Last week's horrific terrorist attack on a Jerusalem yeshiva ought to be a wake-up call to American voters.

Presidents really do receive calls on the red phone in the middle of the night. And though the slide into domestic recession is bound to dominate the electoral consciousness, this campaign does have — or ought to have — a critical foreign policy dimension that extends well beyond the disastrous war in Iraq and the botched Afghan incursion.

In the Middle East, it's a dimension whose hideous complexity has been exacerbated by the Bush administration's brutishly quixotic policies — nowhere more so than in the ongoing struggle to create a viable Palestinian state willing and able to negotiate rapprochement with Israel.

Thursday's atrocity at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva was particularly savage. The gunman, an Arab from East Jerusalem, fired more than 500 shots inside a library where hundreds of religious scholars were gathered to study sacred texts. All but one of the eight murdered young men were teenagers; two were just 15.

There is every reason to suspect, moreover, that this particular religious school was more than a target of opportunity. Mercaz Harav is Israel's leading "Hardal" seminary, the Harvard of a movement that blends strictly Orthodox Judaism with a militant and messianic religious Zionism. Its graduates are the theorists and the shock troops among West Bank settlers. Its adherents also are the segment of Israeli popular opinion most inclined to demand that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — whom they regard as a quisling — suspend talks with the Palestinians.

As Amir Mizroch wrote Friday in the Jerusalem Post: "While defense establishment officials sitting in the Kiriya military headquarters in Tel Aviv ponder the diplomatic-security implications of last night's attack, a totally different analysis will be taking place this weekend around Shabbat dinner tables across Jerusalem and most West Bank settlements. ... Together with the grief and sorrow, there is going to be a lot of angry talk about good and evil, about a religious war over the Holy Land. ... The fact that the attack was carried out in the way it was — live fire, chasing down the students and shooting them at point-blank range, as well as confirming the kills — and not by a suicide bombing, will add to the sense of brutality, of the narrative of good versus evil."

The Manichaean view that Mizroch is describing excludes compromise, just as a faux moral equivalency — in which atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists against teens and other civilians are viewed as no worse than deaths caused by the Israeli military fighting back in the country's defense — makes a mockery of justice. Both compromise and justice are preconditions of real peace.

These days, American policymakers also need to struggle as never before not to fall into a false even-handedness when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of Western Europe's policy and intellectual elite have slipped from sympathy for the Palestinian cause to anti-Zionism and, from there, into new modes of objective anti-Semitism. International organizations, across the board, are little better. Thursday, the U.N. Security Council couldn't even muster a condemnation of the yeshiva atrocities because Libya insisted that it also denounce as co-evil the Israeli military's recent defensive incursions into Gaza.

In such a climate, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Israel's incursions into Gaza recently occurred because Hamas is sitting across the border firing missiles into Israeli towns. (It's a bit of a cliche by now, but if a faction of Mexican terrorists was holed up in the barrios of Tijuana firing rockets into San Diego, does anyone doubt Baja California would be swarming with Marines — or that any president who didn't send them there would be impeached?)

These are the nuances the next president will have to hold in mind when answering that 3 a.m. call. It would be a relief to hear them acknowledged as the campaign proceeds.

Tim Rutten is a Los Angeles Times columnist.