In the early hours of the morning, the Republican incumbent, Senator George Allen, said counting would continue throughout the night and he called on his supporters to watch the tally "like eagles and hawks". Even before the sun rose over Virginia, both parties were firing off emails to sympathetic lawyers calling on them to prepare do battle over provisional ballots, absentee ballots, challenges to results from computerised voting machines and every other legal grey area.

Complicating the picture still further, the FBI opened an investigation into alleged fraud and intimidation involving phone calls made to Democratic voters in Virginia falsely claiming their names were not on the electoral rolls or giving false information about the location of polling stations.

Elsewhere, the Democrats made Senate gains in Missouri, Ohio, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Joe Lieberman won the Connecticut race standing as an independent. He beat the Democratic candidate, Ned Lamont, but has pledged to vote with the Democrats in the new chamber.

The Democrats also won a brace of governorships, putting the party in power in a majority of states, an important boost to the party nationwide and a strategic advantage for the 2008 presidential election.

The president will give a press conference at 1pm (1800 GMT) and the Democrats will be listening critically to his tone as they try to gauge how ready he is to work with the new Congress and compromise over the management of the war. By then, Mr Bush will almost certainly have made the call he must have feared most, saying "Congratulations, Madam Speaker" to Nancy Pelosi, who Republicans turned into a hate figure in the last days of the campaign.

Ms Pelosi, a tough, resoundingly liberal Democratic leader from San Francisco will become the first woman ever to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives, where the party looked likely to gain 30 or more seats.

Among other milestones passed last night, Bernie Sanders of Vermont became the first socialist in the US Senate and Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts, only the second black governor in US history. Keith Ellison in Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives.

As speaker, Ms Pelosi will be in a powerful position. She will appoint the chairs of the all-important House committees - which can launch enquiries and ask difficult questions about the Iraq war and other issues - and she will control the legislative agenda in the chamber. She and her party will also have a powerful say over taxes and spending.

In theory, the job gives her less sway over foreign policy, but in her victory speech last night, she made it clear she would not be bound by such traditional constraints. "Today the American people voted for change and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction and that is exactly what we intend to do. And nowhere did the American people make it clear they wanted a change more than in Iraq," Ms Pelosi told a crowd of supporters in Washington. "And so we say to the president, Mr President we need a new direction in Iraq. Let us work together to find a new solution to the war in Iraq."

She promised to restore "civility and bipartisanship" to the political process in Washington. Whether that happens remains a major unanswered question. In France they call it cohabitation, but in the US a situation in which a president from one party has to work with a Congress from another is usually known as gridlock.

Cooperation between the White House and a Democratic majority in the House would require a sea-change in political style on the president's part. On the basis of the most questionable mandates in 2000, he governed as if he had won a landslide.

It will also require some tough decisions from Ms Pelosi, who must bridge the gap between the liberals on her wing of the party and its conservatives, boosted by the new intake of House Democrats such as Heath Shuler from conservative "red" states. Mr Shuler won his seat in the deepest Republican territory of North Carolina only because he stood as a social conservative, opposed to abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

Gay marriage was one of the big losers in the election as a string of ballot initiatives calling for a ban were passed. In South Dakota, however, a proposal to ban abortion under almost all circumstances was defeated.

Overall, the election continued a long political realignment in the US, leaving the demarcation line between a Republican south and a Democratic north-east and west even more pronounced. The biggest Republican losses last night were "behind enemy lines" in the liberal east, holdovers from a more bipartisan age. By that measure the sharp geographical divide in US politics just got deeper.

Officials at Jewish organizations in Washington said this week that the minority leader's attack on Carter is in line with what they describe as a straight-A record on Israel. Still, Pelosi has struggled to convince many activists in the pro-Israel community that she is not the "San Francisco liberal" her GOP critics portray her to be. And Republicans have been arguing that their best, perhaps only, hope of hanging on to the House is to convince voters that Pelosi would be a weak wartime leader.

Pelosi's critics "think being a liberal from San Francisco is a code name for wearing Birkenstock sandals, tie-dye shirts, being pro-abortion and anti-Israel," one of Pelosi's supporters in the Jewish community said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The truth, according to Pelosi's backers, is quite different. On matters concerning the Jewish state she is as mainstream as they get, sticking to a pro-Israeli line ever since she entered Congress. (As for the tie-dyes and Birkenstocks, Pelosi is one of the best-dressed politicians, known for her designer suits and matching shoes.)

To demonstrate the extent of Pelosi's support for Israel and for the Jewish community, Jewish activists in the Bay area tell the story of a luncheon given several years ago by pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, at which Pelosi was one of the speakers. Suddenly an alarm went off in the building and the participants began rushing to the doors. All but one - Pelosi, who stood up and recited Israel's national anthem. The impression that this event left on the Jewish activists who were gathered in the room is now one of Pelosi's main assets as she tries to improve her image in pro-Israel circles.

Pelosi, who grew up in Baltimore and first heard about Israel from Zionist neighbors, is said to have many friends in the San Francisco Jewish community. Sam Lauter, a political consultant from the city, used to have the Pelosi family over for the Passover Seder every year, until they moved to Washington. "She is a personal friend of ours and a passionate friend of the Jewish community," Lauter told the Forward.

Pelosi and her husband, Paul, are Roman Catholic. According to acquaintances, Pelosi, who attended a Catholic girls school in Washington, goes to church regularly.

She visited Israel in the early 1990s on a trip sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, and she has maintained strong ties with the pro-Israel community ever since.

Aipac includes a laudatory quote from Pelosi on its Web site. "Leader Pelosi has a perfect record of support for the U.S.-Israel relationship and has demonstrated leadership on a host of our issues," spokeswoman Jennifer Cannata said. "She has strong ties with the pro-Israel community... locally in her district, in her state, and nationwide."

Another veteran official at a major Jewish group told the Forward that "as far as it concerns Pelosi, there is no question about her commitment to Israel and nothing about that will change."

Regarding Iraq, Pelosi has established herself as a vocal critic of the war and has rejected the Republican claim that it has benefited Israel. Pelosi has argued that the Iraq War - which was endorsed by two of the Jewish community's main umbrella groups - destabilized the region and made things more dangerous for Israel.

Many pro-Israel observers surveyed by the Forward predicted that if Pelosi does become speaker, the House would remain staunchly pro-Israel given the bipartisan support enjoyed by Jerusalem. Close advisers to the minority leader could not point to specific ways that her approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would differ from Bush's. But other congressional sources believe that Pelosi has a more dovish disposition than the White House and that she could use the position of speaker to push Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to play a more proactive role in kick-starting the peace process.

Shlomo Aronson, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, believes that the Democrats controlling of the House may leave Congress more open to negotiations with Damascus and might push the administration to allow Israel to move forward on the Syrian track. "The mere fact that the Democrats might talk about disconnecting Syria from its ties to the axis of evil may lead to negotiations which will benefit Israel greatly," said Aronson, who is now a visiting professor at the University of Arizona.

The executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, predicted that as a lawmaker representing one of the country's most pro-Palestinian districts, Pelosi would be under constant pressure to back away from her earlier support for Israel. "She will constantly have to look over her left shoulder," Brooks said.

Brooks criticized Pelosi's failure to co-sponsor a pro-Israel resolution during last summer's war in Lebanon.

A day after the war broke out, Pelosi agreed to co-sponsor a nonbinding resolution expressing support for Israel in a time of war, along with House Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican. The resolution went to the House International Relations Committee, and, after a week of back-and-forth negotiations, the Republican led-committee refused to add language Pelosi wanted that called for both sides to refrain from harming civilians. After her suggestions were turned down, Pelosi refused to be a co-sponsor; however, she did support the resolution and pushed her fellow Democrats in the House to do the same.

In a statement that her office put out, Pelosi said that "this resolution reaffirms our unwavering support and commitment to Israel and condemns the attacks by Hezbollah."

Sources close to the minority leader said she was made "furious" by claims that she was not being supportive of Israel at a time of war. A senior activist in the Jewish community, who asked not to be identified, said that Pelosi was the victim of an "attempt to turn Israel into a partisan issue."

But Brooks said the problem was that Pelosi blinked in a crucial moment for Israel. "She literally stripped her name off a resolution supporting Israel because she thought it was not evenhanded enough and too pro-Israeli," Brooks said.

After the war in Lebanon ended, Pelosi gathered a group of local Jewish communal leaders from her home district to discuss its outcome.

"She was eloquent in her support for a strong Israel," said San Francisco JCRC executive director Dough Kahn, who attended the meeting. "She feels it in her bones."

Fiercely partisan, a phenomenal fundraiser and a tireless networker, she has pulled the notoriously fractious Democratic party together with a "You're either with me or against me" approach not unlike that of George Bush.

She has backed that tribal attitude with the power of patronage, rewarding those who stay on message with perks and jobs. The result has been the most unified Democratic party in the House since the Republicans took control in 1994 and an effective opposition.

Ms Pelosi arrived in Washington in 1987, spending her first years focusing on Aids and human rights in China. Initially uninterested in a leadership position, she made history when, in 2002, she became the first woman to be House Democratic leader, stronly supported by liberals, women and Californians.

She comes from an Italian-American family steeped in Democratic politics. Her father, Tommy D'Alesandro, was a New Deal Democrat who served five terms in Congress. From him, she learned the value of calling in political favours for services rendered, and has an enormous political database of loyal donors.

Together with Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, she is part of the troika of powerful female Democrat movers and shakers from San Francisco, all of them loathed by east coast conservatives.

The Republicans like to portray Ms Pelosi as a leftwing firebrand, but it is a hard label to make stick when the person in question is an Italian-American mother of five and a grandmother.

They would perhaps do better to call one of the wealthiest members of Congress a limousine liberal. She and her investor husband, Paul, are worth at least $25m (£13.1m) and have property in the Napa valley.

It is easy to understand why she rankles the Republicans - she is rude about their president. "He is an incompetent leader. In fact, he is not a leader," she once said. "He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide on."

Being rude to Republicans is one thing, being an effective opposition leader another. Ms Pelosi perfected the use of stonewalling tactics to derail key Bush policies, especially the president's plan to part privatise social security (the federal pension scheme).

She told her fellow Democrats to focus like a laser beam on tearing the president's plan apart, resisting suggestions to come up with an alternative that would allow the Republicans a target. The self-avowedly negative tactic worked, and the Bush plan fell into oblivion.

Her inclination to avoid the TV chatshow circuit - she is uncomfortable in front of the camera - has also deprived the Republicans of a visible target, perhaps a reason why efforts to demonise her have been ineffective.

On Iraq, the big issue of the midterms, Ms Pelosi was one of the few House members to vote against the use of force in October 2002.

She again showed her tactical nous when congressman John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated marine, last year stunned the political establishment by calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. As a respected Vietnam veteran, his words carried special weight and began the erosion of public support for the war.

When Ms Pelosi was asked for her reaction to Mr Murtha's tearful press conference, she said simply: "I will take it under consideration." She wanted the headlines to stay firmly on Mr Murtha, and later said it was important for the congressman, who had 35 years of national security experience, to be the messenger.

Such tactics have not endeared her to younger Democrats such as Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos blog.

In March, he criticised Ms Pelosi for not being aggressive enough in exposing Republican ethical lapses in the House, unlike Harry Reid, her counterpart in the Senate. She has also not endeared herself to bloggers through her support of legislation to impose campaign finance disclosure requirements on sites such as Daily Kos.

If Ms Pelosi is not gung-ho enough for the likes of Mr Moulitsas, she does conform to classic Democratic issues. Her goals for if, or when, she becomes Madam Speaker, are to push for a minimum wage, promote stem cell research and enact the recommendations in the September 11 congressional report.

Ms Pelosi is a Democrat to her fingertips. As a young girl, she was offered a toy elephant by a Republican poll worker at a polling booth, but she recoiled, handing it back.

And for Democrats, she has the right enemies - the Republican strategist Karl Rove and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, are both said to revile her.

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking Sunday on ABC's This Week, said the administration's plans for the conflict would not be altered if the Democrats gain control of Congress.

"I think it'll have some effect, perhaps, in the Congress, but the president's made clear what his objective is: It's victory in Iraq, and it's full speed ahead on that basis," Cheney said. "And that's exactly what we're going to do."

Democrats, like Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the election results would foster a more "open dialogue" on foreign policy.

"If we make gains in the House and Senate, whether we win them or not, I think you'll see a lot of Republicans willing to join me and others in a plan for Iraq that is a rational way in which we can responsibly bring home more troops and leave a stable Iraq behind," Biden said on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday. "But it requires a fundamental change in the course we're on."

Throughout his final campaign swing, Bush told audiences that leaving Iraq and ignoring Iran, as he accused the Democrats of suggesting, would put Israel in danger.

"They would like to get a hold of oil resources so they could then say to the West, 'Abandon your alliance with Israel or withdraw from the Middle East, otherwise you're going to be facing highpriced oil, and we'll bring your economy down,'" he said Monday while campaigning for Republican candidates in Nebraska.

US policy toward Israel is not expected to shift dramatically if Democrats take control of Congress. While Republican leaders have made efforts to overtly back Israel in recent years, analysts point to historic support for Israel among Democrats. In recent weeks, Democrats have been working to counter concerns they would balance support for Israel and the Palestinians or that Democrats would name committee chairmen who are seen as traditionally unsupportive of the Jewish state.

"There will be some Democratic chairmen who may not share all my views or have as clear a perspective on Israel as I do," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), a Jewish lawmaker, said in a recent on-line chat with Jewish voters, sponsored by the House Democratic caucus. "But they will not be chairing committees dealing with Israel and the Middle East."

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee also weighed in. In a statement last week, it said, "Strong bipartisan support for Israel exists in both parties and, regardless of who is in control, that support will remain steadfast."

"AIPAC works closely with leaders on both sides of the aisle, each deeply committed to strengthening the bonds between the United States and Israel," the statement continued. "No matter who wins the upcoming elections, AIPAC is confident that Congress will continue to support a strong Israel and a strong relationship between the United States and its most reliable ally in the Middle East."

In the House of Representatives, Democrats are predicted to win at least 10 of the 15 seats they need to gain majority control, according to an analysis by Congressional Quarterly, with another 23 seats too close to call.

Analysts suggest the Democrats will not lose any of the seats they currently hold.

If the Democrats win control, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, currently the House minority leader, would likely become the next House speaker.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who has led Democratic support for Israel in the House, is expected to seek the role of majority leader, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, whose Israeli father fought in the pre-state Zionist underground, is expected to challenge several candidates for majority whip. Emanuel has received praise for his role as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, charged with raising money for candidates.

The Senate race, where Democrats need six seats to garner control, is considered much tighter. Democrats are expected to pick up seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and likely also in Rhode Island. Other seats, including those in Montana, Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia, are neck-and-neck. Democrats must also hold on to seats in Maryland and New Jersey, where Republican challengers have remained strong.

If Democrats pick up five seats, there will be a 50-50 tie in the Senate. The two parties would likely create a power-sharing structure, similar to that which occurred in 2001, with Cheney holding the tie-breaking vote.

Matthew E. Berger is also a correspondent for Congressional Quarterly.

Since then it's been quoted and defended everywhere from Mother Jones to The New York Times, debated before a packed audience at New York's revered Cooper Union and lately republished in the respected quarterly Middle East Policy. It's also landed a prestigious book contract for the professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. What better proof of the Lobby's power to quash dissent?

Pro-Israel activists have given back as good as they've got. Stung by the antisemitic undertones in the claim that they stifle debate, they've been working overtime to keep those who hold such views from speaking in public. In the past two weeks alone, Jewish protests have helped to cancel appearances in New York by an Australian author at the French mission and by a New York University historian at the Polish consulate and at a Catholic college in the Bronx. (See news story, Page 4.) That ought to stop those rumors about Jews stifling debate.

The NYU historian, Tony Judt, is now a cause celebre in his own right. One of two panelists to take Mearsheimer's side at Cooper Union last month, his name was already mud in pro-Israel circles, mostly because of his 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books arguing that Israel was an "anachronism" and would probably end up a binational Jewish-Arab state. A quick Web search for his name turns up entries like "Tony Judt's Jihad Against Israel." Lately he's become a dinner-table name, attacked as an enemy by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and a host of others.

"I find the whole thing, in the end, depressing," Judt told the Forward this week. "Antisemitism is a real thing, and it's a serious thing. I've written about it and I care about it. So to find myself attacking the ADL for implicitly accusing people of antisemitism - it seems, well, upside down."

His complaint about the ADL stems from the Polish consulate affair. Press accounts suggest that the ADL and AJC had a hand in the cancellation of his speech. Judt says the ADL was doing precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt claim it does, muzzling dissent.

The ADL replies on its Web site that Judt's complaint is simply "part and parcel of Judt's conspiratorial ideas about pro-Israel groups and 'Jewish control' of U.S. foreign policy."

For the record, they're both wrong. The ADL's role in the consulate flap was little more than to call and ask what the event was about, according to both ADL and the consulate. Told that a room had been loaned to an outside group, the league said thanks and backed off. The consul-general then Googled Judt to find out what the fuss was about and concluded that the controversial historian was not someone Poland's New York consulate needed to be associated with, given Poland's sensitivities about Jewish sensitivities.

On the other hand, ADL indignation over Judt's "conspiratorial ideas" is wildly misplaced. The only time he has publicly discussed conspiracies or "Jewish control" of American policy was in a 2005 essay in The Nation, in which he flatly condemned such notions as "anti-Semitism."

His reputation as an Israel-basher rests almost entirely on that one essay in 2003, "Israel: The Alternative." In it he wrote that the scope of Israel's West Bank settlements had made the old partition idea of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine nearly impossible. Dismantling settlements and separating the two peoples was no longer conceivable. The only alternatives left were mass expulsion of the Palestinians or a single state in all of the land of Israel, which would inevitably be binational. He was not advocating a binational state, he says. It was an observation.

Would he have written the same essay now, after seeing Israel withdraw from Gaza? "I might have written some things differently," he said. "A lot of my friends still believe that a two-state solution is possible. I'm more pessimistic, I guess."

He wouldn't have changed the word "anachronism," though. "As a historian, I do believe that nation-states based on ethnicity are an anachronism." But, he added quickly, "you can be an anachronism and still have a perfect right to exist."

Does he think Israel's existence is morally wrong? "Good God, no," he said. "Of course I don't believe that."

Judt is a complicated figure. Born in London in 1948, he served as national secretary of the Labor Zionist youth group Dror and spent much of his teens on a kibbutz. He has written extensively about European antisemitism. He served for a time as a judge on the Koret Jewish book awards. Over the years, though, he has become deeply disenchanted with what he calls "Israeli misbehavior" in the West Bank and Gaza. He says he no longer feels close to Israel, as he once did.

Up to a point, that is. "I can't pretend that it's not connected to me," he said of Israel. "I have relatives there. I used to know it well. I feel almost as I would if it were my own country that were misbehaving. I care about it more than I do about other countries."

What, then, was he doing on the stage at Cooper Union, defending Mearsheimer? Here Judt starts to sound uncomfortable and to pick his words carefully. "I didn't see myself as defending him," he said.

Mearsheimer's critics observe that he has a way of conflating pro-Israel lobbying groups with institutions like The New York Times that happen to accept Israel's right to exist and happen to look Jewish. Judt doesn't argue the point. "I saw it as crucial to put some space between myself and his paper," he said. "The one crucial thing is that this is about forcing open the conversation."

Judt argues that antisemitism should not be the first objection raised in a debate like this, but the last. "Once you raise the issue of antisemitism, further discussion is silenced. Antisemitism becomes the only question addressed," he said. "I'm not worried about the fate of Jews in this country. This is not Germany in 1938. What I worry about is the state of conversation in this country."

The conversation Judt wants brought into the open - the one point that Mearsheimer and Walt may have gotten right - is about America's proper role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is one of the important irritants in our relationship with the Muslim world. It's not the whole problem, but it's a big part of it. Lowering the heat in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would go a long way toward reducing the growing international conflict between the West and the Muslim world. America could make a big difference, if it would nudge Israel harder toward those "painful concessions" that are the key to a solution. Israel and its advocates, naturally, want Jerusalem left free to make its own decisions.

Which brings Judt to the Lobby. "In the end," he said, "there are lots of lobbies that use all sorts of tactics to influence policy - the oil lobby, the chemical lobby. The one thing that's distinctive about the Israel lobby is that part of its agenda is to silence criticism of itself."

And that is where Tony Judt, for all his protestations, comes closest to conspiracy theory. Like many critics of Israel, he's been stunned and infuriated by the tsunami of hate mail and formal protest he's encountered since his infamous 2003 essay. He can't believe it's a spontaneous outpouring of rage from angry fellow Jews. Instead, he's convinced himself it's orchestrated by big Jewish organizations.

But it isn't. It's the grass roots screaming at him. The anti-Judt postings on the Internet aren't from the ADL but from bloggers and militants. American Jews by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, live in daily fear for the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people. When they see a threat, or the shadow of a threat, they shout.

Judt used to know that; he wrote about it, with some sympathy, in his 2003 New York Review essay. But, like so many others who've run afoul of Jewish militants, he seems bruised these days, too weary to draw distinctions.

There is an important, even urgent conversation to be had about Israel, America and the scary new Middle East. It's not an easy conversation to begin. It's not clear that Judt and the bedfellows he's chosen are making the discussion any easier.

Another long silence on the phone. "Maybe not," Judt said quietly.