In the wake of Israel’s vengeful and disproportionate response to the murders of the three teenagers, Paul took the opportunity to burnish his neocon cred with an op-ed at NRO defending Israel’s actions and calling for a cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority. It’s a miserable, asinine piece of boilerplate designed, quite patently, to pander to the Adelson crowd. (The commenters, by the way, suggest that there is actually a robust debate on this among conservatives that is never allowed to be aired at NRO or the Weekly Standard.) Chait gets to the point:
“Israel has shown remarkable restraint,” Paul argues. “It possesses a military with clear superiority over that of its Palestinian neighbors, yet it does not respond to threat after threat, provocation after provocation, with the type of force that would decisively end their conflict.” What kind of force would “decisively end their conflict”? Killing every single Palestinian man, woman, and child?
His op-ed proceeds to demand the cutoff of aid — which is opposed by AIPAC, for the obvious reason that it would create even more dysfunction and empower terrorists. Paul’s bill does boast the support of the extreme right-wing group Zionist Organization of America. Paul’s gambit here is obviously to win over Republican hawks justifiably concerned he shares his father’s kook foreign-policy ideology. His remedy is to embrace a different kind of kookery.
And what happened to his previous call for ending foreign aid to Israel as well? Poof! Kilgore blasts Paul’s naked opportunism:
Paul, of course, has been engaged in a intensive process of overcoming his and his father’s reputation as “anti-Israeli” for favoring a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel. So there is probably no act Israel could commit that won’t be aggressively praised by the peace-loving senator (in an impressive display of hypocrisy, he’s calling his bill for a termination of U.S. aid to the PA the “Stand With Israel Act.”) But blasting the administration for exercising actual diplomatic care over an explosive situation crosses the line from opportunism to cynical demagoguery.
Larison is disappointed that Paul’s willingness to buck GOP hawks on issues like Iraq doesn’t seem to extend to Israel:
On most things related to Israel, Sen. Paul is always too defensive, too eager to say what he thinks most Republicans want to hear, and too worried about being judged wanting in his support for the client state. Like his unnecessary security guarantee to Israel last year, this latest push to cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority is a doomed bid to beat hard-liners at their own game.
The larger problem with this is that it helps to perpetuate an undesirable status quo in U.S.-Israel relations. At present, Israel can act in whatever way it wishes without having to fear the loss of any U.S. aid or diplomatic support, and the U.S. then naturally takes some of the blame for the behavior of its client. That enables Israel to behave in harmful and ultimately self-destructive ways, and that undermines U.S. interests in the process. This is the phenomenon that Barry Posen refers to in Restraint as “reckless driving,” which the U.S. encourages by providing uncritical and effectively unconditional support to some of its allies and clients. Sen. Paul should be trying to discourage this recklessness and reduce the U.S. role in enabling it, but at the moment he is doing just the opposite.
It might even confirm to some that, in fact, there is an effective litmus test on both the GOP and Democratic primaries that demands that all potential presidents adhere to this ruinous policy for both Israel and America – or be tainted mercilessly as anti-Semitic. I want to support Paul in many ways. But this is a sign that he has no spine at all. He’s a sad, pathetic panderer on this – and libertarians and non-interventionists need to see that writing very clearly on the wall.
The Dish 