Last night, the three “leading” candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination — Senators Clinton, Edwards and Obama — appeared live on CNN on faith and politics, sponsored by the Sojourners organization.

While the discussion offered new and interesting insights into these candidates generally (see, for example, here and here), of particular interest to readers of this blog may be Sen. Obama’s response to a question about the morality challenges of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One can only wonder what motivated CNN to place this question in the cue, it seemed to this viewer to be a real curveball. But Obama responded well: “I believe the Israelis want peace and they want security…Israelis have been killed. They’ve got bombs flying into their territories right now. We would expect them to act appropriately to defend themselves.”