The choice has been whittled down to four candidates in the U.S. presidential race, so their various positions on the outstanding issues of Middle Eastern politics are becoming increasingly important.

It is also becoming interesting, because while the staunchly pro-Israeli positions of senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton are well known, Senator Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney are relative newcomers to the international scene.

Romney established his position a year ago, when he attended Israel's annual Herzliya conference, an annual get-together of Israel's foreign policy and security establishment at the pleasant beach resort suburb just north of Tel Aviv.

What we should have realized since Sept. 11, 2001 is that what the world regarded as an Israeli-Arab conflict over borders represented something much larger, Romney said, in a speech crafted to win maximum support from anti-terrorist and also pro-Israel voters back in the United States.

It was the oldest, most active front of the radical Islamist jihad against the entire West, Romney went on. It therefore was not really about borders. It was about the refusal of many parts of the Muslim world to accept Israel's right to exist within any borders.

Senator Obama, whose main claim to a distinctive foreign policy lies in his 2002 speech against the war on Iraq when he was in the Illinois state legislature, has had a rather more varied position on the issue of Israel and Palestine. A year ago, he told the AIPAC conference that Israel remains "our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy."

This week, in an interview with the Israeli paper Haaretz, Obama said: "My view is that the United States' special relationship with Israel obligates us to be helpful to them in the search for credible partners with whom they can make peace, while also supporting Israel in defending itself against enemies sworn to its destruction."

This staunch support of Israel came as a surprise to one of Obama's old supporters, Ali Abunimah, who runs the pro-Palestine Electronic Intifada Web site.

"Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago, including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker," Abunimah recalled.

"In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of U.S. policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing. As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, 'Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.'"

Upfront he most certainly is.