The Nation's editorial this week is an embarrassing exercise in obfuscation. The editors prove that their magazine still is, as former columnist Christopher Hitchens wrote upon his departure, "the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." The editorial warmly introduces three pieces in the magazine, each of which "favorably discusses some form of binational or democratic state in all of Israel-Palestine, whose citizens would have equal rights or shared sovereignty." This is a fantasy, as any Jew who has lived in a majority Muslim state can attest. While violence among Palestinian factions wages on in Gaza (from which, as even The Nation concedes, Israel de-occupied nearly two years ago), Israel is of course to blame. The editors contrast stubborn Israelis (most of whom "viscerally, emphatically oppose both the binational and secular democratic models") with the more reasonable Palestinians. Apparently, "The mainstream of the Palestinian liberation movement, for its part, has for three decades supported the two-state solution, and even the Islamist Hamas has indicated that it would acquiesce." The first contention is outright delusion, and the second reconfirms the magazine's long history of being useful idiots for totalitarians. Whether shilling for Fidel Castro or insisting on Alger Hiss's innocence (yes, publisher Victor Navasky is still at it), the oldest journal of opinion in the United States has yet to find an anti-American cause with which it cannot sympathize. --James Kirchick