Senator Obama’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which began yesterday and ends tomorrow, is unlikely to have any surprises. Mr. Obama is at that stage of a presidential campaign where every word is carefully scripted. When it comes to Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs, his main concern right now is to offend no one, whether in Jerusalem, Ramallah, or the American Jewish and Arab communities. His coaches and speech writers can be counted on to paddle him safely through the rapids of these three days.

Still, it is already possible to form some idea of what an Obama presidency would mean for the Middle East. From an Israeli point of view, it need not necessarily be a catastrophe. Mr. Obama never was and is not the anti-Israel figure that some right-wing Jewish circles nastily attempted to portray him as during his primary campaign. He will support Israel on many issues just as nearly all American presidents have done before him.

But an Obama presidency will not be a great boon to Israel, either. Essentially, it will mean a return to the Clinton years, with their quite literal even-handedness that was expressed as one arm hugging Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn and the other hugging Yasser Arafat. President Bush, it will be recalled, not only did not put any arms around Arafat, he refused to let him tread on a blade of White House grass. Mr. Obama, who has repeatedly stressed the importance of talking to one’s adversaries, will be, like Mr. Clinton, less finicky.

This will not work to Israel’s advantage. In a world in which the geo-strategic scales weigh heavily against Israel to begin with, American even-handedness does nothing to improve the balance. An Israel that continues to receive American support at the same time that America woos the Palestinian Authority and Syria, and possibly even Hamas and Hezbollah, will have a harder time defending its vital interests.

But what is most worrisome about Mr. Obama from Israel’s point of view is not his likely return to the charted territory of American even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel has lived with such presidencies in the past, taking advantage of their friendship and resisting their pressures as best it can, and it can live with another one, too. The worrisome thing, rather, is Mr. Obama’s attitude toward the uncharted territories of Iraq and Iran.

Mr. Obama’s recent pronouncements that America should be putting less effort into Iraq and more into Afghanistan, since the latter is the more important of the two countries for American interests, is shockingly poorly informed. Afghanistan, apart from serving as a base for Muslim jihadists, who are mobile and can easily move their operations elsewhere, has no strategic value at all. It is a poor, land-locked country without natural resources or international importance, and while it would be a great blow to American prestige to lose it, which is an excellent reason to avoid doing so, its loss would have little material significance for America and none at all for Israel.

The importance of Iraq, on the other hand, can hardly be exaggerated. It is a country with huge oil reserves and sits next to other such countries and astride their transportation routes; along with Egypt, it has always been, historically and in modern times, a hub of the entire Arab world; and whatever happens in it will have an enormous effect on that world. If it is stabilized and even just partially democratized, it will be a significant force for political moderation and modernization in the Middle East; if it is radicalized and falls into the hands of Islamist extremists, it will join the Iranian-Syrian axis. The notion that it should be sacrificed for Afghanistan reveals atrociously bad judgment.

Mr. Obama’s position on Iran is, if anything, even more naïve. If he thinks it does not matter whether Iran obtains atomic weapons or not, and that a nuclear Iran, although a threat to Israel, would be none to America, let him say so. This might be a difficult stand to defend, but at least it would have an internal consistency.

But to proclaim, as Mr. Obama has been doing, that a nuclear Iran is a threat to America while insisting in the same breath that the problem must be solved peacefully by diplomatic negotiations, is unbelievably innocent. It should be obvious by now to any newspaper reader that, in the absence of a credible military threat to their nuclear program, the Iranians have no intention of negotiating it away and view diplomatic talks as a tactic for gaining time while their centrifuges spin. The only alternative either to acquiescing in a nuclear Iran or launching a military strike is convincing the Iranians that one is seriously thinking of such a strike — which is precisely what Mr. Obama refuses to do.

It is the naïveté of such views that is most disturbing. Israel has always had to deal with a certain amount of American cynicism in the Middle East, whether this consisted of selling advanced military equipment to Arab regimes that didn’t need it or talking eloquently about democracy while cozying up to autocratic Arab governments. And yet cynicism, of which Mr. Clinton had a great deal, at least understands the power relationships that prevail in this world. Naïveté does not. This is why, for Israel, an Obama presidency could be dangerous in a way that a Clinton one never was.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.