President Obama faces a backlash on Capitol Hill if he nominates Senator Hagel, who formerly represented Nebraska in the upper chamber, to be secretary of defense. That’s the report from Reuters, which characterizes the backlash as “growing” and as coming from “pro-Israel groups, neoconservatives and even some former colleagues.” The problem is Mr. Hagel’s hostility to Israel and his willingness to treat with Iran. It has become clear, Reuters adds, that Mr. Obama will have a confirmation fight on his hands if he decides to nominate the former Nebraska lawmaker, regarded as a moderate Republican, to replace Leon Panetta at the Pentagon.

These columns have been warning of this for years, starting in 2004 with an editorial called “Hagar the Horrible.” It was about both Mr. Hagel and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. The Republican duo, members of the Foreign Relations Committee, had just been praised by Senator Kerry, whose campaign had already been holed at the waterline by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. We pointed out that when the Senate voted 96 to two to renew the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, the two sticks in the mud were Messrs. Lugar and Hagel. They’d become a kind of two man band against a strong foreign policy.

Our editorial pointed out that in 2001, when 87 members of the Senate sent President Bush a letter saying Yasser Arafat should not be invited to meet with high-level officials in Washington and faulting the Palestinian Arabs for using violence against Israel, Messrs. Lugar and Hagel were among those who failed to sign. “The bottom line,” we wrote, “is that Messrs. Hagel and Lugar (Hagar, is how their names can be contracted) want a weaker stance than most other senators against the terrorists in Iran and Syria and the West Bank and Gaza and against those who help the terrorists.”

We issued another editorial in respect of Mr. Hagel in 2007, after he and Mayor Bloomberg had dinner in Washington. The editorial suggested that the mayor, whom we were urging to jump into the presidential race, would be “wise to avoid entangling himself or his presidential ambitions much further with Mr. Hagel.” We noted, among other points, that Mr. Hagel had met at Damascus in 1998 “with the terror-sponsoring dictator, Hafez Al-Assad, and returned to tell a reporter about the meeting, “Peace comes through dealing with people. Peace doesn’t come at the end of a bayonet or the end of a gun.”

Mr. Hagel had recently appeared before an Arab group, where he’d boasted that his support for Israel wasn’t “automatic,” a slur not only on Israel but on his fellow Republicans who had long since emerged as the party more supportive of the struggle of the Jewish state to be left in peace in the Middle East. We issued yet another editorial about Mr. Hagel in January 2008, when Mr. Obama, then a senator, was asked by Jonathan Alter of Newsweek whether he would have Republicans in his cabinet. He’d praised Messrs. Lugar and Hagel, saying of the latter, that he was a “smart guy” who had shown some courage “even though we disagree on domestic policy.”

Domestic policy? The way the then-candidate, Mr. Obama, phrased it offered a hint of where his sentiments really lay in respect of foreign policy. Up until that point, we’d tended to take Mr. Obama at his word regarding Israel, but his comments to Mr. Alter about Mr. Hagel were, we suggested, a warning “that Senator Clinton and President Clinton may be onto something when they say Mr. Obama wouldn’t be ready to step into the job as president on Day One.” We characterized Mr. Hagel as being in an “extremist minority” that stands against “the bipartisan consensus in the Senate that wants a hard line against the terrorist enemies of Israel and America.”

In recent days there have been a number of excellent dispatches about Mr. Hagel from such writers as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. But this isn’t really about Mr. Hagel one way or another. This is about Mr. Obama. What we’re seeing as he floats the name of Senator Hagel for secretary of defense is a glimpse of his true views on the Jewish state. He is against it in a deep, strategic way. He had to try to obfuscate that during his first term, because American voters are on the other side of the issue. Now, however, he’s run his last election and has the very “flexibility” he boasted he’d have in his famous whisper to President Medvedev. Pro-Israel Democrats can’t say they weren’t warned.