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Whatever else happened in that Florida vote, the American Muslim Association has declared a victory for its constituency. According to an exit poll, 91 percent of the 60,000 Muslim voters in Florida cast their ballots for George W. Bush, allegedly "making the difference." Reporting on the success of a vigorous get-out-the-vote drive throughout America, one spokesman said, "It won't be long before political analysts realize that the Muslim voters have played a historic role."

Even if we don't count the home-grown African-American Muslim movement, which has its own political agenda, there are now more Muslims than Jews in America — and demographers say the disproportion will be even greater by the middle of the century. And even if we acknowledge that there is not all that much solidarity among Muslims from different countries, we had better recognize there is enough of a common anti-Israel sentiment to provide some political force in the years ahead, if they organize.

The American Muslim population is still many years away from being as integrated as American Jews in the political and social structure of the country, but they are working at it. The American Muslim Association reports that 152 Muslim Americans, most of them members of the Association, were just elected to local and state offices. There were a record number of first-time Muslim voters.

The Muslim organizing groups have other agenda items, but they are virulently anti-Israel. They give prior notice on the Internet of the increasing number of pro-Palestinian protests across the country. They also regularly protest the anti-Arab bias of American journalism, the American Muslim Association calling it "the triumph of Zionism in U.S. media."

There is no reason for panic, but neither should we be too complacent about the state of American support for Israel. According to a recent Gallup Poll, about four out of 10 Americans still say they are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians, and only about one out of 10 say they are more sympathetic to the Palestinians. But in the same poll, about three out of four Americans say the United States should remain neutral on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, 6 percent saying that the country should side with Israel, 1 percent with the Palestinians. Sympathy is one thing; commitment at a time of crunch is another.

However, it is not just a problem of battling emergent Muslim groups for political access. Organizations, pro and con, can gain access to the public and to policymakers, but it is what they do with the access that counts. The American public will support Israel in a crunch if it and its political leaders believe it is in American national interest to do so. This is the battle of persuasion in which the American Muslim and the American Jewish organizations will be engaged. It will be an unhappy battle involving an unprecedented adversarial relationship with another faith group of fellow citizens, and it is a battle with dangerous overtones.

American support for Israel reached its apex when the national cry was "the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming," during the Cold War, and when Israel was an important ally on that count. The Russians are no longer coming. With oil at stake, and given the fundamentalist and terrorist anti-American drive within the Muslim world, a national-interest cry that touches on the Middle East might now be "the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming."

But that is a dangerous cry for American Jewish organizations to make. We know about the effects of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and we do not want to help launch a "Protocols of the Elders of Islam" into the national dialogue — or impose its consequences on a whole body of religious worshippers.

American Muslims have a right to exercise their religious and political convictions without penalty. We must stand strongly and actively against any abridgement of that right, or any broad stereotyping. But at the same time that we do that and make all necessary distinctions, we must still aggressively and unflinchingly assert that America's national interest, and peace in the Middle East, are threatened by the fundamentalist and terrorist forces that now politically dominate critical sections of the Muslim world.