Nominated by the Biden administration to serve as America’s ambassador to Brazil, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley has held diplomatic positions in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter, including a stint as ambassador to Portugal from 1994 until 1997. Adam Kredo, who obtained a copy of an interview Bagley gave in 1998, examines some of its more alarming content, which also disturbed two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The interview was conducted by a historian at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training for an oral history project. . . . Bagley opened up about the “Jewish lobby” and its impact on Democratic party politics. She was asked about “the Israeli influence” on the Clinton administration.

“There is always the influence of the Jewish lobby because there is major money involved,” Bagley said. . . . Democrats, she said, “always tend to go with the Jewish constituency on Israel and say stupid things, like moving the capital to Jerusalem always comes up. Things that we shouldn’t even touch.”

The “Jewish factor” is not about the raw number of electors who care about these issues, Bagley said, “it’s money.”

When questioned about these remarks during a May 18 confirmation hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bagley claimed they were the result of a “free-flowing discussion” with the interviewer.

Bagley’s assertion that the discussion was “free-flowing” hardly exonerates her. Meanwhile, the “stupid” decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital—supported by decades of bipartisan legislation—did not bring about any international crises, and was instead followed by major breakthroughs in Israel-Arab peacemaking.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.