Free Republic

On the eve of a Senate vote to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, a 2009 report co-authored by Hagel has surfaced titled “A Last Chance For A Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement.” It called for Israel to make “the hard compromises and painful concessions for peace” without asking anything comparable from the Palestinian side. Indeed, the report warned against “the Jewish-American and Christian Zionist groups that feel comfortable amplifying the positions of Israeli politicians hostile to hard compromise and painful concession.” One of Hagel’s principal co-signatories on the report was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had advised Obama on foreign policy during...

“Elian is now where he belongs.” (Senator Chuck Hagel after Elian Gonzalez was shanghaied at U.S. gunpoint from his American family at Fidel Castro’s command and without a warrant.) “To me,” wrote Hagel in a New York Times Op-Ed just after the armed raid on the Gonzalez family’s Miami home, “this case has always been fundamentally about a father-son relationship. … the point of the raid — to reunite Elián with his father when those housing him had repeatedly refused to hand him over….The boy is where he belongs.” Why did this Republican Senator accept the word of a Stalinist...

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to former Sen. Chuck Hagel's 2008 memoir, America: Our Next Chapter. In it, Hagel lays out his thoughts on a wide range of issues, including the Israel-Palestinian conflict and Iran, to which he devotes one chapter each. Hagel's attempt to describe the origins and history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals that he does not know the facts--and fills the void with anti-Israel bias. Hagel identifies the origins of the conflict by claiming: "the Arab-Israeli standoff was first set in motion by the Balfour Declaration of 1919 promising the Jewish people a homeland and the...