual joke. The battlefront in this war comprises a good deal of sovereign Israel. What might look to much of the outside world like “disproportionate” military action seems to the vast majority of Israelis like deterrence in the cause of self-defense.

All the violence that Israelis have endured since the collapse of the peace process in September 2000 has given them quite an acute understanding of how seriously to take any given attack. One of the mordant jokes created during the al-Aksa intifada was a drawing of a “ruler of attention and shock” with calibrations showing the psychic impact of various Palestinian acts. Throwing a rock at a settler’s car rated a mere 1.5 on a scale of 10. A suicide bomber blowing up a bus scored 8.5. The idea of a rocket hitting Haifa, much less 800 of them falling all over northern Israel, did not even occur to the satirist.

Now that precisely such an onslaught has occurred, many Israelis have begun likening the war with Hezbollah, which is really a war with Iran, to the nation’s 1948 war of independence. It is being fought not in the occupied territories, as were the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and both intifadas; it is not being fought outside the country, as were the Six Day War in 1967 and the Lebanon war in 1982. The kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers on Israeli land was merely a prelude to the larger agenda. Haifa, Safed, Nahariya, Tiberias, Nazareth, Rosh Pina, Kiryat Shmona — Hezbollah’s targets are all inside the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel.

It doesn’t take a right-winger to view the stakes as existential. “This is a different kind of war, and an old kind of war,” rabbi and author Daniel Gordis, a peace activist during the Oslo period, wrote last week. “Rage has given way to sadness. Disbelief has given way to recognition. Because we’ve been here before. Because we’d once believed we wouldn’t be back here again. And because we know why this war is happening.”

Orna Shimoni, whose son was killed during Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon after the 1982 invasion, was one of the founders of the “Four Mothers” campaign that called for withdrawal. Even she, in a commentary for the Israeli Web site Ynet News, endorsed the current attacks. “It is clear that we were attacked inside our own sovereign territory, with no provocation at all,” she wrote. “There is no question that we must now strengthen both the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and our political echelon to allow them to obtain two main objectives: Bringing our kidnapped soldiers home and disarming Hezbollah, and pushing that organization away from the Israel-Lebanon border.”

Why would longtime Israeli doves such as Gordis and Shimoni adopt such seemingly hawkish positions? One way of answering the question is to say that the old templates for analyzing the Israeli-Arab conflict no longer apply. In the traditional view, the warring parties were locked into a “cycle of violence” caused by the competition of two national movements for the same finite piece of land. Compromising on the territory, releasing the West Bank and Gaza from Israeli occupation, would finally terminate the cycle.

Compromise might have worked had the conflict indeed remained one that, like the Cold War, pitted two rational, secular adversaries against each other. But in Hezbollah, as well as in Hamas, Israel now faces an opponent that holds to the absolutism of religious doctrine, specifically the messianic martyrdom of jihadist Islam. The assaults by Hamas from Gaza and Hezbollah from Lebanon both came after Israeli withdrawals to borders accepted by the United Nations. For six years in south Lebanon and one year in Gaza, there has been no occupation, and Ehud Olmert built a centrist governing coalition in Israel on the promise of pulling out from most of the West Bank.

Maybe the people so ready to assail Israel now should have been watching more closely a few months ago when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran convened a conference devoted to the exterminatory premise of a “world without Zionism.” Maybe they should have been listening more closely when Ahmadinejad declared his desire to “wipe Israel off the map.” Instead the conference was pooh-poohed as the same old demagogy, a populist giving the red meat to his base, and the translation of the speech was dissected by Iran apologists as if the only relevant question was whether the president’s Farsi phraseology meant altering the map with a gum eraser or white-out.

Plainly, Ahmadinejad took himself seriously, as seriously as one presumes Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah took his own reference to attacking “occupied Palestine.” By which he meant not the West Bank and Golan Heights but, well, Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The reality of such a threat, backed up by 12,000 missiles and rockets, makes for a certain sort of consensus in Israeli society. Yes, dissident notes have been struck by the politician Yossi Sarid and the historian Tom Segev, and, yes, about 2,000 Jewish and Arab Israelis took part in a peace march on Saturday in Tel Aviv. Supporters of Israel’s overall strategy have been vigorously debating the effectiveness of its aerial bombing tactics. No thinking person would welcome the destruction and carnage in Lebanon.

But decisions to go to war do not get made blithely in Israel. It has no death cult. It has an army of conscripts, not volunteers. When even one soldier dies, those six degrees of separation touch a vast share of a small nation’s population. And somebody comes up with yet another astringent joke to ward off the dread. One of the latest, recounted by Gordis in his recent essay, was a skit on a television newscast. It had one Israeli telling another, “Mi-po ani lo zaz,” this is the only place where Jews can be safe. When the camera pulled back from the men, it showed they were standing in London.

When the battle tape ended, Malloy switched to a sound bite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference lauding the “careful, measured beginning” of the war. Then Malloy returned to the air, saying, “This is a dark day, this is a filthy day, this is a day for shame.” And finally, heading into a commercial break, he wove together more combat racket with a madrigal-like song by Pink Floyd, “Goodbye, Blue Sky.”

For nearly 20 years, Mike Malloy has been making talk radio like this: caustic, abrasive, inventive, confrontational and resolutely left of center. It has won him admirers and awards, and it has cost him jobs. At a time when the very genre of talk radio is widely seen as synonymous with strident conservatism, his career both ratifies and belies that premise.

Malloy has hosted shows on major stations in major markets — WSB in Atlanta and WLS in Chicago — defying the conventional wisdom that liberal talk radio barely exists. Yet the fact that Malloy, at age 60 a proven success with a numerous honors and much critical praise, now reaches only a handful of affiliates on a network run by a labor union attests to the structural obstacles liberal talk radio faces. The vast majority of his listeners hear him not on the radio at all, but from his own Web site, which streams live audio of his daily show and also links to an archive of recent broadcasts. The site attracts “tens of thousands” of listeners each day, Malloy estimates.

For worse or better, then, Malloy operates under the commercial radar. “I do feel restricted and closed in,” he said. “Having worked for two 50,000-watt stations whose signals would boom out over half the country, yes, it does feel a little claustrophobic now. But we have six telephone lines, and they stay busy after the first few minutes of the slow. Kind of like the way it was when I was in Atlanta and Chicago on radio stations.”

Malloy may well figure prominently in a high-profile effort to provide a liberal alternative on commercial radio. Sheldon Drobny, the venture capitalist from suburban Chicago who has put in upward of $10 million to start a liberal talk-radio network by the end of 2003, was inspired partly by Malloy’s shows, first on WLS and now on the I.E. America Radio Network, owned by the United Auto Workers. Malloy even recommended the man, Jon Sinton, whom Drobny hired as chief executive officer of the nascent network, AnShell Media.

“I don’t want to violate anybody’s contract or hurt anybody else,” Drobny said in a recent telephone interview. “But Mike’s the kind of homegrown entertainment we’re looking for. He’s not only very seasoned, he’s very entertaining, he’s a hard-hitting opposition to the right wing. And he reaches both the elites and the blue-collars.”

Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers, named Malloy to his “Heavy Hundred” list three times in the past four years. “Just like Rush Limbaugh,” he said, “Malloy is a radio guy. He’s paid dues. He’s there to entertain, not to save the world. When he’s exposed, he gets ratings. And when he’s not exposed, he can’t get ratings.”

To consider Mike Malloy’s career is thus to reckon with the reasons liberal talk shows do, or don’t, get that exposure. The child of Democrats in the union stronghold of Toledo, Ohio — his mother a waitress, his father a cost analyst for construction projects — Malloy grew up listening to such radio staples as “The Shadow,” Jack Benny, and “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” He had bounced through four colleges in as many states by the time he landed in Atlanta in the late 1970s. There he honed his journalistic talents as an editor of the alternative weekly Creative Loafing and later as a writer on CNN. Acting with the Southern Theater Conspiracy, an avant-garde troupe, he learned “how to use language, how to be dramatic, how to leave someone wanting more.”

All of those skills came into use in 1985, when he apprenticed himself to a conservative talk-radio host named Ludlow Porch on the Atlanta station WCNN (no relation to the cable network). Though their politics stood at a polar remove, Malloy appreciated Porch’s populist style of humor, which reminded him of both Will Rogers and Harry Golden. “Ludlow said you have to remember you’re not the smartest person sitting behind the mike,” Malloy recalled. “He said, Play to your audience’s intelligence, to their curiosity, not to their prejudices.”

By late 1986, Malloy was hosting his own late-night show on 50,000-watt WSB. His chief issues included the Reagan administration’s involvement in Central America, especially the arms-for-hostages deal, and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and he performed strongly enough to be moved into a midday slot. It placed him in direct competition with Limbaugh, however, at the very time Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich was successfully leading the Republican Party into control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a half century. “I was swamped,” Malloy admitted. In 1995, WSB replaced Malloy with Dr. Laura Schlessinger, herself part of the conservative phalanx in talk radio.

Taking over a 10 p.m.-1 a.m. show on WLS in Chicago in 1997, Malloy raised listenership by a double-digit margin and regularly put his station in Chicago’s top five for the overnight slot. In addition to being named to the Heavy Hundred in 1999 and 2000, he won the Achievement in Radio award for the best overnight show in the Chicago market. He championed the causes of several death row inmates who were ultimately exonerated or pardoned.

Most of all, in a deeply polarized time in national politics, Malloy whetted his satiric blade. The more that conservatives (and their favorite talk-show hosts) accused President Clinton of both real and imagined high crimes and misdemeanors, the more Malloy ridiculed what he routinely called the “flying-monkey right.” Or as he once put it, “I’m picking on Republicans tonight. And every night.”

When Paula Jones came forward to charge belatedly that the president had, years before, sexually harassed her, Malloy mimicked her in a creaky twang out of the “Beverly Hillbillies”: “It was me. I was the one. See, it says right there it’s me. Right here on my shirt label, where my momma sewed it on: ‘That s.o.b. sullied my reputation.’ That’s what he did. Can you bring that camera in a little closer?”

The ascent of then-Gov. George W. Bush as a presidential aspirant in the late 1990s inspired all of Malloy’s working-class contempt for a rich boy. “Oh, W., you want a baseball team?” he said in a typical bit, imitating the senior Bush. “How about an oil company? Off-shore drilling rights in the Red Sea. Red Sea. Never mind. We’ll get it for you.”

Yet in March 2000, Malloy left WLS. The official version, part of a formal settlement, portrayed his departure as the product of mutual consent. But Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, pointed to ideology as the real cause, citing an e-mail from the WLS program director, Mike Elder, that had criticized Malloy’s “very dark and mean-spirited approach.” (Elder, now an executive with WRKO in Boston, refused several requests to comment for this article.) “They were always on his case about being too harsh, too rough on his conservative callers,” Zorn said of Malloy in a recent telephone interview. “But the truth is, he was no rougher on his callers from the right than Rush or Dr. Laura are with their liberal callers. I don’t think there’s any question that if Mike Malloy had his exact same manner and style and rating and was politically conservative, he’d still be on the air.”

Interestingly, Malloy found himself virtually unemployable. Major stations such as KIRO in Seattle, WMAL in Baltimore, and KOA in Denver all expressed interest, solicited his demo tape, and then backed away. “They’d say, ‘Your program is too edgy,’ or ‘Too dark and depressing,’” Malloy recalled. “Very simply, it means too liberal.”

He signed on with the I.E. America Radio Network in October 2000. The UAW network streams audio on the Internet and serves about 170 stations, none in markets larger than Omaha and Santa Fe. The network’s average weekly audience of 1.7 million listeners amounts to what Rush Limbaugh might reach in one or two big cities. Even at that, I.E. America has had far greater success placing service-oriented shows like “Antique Talk,” “Car Care Clinic” and “The Employees’ Lawyer” than Malloy’s political talk. By the last count, merely four stations carried him. Despite such obscurity on the radio dial, the show has built such a following on the Internet that I.E. America must sometimes triple its bandwidth when Malloy starts his three-hour shift at 9 p.m. each weekday. (He switched to the later time slot on April 21.)

Those who do locate Malloy can hear him ridicule “President Dazed and Confused” and the “Bush Crime Family,” playing songs like “Thick as a Brick” or “Pencil-Necked Geek” for sardonic punctuation. They hear regular callers ranging from the Cincinnati trucker nicknamed Gizmo to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. They hear newscasts from an outfit called the Workers Independent News Service, whose slogan promises, “WINS is not about what big business wants you to hear. It’s about us.” What they don’t hear very much of is paid advertising — though the regular buyers include Advil and Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing — and for a commercial network that is a problem.

So the question remains exactly what to make of Malloy’s experience, what larger insight into the political shape of talk radio it yields.

Malloy and a number of media critics and scholars place substantial blame for the political slant of talk radio on two acts of government. First, in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the fairness doctrine, which required radio stations to present at least a semblance of political balance. Then, in 1996, the Clinton administration pushed through the Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the ownership of radio stations. The former action gave legal latitude to dogmatic talk shows; the latter drastically reduced competition.

To put it in more personal terms, when Malloy started in talk radio 18 years ago some 400 companies owned radio stations. Now six conglomerates dominate. The ideological alternative that Malloy had provided early in his career to Ludlow Porch is no longer required.

Radio experts disagree, however, on whether the radio conglomerates of today push a conservative agenda out of true belief or apolitical greed. “You can’t avoid the fact that corporate owners are sympathetic to right-wing politics, especially on business and economics,” said Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois in Champaign. “And if any show is remotely close to a gray area, you’ll go with whatever’s close to the politics of your advertisers.”

War with Iraq brought several radio corporations into overt advocacy. Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, with 1,225 affiliates, sponsored pro-war rallies in several cities. Cumulus, another major owner, organized the demolition of CDs by the Dixie Chicks after one of the group’s members publicly criticized President Bush. Protest songs, a staple of FM in the Vietnam era, received scant commercial airplay this time. The presence of Colin Powell’s son Michael as chairman of the FCC exerts a chilling effect on radio dissent during wartime, media critics such as McChesney maintain.

The counterargument holds that conglomerates simply choose programming that is demonstrably profitable. By this line of reasoning, liberal talk radio suffers for the same reason free-form music does: It requires management to take a risk. Conservative talk radio, in contrast, boasts a proven model in Rush Limbaugh. His show can be syndicated into scores of markets, and his style can be cloned.

“Radio on the left lacks compelling personalities like Limbaugh,” said Alan Stavitsky, a scholar of the radio industry and the School of Journalism and Communication’s associate dean at the University of Oregon. “The thing to understand about Rush is that he was trained as a disc jockey. He began in music radio. He brings that ethos and those production values to his program.” (Limbaugh also never bothered registering to vote for more than a decade, as Paul D. Colford revealed in his unauthorized biography.)

The most prominent efforts by liberals to crack the talk-radio market, in contrast, involved the politicians Jerry Brown, Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower. Effective stump speakers, none mastered the improvisation, conversation and give-and-take of talk radio. Only Hightower remains on the air, though in drastically reduced form. Instead of hosting a talk show, he contributes two-minute commentaries to about 100 stations, mostly in small markets.

For all that, liberal talk radio is not quite so marginal as it may first appear. When critics decry the dearth of such shows, Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine notes, they are referring to one part of the radio universe: commercial radio for white audiences. There, he estimates, 80 percent of the political shows indeed espouse a conservative message.

Yet liberal hosts such as Neil Rogers of WQAM in Miami and Lionel of the WOR network have survived. Fox recently began syndicating Alan Colmes, the designated liberal punching bag on its cable news station. The talk on black stations, meanwhile, leans heavily to liberal in the person of such hosts as Cliff Kelly of WVON in Chicago and Mary Mason of WHAT in Philadelphia. The nonprofit Pacifica network reaches an audience of 800,000 with stridently left-wing programming. National Public Radio draws 22 million listeners, of whom two-thirds describe themselves as being politically moderate or liberal. NPR’s syndicated talk shows — “Talk of the Nation,” “The Connection” and “The Diane Rehm Show,” among others — strive for a balanced, centrist approach that qualifies as liberal in comparison to that of Limbaugh and his imitators.

The liberal radio audience, then, might be thought of as a mirror of the liberal coalition, Stavitsky said. As both a political movement and a radio demographic, the so-called angry white men of conservatism coalesced around fundamental beliefs and values, including an antipathy toward Bill Clinton and the putatively liberal mainstream media. The liberal coalition, in contrast, contains an unwieldy amalgam of whites and minorities, elites and populists, globalist free traders and labor union protectionists.

The phenomenon of NPR suggests yet another challenge for liberal talk radio — the aesthetic of the genre. In focus groups conducted by George Bailey, an audience analyst and a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, NPR listeners described commercial talk radio as “sensational,” “loud,” “argumentative,” “angry” and “shallow.” Those traits contrasted with their preference for “radio based on civility, on calm, informed, open discourse,” as Bailey put it.

One of the arguments raised by those who doubt that left-wing talk radio will ever challenge Limbaugh is that liberals will always, by their nature, be more open-minded, tolerant and nuanced than conservatives — and that those noble traits are a commercial snooze. According to this line, a red-faced conservative ranting against the evils of liberal do-gooders or evil Muslims has a hot message and a natural constituency of resentful white men; his liberal counterpart, trying to defend federal programs or explain the historic roots of the Mideast conflict, has neither. While this generalization may contain some truth, Malloy’s two-fisted, take-no-prisoners show proves that liberals can dish it out entertainingly, too.

Malloy and the founders of AnShell Media believe they can build an expansive audience for liberal talk radio. Fifty-two percent of American voters, Malloy regularly reminds his listeners, voted for Al Gore or Ralph Nader for president. On the bestseller lists in the past few years, unapologetic, aggressive liberals like Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich and Al Franken have perched alongside the Mona Charens and Bernard Goldbergs.

Can commercial radio be so uniquely resistant? “Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” said Jon Sinton, AnShell’s CEO. “Five years ago, how many people thought there was a mass radio audience for rap?” The name most publicly bandied about as a prospective on-air host for AnShell is that of Franken, whose background as a satirist includes a stint of “Saturday Night Live.” Malloy remains formally under contract to I.E. America, but his relationship with Sinton makes him appear to be a logical choice for AnShell should he become available.

Malloy put the challenge of creating viable liberal talk radio in concrete and comparative terms. Limbaugh has had 12 years to build his audience, and he built it without pressure for immediate success. He enjoyed the backing of a media guru in Roger Ailes and an aggressive syndication company. He explicitly tied his show not just to conservatism as a movement but also to the Republican Party. I.E. America has not even sent Malloy to such vital showcases as the New Media Seminar and the National Association of Broadcasters and Radio Advertising Bureau conventions. How much better AnShell might do for its talent remains mere speculation at this point.

“A program like mine, presented nationally, would instantly resonate with millions of listeners who are completed turned off by the conservative babble that is choking the country,” Malloy said. “I believe this honestly, not just as an article of faith. The audience is there waiting. And they spend money, which is, after all, what radio is all about.”

Meanwhile, far from being humbled by the American conquest of Iraq, he has been busily churning the war’s aftermath into material. From a studio adorned with a poster of George W. Bush as Alfred E. Neuman, he has scourged the American commitment to protect oilfields while leaving the archaeological treasures of the Baghdad Museum wide open to looters. He has mordantly noted the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. Compared the “photo op” of Saddam’s statue being toppled with the grassroots demolition of the Berlin Wall. And when one caller asked about Islamic fundamentalists filling the power vacuum, he said with finely tuned sarcasm, “Sure as God made little green apples.”

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Listen to an audio clip of Mike Malloy’s show.

Throughout the pages of “Capture the Moment,” in fact, I found many such photographs, all of them deemed worthy of journalism’s highest award. There is Edward Adams’ photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant during the Tet Offensive of 1968. There is Greg Marinovich’s shot of African National Congress fighters setting afire a spy from the rival Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.

The two prizewinning photographs from 1994 cumulatively explain why the United States got into and out of the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. The first, taken by Kevin Carter of the New York Times, captures a vulture hunching behind a supine, emaciated child. The second, shot six months later by Paul Watson of the Toronto Star, depicts the body of an American serviceman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

It would not surprise me if every one of these photographers were widely reviled for being not merely sensationalistic but inhumane. As if to address that very question, “Capture the Moment” explains that Ut took the Vietnamese girl to the hospital and remained in contact with her for many years, that Carter shooed away the vulture and, a few months after winning the Pulitzer, committed suicide, leaving a reader to wonder if it wasn’t out of desperation or guilt arising from his own images.

What I kept thinking, all along, is that this is what we, as journalists, do. We intrude. We afflict. We reawaken slumbering anguish. We assault the senses with images worthy of nightmares. And we tell ourselves, not falsely, that we do this out of a belief in the transforming power of knowledge, of what the intellectual historian Anne Douglas called in a different vein “terrible honesty.”

The propaganda tape of Daniel Pearl’s final words and decapitation deserves to be available on the Internet precisely because it is so shocking, so ghastly, so brutal, so barbaric. Has the Boston Phoenix acted entirely out of moral conscience and journalistic integrity in linking to the video from its Web site, and running still photographs in its print edition, as its publisher Stephen Mindich would have us believe? I doubt it. Three months after Pearl’s murder, Mindich’s decision smacks of promotional genius as much as First Amendment principle. But what honest journalist, covering a war or catastrophe, can honestly deny the way ambition and social conscience commingle in our souls?

Certainly, Mindich is right in his central thesis. In a way that no article about Pearl’s execution or even CBS News’ edited, bloodless excerpt of the tape possibly can, the unexpurgated video on the Internet attests to the nature of America’s enemy in the war against terror. The most unnerving seconds in the video are not those when a knife is dragged across Pearl’s neck or a hand holds aloft his severed head. No, they are those when Pearl, voice shaky, intones the script that reveals the motive.

“I’m a Jewish American,” he tells the camera. “I come from a, on my father’s side, a family of Zionists. My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B’nei Brak in Israel, there’s a street called Haim Pearl Street, which is named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders.” After a few cursory comments about the Guantánamo Bay prisoners, Pearl returns to his captors’ dogma about America’s “unconditional support of the government of the state of Israel” and its “24 uses of the veto power to justify the massacres of children.”

All the while, the screen displays scenes of supposed Palestinian victims of Israel — infants with head wounds, a sobbing mother, a young man on his funeral bier. There comes the famous footage of a Palestinian boy and his father huddling amid a shootout in Gaza during the early days of the al-Aksa intifada. President Bush is shown shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Almost as an afterthought, bombs explode, presumably from the American campaign in Afghanistan.

To see this film is to have little doubt that Daniel Pearl, while he may have been kidnapped as an American and a journalist, was slain as a Jew. And that recognition, that awful truth, as Mindich argues, has not adequately sunk in. For understandable reasons, Pearl’s family and his employers at the Wall Street Journal made little or no mention of Pearl’s religion and Israeli heritage while there was still hope for his negotiated release. Before and after Pearl’s death, his wife and now widow, Mariane, has repeatedly emphasized his openness, his universalism. The statement released by Pearl’s family, after they learned of his death, memorialized him as “a musician, a writer, a story-teller, and a bridge-builder … a walking sunshine of truth, humor, friendship and compassion.”

Who could doubt all that? And who could doubt the distress of Mariane Pearl after CBS aired its video excerpt, when she said, “It is beyond our comprehension that any mother, wife, father or sister should have to relive this horrific tragedy.” Rarely have I heard a rationale as loathsome as Mindich’s contention that “if Daniel had his choice, he’d want it seen.”

I’m sure that when I showed up at the doorstep of a family in Piscataway, N.J., a few mornings before Christmas 1977, knocking on a front door that was decorated like a giant, beribboned gift box, their choice would surely have been not to talk to a reporter about how their teenaged son had been shot to death the night before on his job as a drive-in bank teller. I’m sure the parents of a college student murdered during spring break in Fort Lauderdale felt the same way when I had to call them up on deadline for a comment.

But this is what we do. And just because Daniel Pearl was one of us, and we grieve for him in the way we rarely grieve for all those strangers we write about, is no reason to obscure the hideous truth of his murder. Nobody is being forced to click on that link. Nor is anyone likely to again be passively faced with it the way viewers of CBS News were.

Human nature wants us to forget the horrors we have seen, which is why they revisit us in our sleep, when our defenses are down. Cerebrally, we understand that al-Qaida is a hateful and ruthless foe, and just as cerebrally we want to achieve distance from what that means. Let us not forget, either, that in large parts of the Muslim world it is still assumed that the tape is some American or Israeli forgery, just as it is widely believed that the Mossad attacked the World Trade Center.

But when I look on Nick Ut’s photograph today, all the revisionism about the Vietnam War instantly falls away, and I understand anew why it sickened this country. And just as surely, when I hear the quavering in Daniel Pearl’s final, forced words and see the residual anguish on his death’s head, when I am thrust up against the joyful sadism of his executioners, I know exactly why this war must be fought.

Just then, right on time, the commuter bus pulled up, making its regular stop in Hebron. I boarded and found a seat amid off-duty soldiers, Russian immigrants in tank tops, and Orthodox mothers in calf-length skirts and the crocheted kerchiefs called snoods. Little more than an hour later, having gone through one cursory checkpoint to imply the passage between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the air-conditioned, bullet-proofed vehicle deposited me in central Jerusalem.

The perverse mix of war zone and bedroom suburb I experienced that day in Hebron and its neighboring settlement of Kiryat Arba typified an ambiguity in Israeli policy itself: an inability, even at a time of lethal conflict, to define a defensible border. While Israelis routinely speak of the Green Line, the border prior to the 1967 war, and while everyone knows the approximate contour of the land that Prime Minister Ehud Barak had offered to Yasser Arafat in the failed peace talks at Camp David, the frontier remained willfully porous for reasons that suited both the right and the left.

In the hopeful years between the Oslo accords of 1993 and Ariel Sharon’s fateful walk atop the Temple Mount in September 2000, Israel’s liberals had seen the unprotected border as a symbol of what peace could offer — not only diplomatic relations, but an interdependent regional economy. Shimon Peres’ vision of a “new Middle East” relied greatly on the proximity of a booming Israeli economy and a vast, affordable Palestinian workforce. For the Israeli right, meanwhile, the refusal to acknowledge a border was a way of hanging onto the messianic dream and nationalistic scheme of Greater Israel, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The existing system of Israeli checkpoints on the major roads crossing the de facto border managed mostly to infuriate Palestinians with long delays and petty humiliations.

The strangeness of this willful refusal to mark and protect the borders was apparent all through the country. It was apparent when I was riding in a taxi with a friend’s son toward the Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anannah, and he indicated the border as simply the place where the fields went from irrigated green to parched yellow. It was apparent when friends both in a West Bank settlement and Jerusalem itself talked almost in consecutive sentences about their fear of terrorism and their frustration that Palestinian laborers could not slip past checkpoints to do construction and home repairs.

Imagine a Texas or Southern California in which the farm workers or maids or janitors who sneak across from Mexico also include the occasional suicide bomber. Imagine a New York in which a Chinese stowaway might wind up busing tables, sewing clothes, or shooting passersby. That was, and is, the condition of Israel with its phantom border.

All this comes by way of saying that after the war must come the wall. The Israeli invasion of Palestinian cities, now ended everywhere but in Bethlehem, may well have reestablished Israeli deterrence, restored relative calm to the nation, and disabused Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades of the heady fantasy that the Jewish state could be terrorized off the map. But there is no reason to expect the quiet to last long, and there is no reason to believe that Arafat, sprung from confinement by Saudi pleadings to American ears, can ever again be a trusted negotiating partner. No sooner was Arafat freed than Hamas vowed to resume suicide bombings. The most to hope for is a wall, whether real or metaphorical, and with it an end of the cycle of terrorism and retaliation. Maybe in a decade or a generation the opportunity to talk peace, and dismantle the wall, will present itself.

For a year or more in Israel, the idea of “unilateral separation” — defined by some sort of wall — has gained appeal as a kind of ideological middle ground in a desperate time. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, voice of the country’s liberals, reported May 2 that a petition calling for an “effective security line” was rapidly gathering thousands of signatures.

Americans, even American Jews, wince a little at the notion — it seems to summon up the Berlin Wall and the oppression that represented. But that reaction may be evolving, too. Now that the Passover suicide bombing in Netanya has stirred the center of American Jewry — that silent majority that rather passively rooted for Oslo to succeed and felt paralyzed by the sudden fury of the new intifada — the idea could gain support in America as well.

It can be left to civil engineers, military officers and the Israeli public to decide exactly where and how the wall would run, and whether it would even be a structure at all, or a line of American and other peacekeeping troops. Ehud Barak, for one, has proposed installing a combination of electrified fences and high-tech surveillance devices along the borderline he offered at Camp David. This would mean that Israel would abandon far-flung settlements and protect, but not permanently annex, the settlement blocks close to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that contain about 80 percent of the 200,000 settlers. Someday, in a better future, the final lines could be negotiated.

Gaza offers perhaps the best case for the wall. Even though it has long been a hotbed of Islamist militancy, Gaza has sent virtually no suicide bombers, for the simple reason that it is fenced off from Israel proper, with entry controlled largely through a checkpoint at Erez. From the West Bank, in contrast, Palestinians can walk across fields and through dry riverbeds into Israel, even during periods of heightened security.

The virtue of the wall, in whatever form it might take, lies in its power to shatter illusions. One illusion is that the settlements contribute to Israeli security. Ariel Sharon articulated that belief just last week, insisting of one Gaza outpost, “The fate of Netzarim is the fate of Tel Aviv.” In truth, Israel must stretch its military capacity to guard every outcropping in a veritable archipelago of settlements. Some 5,000 soldiers, for instance, are required to protect the 7,000 settlers amid 1 million Palestinians in Gaza. And still shootings, stabbings, and mortar attacks continue.

As an act of divorce, the wall would shatter an important Palestinian illusion, as well. And that is the belief that the nascent state had nothing to lose when it chose to replace negotiation with armed struggle. Palestinians had a lot to lose, and they have lost it: Those insurance agencies and banks and schools and libraries that the Israeli army bullied through in Ramallah — they were surely something to lose. So were the former tourist haunts of Nablus’ casbah, which became a battleground, where tourists are unlikely to return any time soon. So were the jobs in Israel that Palestinians used to reach through the Erez checkpoint. The Palestinian economy, growing at 6 percent annually before the intifada, has been shattered.

By embracing martyrdom at the expense of nation building, the Palestinians have created the bleak conditions that now require unilateral separation. Their actions undermine their denunciation of a physical wall as a form of apartheid.

President Bush’s active role in ending the Ramallah siege — using American and British troops to help guard six terrorists in a Jericho prison — raises the prospect that the United States might potentially supply the soldiers to form a human wall. The question is what it would take for an Israeli government to move forward. It may require another election, when Labor could run against Sharon’s Likud on a platform of unilateral separation. Although most of Israel’s left has abandoned hope for a negotiated peace any time soon, much of the right resists separation. Pointing to the unstable border with Lebanon, to which Hezbollah surged after Israel unilaterally withdrew two years ago, conservatives claim that relinquishing any part of the occupied territories would be construed as weakness by the Palestinians, inviting further terrorism.

Politically beholden to and ideologically aligned with the settlers, Sharon could never be expected to push for even a commonsense withdrawal to a defensible border. It is sometimes said by his advocates that, after the peace treaty with Egypt, Sharon himself as defense minister oversaw the forcible evacuation of the Sinai settlement of Yamit. But it was Menachem Begin, a political leader capable of bold, unexpected strokes throughout his career, who had made the Camp David deal with Anwar Sadat, and Sharon was just doing his bidding.

The Berlin Wall gave walls a bad name, symbolizing as it did a kind of Communist prison. Maybe, though, that was a bum rap. Like so much else from the Cold War, the wall looks eminently rational when compared to decentralized terror in its myriad forms. It might even be said that the wall did its job, by holding East and West apart, like a referee thrusting himself between two enraged boxers. It fell when the time of nuclear brinkmanship had passed, having successfully contained that mortal danger to the world. One could only pray for as satisfying a result to the deadly stalemate between Israel and Palestine.

Yet Shapiro in many ways embodied one of the most durable and admirable traits in the American Jewish character: universalism. His mother and father were New York teachers, part of the grand tradition of American Jewish commitment to public education. In an interview with the Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper, Shapiro traced his commitment to the Palestinian cause to his studies of the Holocaust, with a protest against the Rwandan genocide a stop along the way.

The universalistic tradition in American Jewish life goes back to Western Europe, to the intellectual daring of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, the artistic adventures of Weimar Germany, the radical social experiments of “Red Vienna.” Driven out of Europe by the Nazis, it manifested itself on American soil through labor unions, the civil rights crusade, the antiwar movement and, most recently, the peace process set into motion by the Oslo Accord in 1993.

But now, for a great many American Jews, all that universalism looks unspeakably naive, a luxury unsuited for a lethal world. Adam Shapiro appears less a traitor than a “freier,” a Hebrew word for Israel’s ultimate insult: a sucker. Almost two years after Yasser Arafat spurned Ehud Barak’s peace offer at Camp David, 18 months after the Palestinians resumed armed struggle, many American Jews have reluctantly embraced universalism’s opposite: tribalism.

Tribalism is the part of Jewish consciousness forged by two millennia of exile and persecution, by blood libel and inquisition and holocaust. It is the part that cannot quite bring itself to trust even the unparalleled acceptance and social mobility Jews have enjoyed in the United States. And precisely because tribalism’s fears have borne so little resemblance to the American reality — three dozen Jews in Congress, rampant intermarriage, “The Producers,” the greatest hit in Broadway history — it had steadily waned in postwar decades. Or it had until the Seder in Netanya.

The Passover massacre accomplished what no other atrocity of the intifada did. It brought into the streets a massive number of Jews from across denominational and ideological spectra, from die-hard believers in the messianic nationalism of Greater Israel to supporters of the Israeli reservists who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. The public outcry that has followed, in turn, reflected the private soul-searching of countless individuals, especially those who had put their faith in the peace process.

“During the Oslo period, universalism asserted itself and there was a flowering of progressive sentiment,” says Kenneth D. Wald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies the political behavior of American Jewry. “But the al-Aksa intifada restored the tribal sense and the recent bombing intensified it beyond levels seen since the Six-Day War.” “Indeed,” says Wald, “I’m struck at how tribal I feel these days.”

The transformation of American Jewish opinion has outpaced the ability of pollsters to record it. The most recent surveys, primarily from 2001, indicate that while a majority of American Jews still favor a negotiated settlement, their acceptance of Arafat as a partner has fallen dramatically. Melvin Allerhand, a psychologist in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who has worked extensively in Israel and the United States on Arab-Jewish reconciliation, put the change in clinical terms: “When a crisis comes, people turn to extremes. For an American Jew, that means in this case becoming more tribalistic, less universalistic. From having reviled Sharon to supporting Sharon. Where previously the view was to keep talking, not to use bullets, now the discussion is, Yes, we know we have to do something to stop it.’ The only question is how far you go.”

Lisa Schiffman wrote about the ambivalent identity of young American Jews such as herself, most of them unaffiliated and many of them intermarried, in her book “Generation J.” From her home in the Bay Area, almost as far away as possible from Professor Wald’s in Gainesville, Fla., she has felt similarly jolted. Going ice-skating in Oakland recently, she noticed an abandoned storefront bearing the slogan, “Stop U.S. aid to Israel.” Picking up a copy of an alternative weekly, she saw that someone had covered the newspaper box with a flier declaring, “Israel is a fascist state.”

“For most of my life, Israel was not something I thought of very much,” she says. “I am of the generation of secular American Jews who grew up after the state of Israel was already a reality. Israel didn’t factor into our daily thoughts. It just existed. We thought of the United States as our homeland. When we gave money, it went to the Wilderness Society, not to the Jewish Federation. When we learned foreign languages, it was Spanish and French but not Hebrew. When we went abroad for a year, it was to Europe. “I am still largely ignorant of Israel, its history, its politics, and perhaps that ignorance is not uncommon among ‘Generation J’ Jews,” she says. “But being uneducated does not mean I do not feel tribal sadness or an intense connection to Israeli Jews right now. I do indeed. My tribalism is undeniable. Surprising even.”

The biggest surprise of the reawakening of tribal consciousness may be that it did not happen sooner. Indeed, the left wing in Israel, the so-called peace camp, had largely collapsed or recanted a year ago. For such Israelis, as the journalist Yossi Klein Halevi recently pointed out in the New Republic, the first shock of the intifada came in October 2000, when a Palestinian mob disemboweled two Israeli soldiers inside the Ramallah police station. Then last June, a suicide bomber killed 20 Israelis, most of them secular teenagers who had immigrated from Russia, outside a Tel Aviv nightclub called the Dolphinarium. Ramallah taught Israelis that the Palestinian Authority was part of the intifada; the Dolphinarium taught them that the entire nation, not just the occupied territories, was under assault.

In their desperation, Israelis in early 2001 elected Ariel Sharon, long a marginalized figure for his role in the Lebanon invasion and his indirect responsibility for a massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. A vast majority endorsed his tactic of targeted assassination. Such prominent figures in the peace camp as Benny Morris, the revisionist historian best known for his book about the conflict, “Righteous Victims,” depicted the intifada as a war for Israeli survival. Another major figure in Israeli cultural life, the novelist Orly Castel-Bloom, entitled her recent book about life during the intifada “Body Parts.” And where 400,000 Israelis had marched against the Lebanon invasion in 1982, a mere 7,000 joined a protest held in the wake of the Passover attack.

What struck Israelis as tragic confirmation hit many American Jews more as revelation. Throughout the peace process, a silent majority had favored the land-for-peace formula without particularly campaigning for it. The Jewish establishment, particularly the lobby AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, had always viewed Oslo and Arafat more warily. So the Ramallah lynching and the Dolphinarium bombing mobilized largely those American Jews already inclined toward mobilization, those on the political right and in the Orthodox community.

The power of the Passover bombing to rouse the rest lay in its symbolism. Even as a majority of American Jews do not belong to a synagogue, even as Jewish ethnicity has lost much of its substance in the postwar decades, more American Jews attend a Seder (87 percent) than engage in virtually any other ritual, according to research by the sociologist Stephen M. Cohen. All but the most estranged sliver of American Jewry knows firsthand the feeling of a Seder.

Hirsch Goodman of the Jerusalem Report likened the Passover bombing to Kristallnacht. For a newly tribalistic American Jew, it called forth more recent antecedents. The anti-Israel rhetoric at the United Nations racism conference in Durban, South Africa, the explicit anti-Semitism in the execution of journalist Daniel Pearl, the wave of arson and vandalism against Jewish facilities in France; all of these events fit into the larger pattern of implacable hatred not against West Bank settlers, not against Israelis, but against Jews, period.

With all of that in mind, a rabbinical student named Brent Spodek began e-mailing friends last week to implore them to attend Monday’s pro-Israel rally in Washington. He intended to march with a contingent from the New Israel Fund, one of the major groups in the American peace camp, and he personally supported the several hundred Israeli reservists who had refused to serve in what some deride as “the war for the settlements.”

“I knew I would be going to this rally even before I knew I would be helping to organize a more ‘progressive’ voice in Washington,” Spodek says. “I knew I would be going because, for me, any conversation about Israel begins from an absolute affirmation of the right of Israel to exist as a state, and a recognition that, unfortunately, states are built and defended through force. God willing, we will one day settle our disputes through a more peaceful method, but that day is far off.

“I think one of the big lies that we on the left often tell ourselves,” he says, “is that it is possible to be neutral, impartial — in short, to be Swiss. But as the Swiss banks let us know, even the Swiss aren’t Swiss. And I know I’m a Jew. I will voice my concerns [about Israeli policy] and I will strive to be a righteous person — but I will do this from within my tribe.”

No episode better marks the shifts within the American Jewish left than the imbroglio surrounding Rabbi Michael Lerner’s full-page advertisement in the New York Times in late March. Lerner founded the Jewish magazine Tikkun, whose name is drawn from the Hebrew injunction that Jews engage in tikkun olam, healing the world, and he has long been a fixture in both social-justice and spirituality circles. In this ad, however, he likened the Israeli army to Pharaoh in the Passover story and assailed its soldiers for blindly “following orders” — a phrase that, intentionally or not, equated those men and women with the Nazis. Several of the Jewish leaders who were listed in the advertisement, including the two chief rabbis of Manhattan’s famously liberal synagogue B’nai Jeshurun, renounced it. On Monday, B’nai Jeshurun closed its Hebrew school because so many teachers were attending the rally; the answering machine at the synagogue offices provided information on a bus service to the event.

For the seven summers between the signing of the Oslo Accords and the onset of the al-Aksa intifada, the theater producer Emanuel Azenberg led a unique tour of Israel for friends and colleagues in the performing-arts community. In addition to making the standard tourist stops of Masada, Yad Vashem and the like, Azenberg brought his group to Jericho to meet with the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, Saeb Erakat. They dined; they talked; they argued. But surely, they must have thought, peace was at hand.

But now, having been reared in the left-wing culture of Labor Zionism, Azenberg finds himself unexpectedly supporting Ariel Sharon, for so long the bête noire of peaceniks. “When Arafat walked away from Barak at Camp David, the Hebrew phrase is ayn brayah, there is no choice,” Azenberg put it. “The left collapsed and the right became the alternative. Do I think Sharon’s invasion will do anything? How do we know? If you kill 300 or 500 real terrorists, how long will it take to replace them? Five years? When you see the houses in the refugee camps that have been razed, you feel rachmanis [pity]. On the other hand, I have the same rachmanis, and a little bit more, for the people who got blown up. I used to think that if you give the Palestinians a middle-class existence for 40, 45 years, even the ones who want all of Israel will change their mind. Now the dream would be a cease-fire. And maybe in 200 years, they’ll like each other.”