Israel’s decision this week to close the office in Jerusalem of Sari Nusseibeh has caught the New York Times in the solar plexus. It rushed out an editorial calling the closure “a breathtakingly wrongheaded move.” It is upset because, it asserts, Sari Nusseibeh is a moderate, a man who, it says, is the leading voice of moderation within mainstream Palestinian Arab politics. It points out that he has urged Palestinians to drop their insistence on a right of return to their former homes in Israel. He also, it points out, helped organize a petition by Palestinian intellectuals urging a halt in suicide bombings. The editorial neglects to mention that as Scuds were landing in Israel during the Gulf War, according to Israeli Col. Shalom Harari, the former Arab affairs adviser for the Israel defense ministry, Mr. Nusseibeh “was telephoning the Iraqi ambassador in one of the neighboring countries to tell the Iraqis where to shoot the missile.” And what the Times editorial really doesn’t want to step up to is the fact that Mr. Nusseibeh was using his office in Jerusalem for the purpose of establishing a Palestinian quasi-governmental post there, something that challenges Israel’s sovereignty in the city. There happen to be a lot of us in New York who recognize the Palestinian professor was committing what amounts to a sly act of war. Writing a whole editorial about the Nusseibeh affair without mentioning the Jerusalem question is disingenuous. The real rub is that the Times opposes Israel’s sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem and wants to split the city in the way the enemies of the Jewish state have been trying to do for years.