At a rally last week for the senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a man unfurled a flag bearing a swastika and began shouting anti-Semitic slurs, in what was unmistakably an attack targeted at the first Jew to be a serious contender for the presidential nomination of a major American political party. None of that, writes, Jonathan Tobin, changes the fact that Sanders has cultivated a coterie of anti-Semitic supporters, advisers, and surrogates, not limited to Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar:

[Senator Sanders’s] campaign manager Faiz Shakir is, [like the two congresswomen, a] supporter of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). Given that Sanders often says that he is a supporter of Israel, but merely a critic of its government, it’s hard to understand why he would give such a senior position to someone clearly opposed to Israel’s existence.

Recently, the Sanders campaign also hired Phillip Agnew, another virulent BDS backer who has engaged in repeated slanders of Israel and who is a promoter of a school curriculum that calls for the Jewish state’s elimination and that supports terrorist groups seeking to make that nightmare a reality.

The former Women’s March leader and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour is also a Sanders campaign surrogate, despite her long history of anti-Semitic utterances and her willingness to make common cause with supporters of the hatemonger and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Another Sanders surrogate is Amer Zahr, a BDS supporter who has engaged in repeated slurs of Jews and Israel.

Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem capable of [denouncing anti-Semitism when it comes from the political left]. Even worse, he provides cover to Jew-haters who can boast they are advocating for the election of a Jewish president even as they engage in anti-Semitic hate and work for Israel’s destruction.

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.