For the past week, though, all three have done their best to disabuse of such notions:

• John McCain finds himself behind in the polls, trying to design policy on economics, which he doesn’t understand, facing a debate for which he is not ready. What does our war hero do? Why, with heroic cool and elan, he panics. He calls off his campaign, sort of. He says he just won’t debate, because it wouldn’t be patriotic. Do you trust this man to answer the red phone at any time of day or night?
• Mofaz loses the Kadima primary to Tzipi Livni. The next day he announces he is taking a time-out from politics. In Israeli political terms, this announcement normally means spending a year or two doing something else, so that the public can forget why it voted against you. Within a couple of days, though, Mofaz was already leaking hints to the press that he meant a short vacation. His allies appealed the results of the primary, hoping to prevent Livni from getting the nod to form the next government. Turns out that Mofaz made his original announcement in a fit of exhaustion and pique. Fine. If that’s how the ex-general performs under political pressure, does anyone want him as the person deciding when to go to war? For that matter, if Livni makes him foreign minister, would you trust him not to insult his Syrian counterpart over a misconstrued remark?
• Barak tells Labor party Knesset members meeting with President Peres to recommend him to form the next government. But to be prime minister, one must be a Knesset member – and Barak isn’t. No matter, the general ordered his troops to make fools of themselves for the sake of his honor. Now, according to this morning’s Ha’aretz, “Defense minister and Labor Party chairman Ehud Barak will demand from…that he conduct the negotiations with Syria if she forms a government. Labor sources also say Barak will demand to be fully involved in all aspects of the talks with the Palestinians.” His qualifications for these tasks will apparently be his universally recognized success as prime minister negotiating with the Palestinians and Syria. Barak’s supposedly brilliant analytical abilities do not include an ability at self-evaluation.

Don’t get me wrong. It is possible that an ex-officer might be a good politician. It’s possible that a good doctor may also play a good game of baseball, or be a good administrator. Or not. It’s possible that someone with no military experience might also panic under pressure (see under: Ehud Olmert, Second Lebanon War). At the moment, military experience as such is an irrelevancy in considering a candidate.

“How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters,” Mr. Hagee said, referring to how Jews ended up in the modern state of Israel. “A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter.”

As we know, McCain actively pursued Hagee’s endorsement. As the NY Times notes,

At a speech last year before Mr. Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, he thanked Mr. Hagee for his “spiritual guidance to politicians like me” and said, “It’s hard to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan.”

Hagee has every effort to make his views public via every media available. His comments expressing empathy for Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin appeared in a book that became a bestseller in its market. The same book looks forward to an apocalypse in which enough blood is shed on Israeli soil to create a river of blood 200 miles long. One of the scholars who introduced me to this literature correctly spoke of the “pornographic violence” of the visions of the end promoted by Hagee and others of his school. The battles, as in every other tract of this sort, are followed by the Jews accepting Jesus.

Hagee is a prominent promoter of the theology known as dispensational premillennialism. It’s the same set of beliefs pushed in the Left Behind novels about the End, which sold in tens of millions of copies, the same beliefs preached by Endtimes populizer Hal Lindsey, by televangelist Jack Van Impe and radio preacher Chuck Missler. All push a “future history,” supposedly based on a literal reading of the Bible, that includes great suffering for all who do not accept their beliefs – but particularly, starkly, overwhelmingly for the Jews. In Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series , a critical development is a world dictator’s orders:

“I will sanction, condone, support, and reward the death of any Jew anywhere in the world,” he says. “Imprison them. Torture them. Humiliate them. Shame them. Blaspheme their god. Plunder everything they own. Nothing is more important.”

The dictator is a demonic character, the Antichrist, but his action is an essential step toward the Second Coming. The scenario, purportedly based on Scripture, allows the believer both to hope for the event and absolve himself, or herself, of responsibility. It’s the same guilt-free glorying in genocide that Hagee justified in his riff on the Holocaust:

That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth.

Regularly, such preachers talk about how they really love the Jews, even as they look forward to a second Holocaust. As Missler said in one lecture, claiming to interpret New Testament verses:

And those words echo in our ears as we think of Auschwitz, Dachau, the horrors of Europe in the 30s and 40s, and realize that what Jesus is saying is it’s going to be worse next time around, that that was just a prelude…

(For more on LaHaye’s vision and its political implications, see my article at the American Prospect. For more on the ideology of dispensationalists and their supposed support of Israel, see my book, The End of Days:Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount .)

If Sen. McCain really didn’t know about any of this before he pursued Hagee’s endorsement, at the very least it shows absolutely abysmal staff work and research. Utter incompetence is the most charitable interpretation one can give. A more reasonable explanation is that McCain was demonstrating the audacity of cynicism.

Ever since Hagee and his fellow travelers started forging links with Jewish groups, some Jews have dismissed their apocalyptic views. Their attitude has been, “We don’t believe this will happen, so what do we care? Right now they’re helping us.” But when people hope for the end of history, they are saying the world is broken and must be fixed. Their vision of how it will be fixed tells you what they think is broken. In the dispensationalist vision of a repaired world, Jews will die or convert. That is, the continued existence of Jews who do not accept Jesus is an unbearable flaw in our world as it is.

At the same time, their reading of the Bible tells them that Jews must return to their homeland and gain independence before Jesus can return. So they support Israel. Hagee’s twist in the sermon that just came to light is that he also justified the real, historical Holocaust – not some imagined future genocide – as serving God’s purpose of returning the Jews to their land so that the End can come.

I should note that the theology implies that all Jews should be ‘ingathered.’ In his 1996 book, “Beginning of the End,” Hagee wrote: “Jeremiah declared that the Jews must return to Israel before Messiah comes.”

So: What methods for encouraging American Jews to return to their land would Rev. Hagee justify as God’s will? Just asking. What he’s already said shows how thin, how blurred, the line is between theological philo-semitism and old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism.

I would suggest that the problem of what Hagee believes about Jews, and what he’s willing to justify, should be raised again and again to Jews who have been willing to build alliances with him: Joe Lieberman , AIPAC , Malcolm Hoenlein (the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations).

In fact, much as I hate to admit it, Jews do owe John McCain thanks: By seeking and getting Hagee’s endorsement, the good senator has finally forced a spotlight on what the pastor thinks, and may have set off a needed debate on the alliance with him and others of his school.

The contacts through Turkey reportedly began in February 2007. If so, the Olmert government may have been persuaded to act (or embarrassed into acting) by the reports published the previous month about Foreign Minister director-general Alon Liel’s back-channel negotations with Syria. The “non-paper ” – or unsigned framework agreement reached by Liel and unofficial Syrian negotiator Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman is important reading, because it gives a sense of how an Israel-Syria deal is likely to look. One creative feature: in order to keep the Golan demilitarized and to prevent competition over Jordan River water, the Golan would be turned into a giant park after Israeli withdrawal – with free access for Israelis.

Liel has stressed – in a press briefing in January 2007, and since – that a critical part of any deal is a switch in Syrian orientation from pro-Iran to pro-West. That would necessarily mean dropping support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria’s secular regime wants the reorientation in order to maintain its independence, Alon reports. For Israel, such a deal would mean much more than removing the direct military threat from Syria. With Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, Iran’s power in our area would be sigificantly reduced.

But the deal requires a third party: Washington. Syria won’t and can’t risk dropping Iran without a new patron; otherwise it will be totally isolated in the region. And Bush’s Washington isn’t interested. Since the Liel-Suleiman talks were publicized, experts here have said that the main obstacle is the U.S.

In a fairly devastating report on the adminstration’s nonexistent role in Mideast peace efforts, the Washington Post says today :

For years, the Bush administration has resisted overtures from Jerusalem and Damascus to participate in revived peace efforts over the Golan Heights…

At his Senate confirmation hearing on May 1, James B. Cunningham, the ambassador-designate to Israel, said expanding peace talks to include Syria would be difficult. “We have taken the position that it is not very useful right now for us to be talking to Syria,” he said. As a result, over the past year Turkey has taken the initiative to launch shuttle diplomacy, a role once reserved for U.S. secretaries of state.

The administration, it seems, has now dropped its absolute veto. But it isn’t happy. Rozen reports :

The Bush administration, which knew the talks were taking place, even as the president was making his controversial remarks, offered reluctant support. “It is our hope that discussions between Israel and Syria will cover all the relevant issues,” a State Department official, speaking on background, told Mother Jones.

The operative word there is “reluctant.”

One administration objection to talking peace with Syria is that it would undercut the pro-Western government in Lebanon, and thereby hurt Washington’s efforts to promote democracy in the region. As I wrote recently in The American Prospect, the Bush policy has actually hurt the Siniora government by strengthening Hezbollah. Hezbollah knows that Syria could leave it high and dry; Washington doesn’t.

It’s true that the Siniora government has lobbied against an Israeli-Syrian deal. Instead, it wants the U.S. to protect it from Hezbollah. This is a clue to what Bush doesn’t get about our neighbor to the north. Lebanon provides a preview for those who’d like to turn Israel and the territories into a binational state. Instead of the state looking for foreign patrons against outside enemies, each community within it – or each faction within each community – looks for a foreign patron, usually hoping that the outside power will do its fighting for it. Syria is always a player, but it regularly switches clients. Back in 1982, Israel was seduced by Bashir Gemayel into thinking it could control Lebanon by backing his Christian faction. The results were disastrous. Siniora would like the US to make the same mistake, but Bush has no troops available. Perhaps he even understands why it would be a bad idea.

The only way to weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon, therefore, is to get Syria to cut it loose. But Bush is ready, at most, to stand aside and let Israel and Syria negotiate. The Bush doctrine, essentially, is “no negotiations, no recognition, no peace .” So the chances of cutting a deal before next January are poor. What happens after that depends – not exclusively, but significantly – on who’s in the White House. Obama believes in negotiating . The McCain Doctrine is the Bush Doctrine, shop-worn, failed and relabelled.

Following contacts between Israel and Syria, officials say significant U.S. involvement will probably be necessary for negotiations to move ahead, and that Syria is still demanding such involvement.

Both Israeli and foreign experts on Syria told Haaretz on Wednesday that a change in the American position was not on the horizon…

In short, Olmert may be ready to make the grand trade; Assad wants to dicker; and Washington refuses to remove its veto.

According to Alon Liel, the former director-general of the Foreign Ministry, who conducted back channel negotiations with Syria, Damascus understands that the price of a deal is dropping its alliance with Iran and Hizballah and realigning with the West. Cutting such a deal, it appears, will have to wait for a new US president – one who is willing to take an entirely new approach to the Mideast. Here’s a clue: It won’t help if his initials are JM.