WASHINGTON

THE ISRAELI INVASION of Gaza carries grave implications for Korea that are easy to overlook in the frenzy of “breaking news” from the region and the worldwide response to Israeli pummeling of defenseless Palestinians.

It would be absurd to try to compare conflict in the Mideast to the Korean War or the confrontation of forces that has prevailed on the Korean Peninsula since the signing of the armistice in July 1953. They are quite different, but they do have one common denominator — the military and diplomatic role of the United States.

Like it or not, the United States is completely committed to Israel to an extent that far exceeds American bonds with South Korea.

The planes, the tanks and virtually all the modern weaponry deployed by Israeli forces are either American-made or purchased with American funds. Israel is by far the largest recipient of American aid. The American passion for Israel reflects the belief in the right of Jews to their own homeland after the slaughter of more than 6 million in Nazi German concentration camps as well as complicated U.S. interests in the Mideast and the power of American Jews, whose political and economic influence far outweighs their numbers.

Now the question is whether the United States, while supporting Israel to the hilt and waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will have the means or the stomach for a potentially far worse conflict on the Korean peninsula.

Would American leaders, and the American people, ever muster the same passion for the defense of South Korea as they do for Israel? For that matter, would the U.S. stand up in a second Korean War as it did in 1950, when a severely depleted American military establishment built up quickly enough to drive out the North Korean invaders and then, after the Chinese entered the war and drove the Americans and South Koreans from the North, finally to drive the Chinese from the South?

The United States today has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, far more than the 500 or so advisers in the country when the Korean War broke out, in June 1950, and South Korean forces are vastly better equipped now than they were in June 1950. The bottom-line question, though, is the will of the United States for a Far Eastern war while involved in unpopular flare-ups from Israel to Pakistan.

In the outburst of publicity over the Mideast, few if any Americans are aware that war on the Korean Peninsula would be far costlier, and bloodier, than anything seen so far in the Mideast, including Iraq. A second Korean War, moreover, would carry the risk of a regional holocaust, with the Chinese and Russians rising to the aid of North Korea, and Japan, the one-time colonial occupier, joining the fray against old foes. That scenario, far-fetched though it may seem, lingers in the minds of those with memories of the horrors that engulfed the peninsula from mid-1950 to mid-1953.

The United States, as it enters the administration of Barack Obama, is not capable of fighting on two broadly separated fronts without reverting to the draft of young men, and possibly women, which was abandoned in the popular revulsion over the war in Vietnam. If Americans are not nearly so hostile to their military establishment today as they were at the height of the Vietnam War, the reason is the absence of fear among young people of having to join the Army whether they like it or not.

Americans, moreover, are far more concerned about problems on their own home front than anywhere else. No American units are going to accompany the Israelis in Gaza. Israeli forces, fully equipped with American weaponry, have no problem roaring over Palestinians, whose rockets attacks are like bee stings in comparison with the shelling, strafing and bombing of Israeli tanks. Hamas, responsible for instigating attacks against Israel, is basically a terrorist organization that does not have the support of the majority of Palestinians, including probably the 1.5 million living in Gaza.

The North Koreans would be a far more formidable foe. Quite aside from their nuclear warheads, which they may not know how to deploy, they have a great many artillery pieces and infantry weapons, products that the North’s decrepit industrial base still manages to make.

The North also has biological and chemical weapons, a navy that includes submarines and lesser submersibles, and an air force whose old-model MiGs can still fly. On paper, South Korea is far stronger in all but one important aspect. North Korea has twice as many men under arms, well over one million compared to 600,000 in the South, and the North Korean troops by and large have served far longer, under more severe circumstances, than those in the South.

The real imponderable, though, is whether the U.S., in the crunch, would rush to defend the South with all the arms it needed, as well as an infusion of troops, if North Korea were to take advantage of America’s current difficulties in the Mideast and stage a surprise attack. Would Obama as president respond as stubbornly as did Harry Truman, the American president when the Korean War broke out?

And how would the crucial American Jewish community feel about a war in which Jewish interests were not at stake as in Israel? The views of Jewish neo-conservatives and liberals on Israel may vary widely, but they all support the Jewish state’s right to exist. What about if the Republic of Korea were imperiled? For Americans, modern Korea is just about as easy to forget, in time of crisis elsewhere, as the “forgotten” Korean War.

The best hope is that all such questions will remain abstract and theoretical, raised for discussion but never put to the test. Still, headlines, news alerts and bulletins on the war for Gaza, all of them from the Israeli side, force everyone to ask, Can it happen in Korea, and what if it does?

Donald Kirk, an occasional contributor, is a longtime foreign editor and foreign correspondent.