This essay examines The Nation, the premier magazine of left-liberalism in the United States, a 150 year-old weekly magazine with a circulation of over 100,000. It is not my contention that The Nation is an antisemitic institution or that it is knowingly spreading antisemitism. Its publisher, Victor Navasky, does not hide his Jewish identity, and many of its staffers and regular contributors are Jews. I also don't believe that it is anti-Israel in principle, but I do see a clear and consistent anti-Israel bias.

This bias unfairly simplifies the vexing and complex issues of the ongoing conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. The Nation's one-sided coverage promotes dangerous assumptions among its readers, and goes beyond its readership to reinforce prejudices against Jews and Israel that potentially places an historically persecuted people, and its very small homeland, at risk.

Nearly two years ago, two representatives of Meretz USA accompanied Yael Dayan to address interns and staff at The Nation's headquarters in New York. The writer-politician daughter of the iconic Moshe Dayan, a veteran dovish Labor Member of the Knesset and currently deputy mayor of Tel Aviv (elected on the left-Zionist Meretz party ticket) was received warmly at a meeting chaired by The Nation's editor for Middle East issues, Roane Carey. An antisemitic or inherently anti-Israel environment would not have been so respectful.

On the other hand, Ms. Dayan is a sharp-tongued dove who is not afraid to criticize her own government. For example, while she does not countenance terrorist violence, she referred to the famous/infamous West Bank barrier in decidedly negative terms. Since she projected the credibility of a committed progressive, she was exactly the kind of Israeli who Nation staffers would be inclined to listen to. If she had come off as defending or excusing some of Israel's policies as understandable responses to terror, she would not likely have been well received.

This put her in a good position to clear up some prejudices and misunderstandings pertaining to Israel. For example, one young woman had assumed that abortion and birth control were hard to come by in the Jewish state. On the contrary, Dayan explained that abortion and birth control have become available as part of the health care package for soldiers. And Dayan is proud of Tel Aviv's record on most social issues, including domestic violence and gay rights, indicating that Tel Aviv is a mini-welfare state.

A left-Zionist comrade in Israel (whose identity I will protect) has contributed a number of articles to The Nation over the years. But when Victor Navasky took a leave of absence from the editorship, sometime in the late 90s, our friend felt iced out, feeling that a left-Zionist viewpoint had become less than welcome. When Navasky returned, this writer's occasional byline returned. Yet this Israeli's view of Carey is positive: "All I can say is that Roane is the person who works directly with me on my articles, and he seems very knowledgeable about the issues."

Still, The Nation's drumbeat of negativity on Israel seems to indicate that Roane Carey has a prejudice (in the literal sense of "pre-judging"). Take the edition dated October 30, 2006. It has two articles relating to Israel. Roane Carey's review of Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree" ("My Friend, The Enemy") was not terrible, but it would have benefitted from historical contextualization. Having seen the author speak on cable television, the book probably needs it as well. That is, the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs needs to be understood as a reaction to the very serious Palestinian effort to destroy the Yishuv in 1947-48. Carey's piece was emotionally difficult for a Zionist like myself, but he was not gratuitously mean or inaccurate.

The "Comment" piece by Arno Mayer, "Israel's Cassandra," was another matter. He needed contextualization big time. Mayer builds up the humanitarian preachments of Martin Buber - supplemented with the visionary warnings of Judah Magnes, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and the left-socialist binationalism of Hashomer Hatzair. The extent to which they were all dissenters from mainstream Zionism is far from clear. For example, I've seen at least one published piece by Einstein in which he counters (in rather conventional terms) anti-Zionist arguments.

Mayer's major flaw is that he contrasts the most progressive elements of Zionist thought with ..., well, nothing on the Palestinian-Arab side. Apparently, the Arab side is a victimized cipher in Mayer's view. He includes nothing about their political leadership. True, it was not nearly as well organized as that of the Jews in Palestine, but it existed. And their top political leader was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, who became an active ally of Hitler.

He doesn't even mention their most reasonable and progressive element, forerunners of the Communist parties of Palestine, Israel and Jordan. Hashomer Hatzair had some difficult discussions with this group; the fact that even they could not agree upon an effective common program, despite their closeness in world view, underscores how difficult - virtually impossible - it was, to achieve a peaceful and humane solution.

Mayer's a talented polemical writer, but he's also shockingly callous in writing disdainfully of "a self-righteousness nourished by the Holocaust [by] Israel's governors and, by and large, its Jewish citizenry...." He heaps blame on Israel and the "Zionist project" for diverse events throughout their history. Was it Israel's "political-military caste" that "began, precipitated, or all but invited five cross-border wars"? (One can make such a case with regard to the 1956 Sinai campaign and the Lebanon invasion of 1982, but as a general satement it's grossly unfair reductionism.) Is it "irresponsibly said by Tel Aviv" that Hamas and Hezbollah are “inspired and masterminded by Tehran and Damascus"? Clearly, Hezbollah is inspired if not masterminded by Tehran and it is supplied via Damascus, where the latter also houses and encourages the most uncompromising and violent tendencies within Hamas.

With Mayer and other such contributors on Israel over the years, The Nation is cultivating an unmistakable and simplistic sense among its readers that Israel is "bad" or always in the wrong. What it needs to do instead is to relate the moral complexities of a conflict that pits a small state associated with an historically persecuted people against another small, grievously suffering people, struggling but not yet succeeding in finding an effective, peace-oriented national leadership. A reasonable end to this conflict is possible, but not obvious. Liberal analyses that do not polemicize are very much in order.

Ralph Seliger is editor of ISRAEL HORIZONS, the publication of Meretz USA. He also edits the Weblog at www.meretzusa.blogspot.com.