If Europe wants to phone America on the Gaza crisis, who does it call? Not George Bush, who has two weeks left in the White House. And not Barack Obama, who has been mute on Israel’s military action, although the world looked to him immediately the conflict filled the screens. “Nobody at home in Washington”, ran one US headline on the turmoil.

“President-elect Obama is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” said Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokeswoman. This is disingenuous. Even if silence is meant only as evasion, it will never be taken as neutral by the region, where officials pore over every phrase – or the absence of them – for clues to Mr Obama’s policy. It is astonishing, in a campaign that turned on foreign policy, how much he managed not to say on the subject.

He has a strong bias towards diplomacy rather than fighting; we know that much from a year of Obama-the-cool on the campaign trail. But that preference is not a substitute for policy. Israel’s action will force him to do what he has worked so hard to avoid so far: saying how, or even if, he intends to help to break the deadlock.

Obama’s few, overanalysed sentences on the Israeli-Palestinian morass are generally supportive of Israel’s general positions, although with a more reserved tone than President Bush has used. In July he said: “In terms of negotiations with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation-state, does not recognise your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon and is deeply influenced by other countries.”

In July, too, in the southern Israeli town of Sderot – which is within range of Hamas’s missiles – he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that.” Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, quoted that remark in justifying the attack.

Mr Obama’s comments have been greeted coolly by Arab commentators, despite his insistence, also, that it is a priority for him to restore America’s image among Muslims. His appointment of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff has attracted a similar response – as has his choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, given her campaign comments on Iran.

But little has emerged about what, exactly, Mr Obama planned to do, even before Israel’s strikes on Gaza. Much is undecided, it is clear. He intends to deploy what one commentator on Haaretz, the Israeli daily, called “an army of envoys” on the Middle East but still has not picked them, nor decided whether they will report to him or be within the State Department. Dennis Ross, negotiator for President Clinton, and Dan Kurtzer, appointed by Mr Bush in his first term as ambassador to Israel, appear to be front-runners. Martin Indyk, another former ambassador to Israel, is also a candidate. George Mitchell, special envoy to Northern Ireland, has been mentioned, but at 75 is perhaps too old, some suggest. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, crops up, too, in such conversations.

This suggests that before Israel launched its Gaza action, Mr Obama had no clear or urgent plan for early Middle East engagement. He was not going to be seen to neglect it, but had more urgent priorities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel’s February election (and the inevitable spell of a month or two for a coalition to form) may have seemed like a breathing space, too.

Now he is confronted with a “shooting war” on the day he takes office. Israel has, at least, forced him to put the conflict much higher in his priorities than he seemed to have ranked it, for all his public assertion to the contrary.

But there is a dangling, if unanswerable question: if he had broken his silence in the past year, and promised active engagement in the problem, would Israel have had more reason to hold its fire?

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