Back in November, I wrote that Rand Paul’s presidential hopes would be a difficult sale to pro-Israel conservatives and Republicans. Paul’s opposition to U.S. aid to Israel and an isolationist mindset that was highly reminiscent of the views of his extremist father, the former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, would seem to make his potential ascent in the GOP a troubling development for Jewish Republicans. While the exchange between us on the question of his attitude toward Israel may not have changed many minds, his recent trip to Israel is a clear indication that the Kentucky senator is serious about running for president.
Paul’s visit to the Jewish state was part of an effort to reposition himself as a friend of Israel, and there are some pro-Israel voices that seem inclined to take him at his word. There’s a lot to like about his criticism of President Obama’s attempts to dictate security policy to the Netanyahu government as well as the fact that he seems to be moving in the right direction on ties between the two countries. Yet it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that anyone inclined to buy into the idea that he should be thought of as a reliable friend of Israel is acting like a very cheap date for the presidential wannabe. Rand Paul may not exactly be a chip off the old block when it comes to the expressions of hostility and willingness to demonize Israel. But his positions on aid and, even more importantly, on broader foreign policy concepts are still far away from anything that the pro-Israel community would recognize as acceptable.
As the Jerusalem Post reported last weekend, Paul criticized President Obama’s statements about the building of new Jewish homes in Jerusalem. Saying Israel’s policy was “none of our business,” the senator also made it clear that “I came here to show that I am supportive of the relationship between Israel and America.” As Seth Lipsky wrote in the New York Post on Sunday, Paul’s stand is noteworthy:
There hasn’t been such a supportive comment on Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and in Jerusalem since Sarah Palin last spoke on the subject. Her comments drove the left up the wall.
Lipsky is right and that’s very much to Paul’s credit. But it should also be understood that his “let the Israelis decide things for themselves” stand comes in the context of a longstanding position that treats everything that happens in the Middle East as being none of America’s business. So while his expressions of friendship are welcome and far more acceptable than the sort of stuff we had come to expect from his father, it’s difficult to argue that a person who has never believed the U.S. has vital interests in the region is the sort who can be relied upon to have Israel’s back in a crisis.
Paul also seeks, as he did in our exchange, to spin his position opposing aid to Israel as not synonymous with hostility. It is true that, as he argues, Prime Minister Netanyahu told Congress back in 1996 that he wanted to phase out U.S. aid. But Netanyahu was referring to economic assistance, not military aid. In fact, Netanyahu’s goal of eliminating economic aid has already been accomplished. For years, Israel has only gotten military aid. But Paul still wants to cut it–although he now says he wants to do it gradually and that countries that burn our flag rather than friends like Israel should get the axe first.
Israel is better off without having its economy subsidized by foreign friends, but in a region where oil money helps fuel an arms race with the nation’s foes, American assistance is vital. Paul told the Washington Post that he admires the Iron Dome anti-missile system that helped save Israeli lives during the recent fighting with Hamas and would even like to see the U.S. develop its own version. But does he think Iron Dome would have been built without extensive U.S. support from both the Bush and Obama administrations? Israel’s ability to act independently in its own interests would be enhanced if it didn’t have to rely to some degree on its one true ally. But the fact remains that American military aid remains necessary to ensure the country’s security. If you don’t get that, then you don’t get the alliance.
It is possible to argue that what we are witnessing with Rand Paul is similar to the process whereby a once-hostile figure like the late Jesse Helms eventually became a devoted friend to Israel in the latter half of his senatorial career. If so, then it may be that Paul will become a bridge between the pro-Israel community and libertarians and will help the latter understand that backing the Jewish state is a natural fit for those who believe in the cause of liberty. If his position continues to evolve, it may actually be possible for him to run in 2016 as an ardent backer of Israel even though some will always see him as his extremist father’s son.
But it is just as possible that Rand Paul’s odyssey to Israel and outreach effort to pro-Israel conservatives is analogous to Barack Obama’s path in the years before he was elected president. Obama had few ties with pro-Israel groups, and was known as the friend of pro-Palestinian activists and other radicals. But with the help of some in the Jewish community, he worked hard to change his image. He, too, said it was all a misunderstanding to see him as anything but a friend to Israel, albeit one that didn’t like the views of the Likud. Those who vouched for his pro-Israel bona fides have had a lot of explaining to do during his presidency.
Those who are allowing themselves to play that same role for Rand Paul need to think long and hard not just about being cheap dates but about the likelihood that the candidate whose positions they are rationalizing may have a very different agenda if he ever got into the White House.
Does Rand Paul believe what so many of Ron Paul's base believe about the Federal Reserve Bank being 'private corporation owned by foreign bankers'?
I think we should remain open-minded regarding Rand Paul. I'm certainly willing to do so.
The military aid is not a one way street. Israel has given the US important information about how US weapons perform in actual combat, and that information can be used to develop improvements or tactics that save American lives. And of course it assures the US industries of customers for spare parts.
To equate Obama's Arab/Palestinian ties and his corresponding animus toward Israel with Rand Paul's libertarian/isolationist orientation is to view one's enemies the same as those who are neither side's allies. In my humble view, Mr. Tobin stated his own solution — allow the pro-Israel community and Rand to use Israel's and the U.S.'s love of freedom and liberty to be the foundation of an alliance and mutual support. n nThis is vastly different than what the pro-Israel liberals/Democrats did with Obama. In that case, Obama used their common liberal/progressive causes (too many to cite) and their star-struck idol-worship, together with an occasional rhetorical bone (virtually always retracted immediately thereafter), to get them to ignore his fundamental opposition to Israel, both in Israel's alliance with the United States and in Israel's eternal war for its survival against its Arab, Palestinian, and Islamist foes. n nRand Paul's views on foreign policy in general, and foreign aid in particular, while not those mainstream supporters of Israel, need not be the basis of antagonism or opposition. There is a basis for friendship and alliance. n nI never have viewed that to be the case with Obama, all the way back to 2004, when I heard him speak to a Jewish political group less than a week after his Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate withdrew from the race, effectively ceding that election to Obama. All Obama had to do was state a few things clearly, like that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel and Israel has the right to safe and secure mutually-agreed borders, then stand back and smile. He could not do it then anymore than he has done it as President.
No, he still cant and he told everyone how he felt from the beginning. Smart people recognized it, except the majority of American Jews, who still despise Christians and vote for 0bama. You reap what you sow.
A bit of hysteria combined with patronizing garbahge. I'm not a cheap date or a cheap Jew. After the wreckage Obama will leave us in 2016, I'll be taking a hard look at anyone who might save this country. n nOh, and thanks for reading, Tobin.But I'm not flattered.
Mr. Tobin, you greatly diminish your case by attacking Dr. Rand Paul (and his father) on aid to Israel. I have long advocated Israel weaning herself from foreign aid including military aid. Israel needs to manufacture as many of her own state of the art weapons as possible and buy the rest on the international market. It would be good for the U.S. and it would be good and healthy for Israel. There are many things that trouble me about Ron and Rand Paul but your continual invoking of aid – which relegates Israel to a schnorrer state of dependency – undermines an otherwise valid argument.
Frankly, after Obama, Rand paul's hands off attitude towards Israel would be a breath of fresh air, well worth e stupid 3B in aid Israel stupidly continues to take. n nbetter no aid to Israel AND no aid to Egypt than aid to both. n nAs long as Rand guarantees access to spare parts and munition resupply in the case of war, his promises will be worth far more than Obama's. n nRand should also make clear he will use e US veto at the Security Council to defend Israel. Costs the US nothing, and will rebuild her reputation as a principled ally. n nWake up, Jonathan. israel does not need the aid. As long as she is allowed to pay for what she needs. n
LOL/ROTFLMAO … American Jews can't help falling all over themselves to vote for B. Hussein Obama who is ready, willing and able to shove their homeland, Israel under the bus and here's Tobin, caterwauling … not about Rand Paul, but about Rand Paul's father. n nSurely Jews must look at their own behavior (over the millennii) and wonder that anyone out here supports Israel. Dude, if you don't wonder then here's a free clue … at some point, no one else will either. n
it’s difficult to argue that a person who has never believed the U.S. has vital interests in the region is the sort who can be relied upon to have Israel’s back in a crisis. n————— n1) Why would it be the business of any American political leader, absent a formal alliance, to "have the back" of any foreign country? And even where formal commitments exist, as in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, are they wise? n2) Are you aware that the only legitmate object of American foreign policy and military resources is to serve the interests of the United States? n3) Why would not it be a legitimate object of American policy to minimize vital interests abroad and attempt, as far as possible, to extricate us from them?
Exactly, I agree with you 100%. Thank you for being willing to speak the truth.
Well, I agree with Cincinnati .. exactly 0%. Here's why: n1) we do have a formal alliance with Israel. And we've had one since the country was re-founded. Are they wise? Yup. Would it be unwise to have the only free and responsible nation populated by decent human beings with western values be exterminated by the most despicable cultures on the planet (Arabs)? Yup again. n2) Define the interests of the United States. Because when I do this, repeatedly I convince myself that a healthy, safe, prosperous and growing Israel is in the interests of the United States. Why? Read my point #1. Then add in the fact that Israel was given as a homeland to the Jews by none other than G-d himself. And we've been warned about what happens to those who do not have Israel's interests at heart. Need documentation? Read the Old Testament. n3) There are certain interests abroad that America definitely should minimize and extract ourselves from. I'm with you on that. Certainly every country on the planet that has an American military base should be considered for this extraction. The only country that I would offer should never be considered a legitimate target for extraction? Yup. Israel. Why? Read my point #1 and my point #2. n nFor many of us this is not a candidate for a sample question in a logic class. This is a moral as well as a national interest issue. Many of us take the security of Israel more seriously than most American Jews. We are just not going to let American support of Israel be diminished.
US policy toward Israel should not be seen in isolation from general principles of justice, based on non-initiation of force. n nGenerally, tax-financed foreign aid should be discontinued, to the extent it is based on altruism or national sacrifice. Though who oppose Israel may cloak themselves in libertarian rhetoric, as does Ron Paul. Yet I think Rand Paul is much better. n nMuslim countries receive more aid than does Israel. A discontinuation of all US foreign aid would be net beneficial to Israel. Israel has a strong economy and can afford to buy what it needs. Israel does provide intelligence to the US, though in view of leaks in the Obama administration, perhaps paying the US in cash would be better (for Israel). n nFor Rand Paul to discontinue aid to Muslim countries first, and aid to Israel last, is prudent and fair. There are plenty of grounds on which to criticize Rand Paul's foreign policy (such as it is), but foreign aid is not one of those.
Ron Paul is not primarily a libertarian. He is a strange hybrid soft libertarian, biased non-interventionist, and fake neo-nazi. n nI made the first donation to finance the convention which nominated Ron Paul for president in the 1988 race. As a delegate, I voted for his competitor, Russel Means. n nMy instincts against Ron Paul proved correct over time. He has deliberately tapped into neo-nazi funding sources (he rented the mailing list of Willis Carto's Spotlight magazine). Self-styled "anarcho-capitalist" Lew Rockwell is Ron Paul's brain, and wrote most of the coded language and weird pandering in the Ron Paul Newsletter. Lew was an acolyte of Murray Rothbard, an economist of the Austrian school (and enemy of Ayn Rand), who like "Zelig" seemed to appear at every attempted coalition of libertarians with assorted rednecks. Murray explicitly stated this strategy in the pages of Liberty magazine. n nRothbard has corrupted the meaning of "libertarian" by grafting on another principle, that of "non-interventionism". To initiate force means, to strike first in a forceful conflict. To intervene simply means, to come between disputing parties. n nIn much the same manner, advocates of government control of the economy have mis-appropriated the good name "liberal". Now, true liberals have to call ourselves "classical liberals" or "libertarians". Or, we were able to, until Rothbard and his followers altered the meaning. We're running out of good terms. Gone, are "progress"; "social"; "liberal"; and soon, "libertarian". n nRothbard resurrected an almost-forgotten doctrine from the medieval era, which culminated in the Westphalia Treaty. This resulted from a mis-interpretation of "Jus Naturale" and "Jus Gentium" after the fall of the Roman Empire. The sovereign was thought to own the estate of his country, as a Roman proprietor owned his personal estate. Therefore, invasion or revolution were thought to violate the property rights of the ruler. I suggest reading Ancient Law, chapter four, by Sir Henry Sumner Maine.
I hate to break it to you folks, but Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Obama are all agreed as far as the important points about Israel. They don't want to get into any wars for Israel and they all want to cut off the aid as soon as they can circumvent the Israel lobby's stranglehold sufficiently to do so. n nThe rest is just fluff. n nA growing majority of the American people agree, too.
We are a nation of immigrants…the "melting pot" has not always produced an even texture of unalloyed loyalty to this nation. Witness the role of the American Irish in funding the IRA and bending US foreign policy with respect to Ireland's relationship with Great Britain and eventual independence. So it is not the first time that ethnic identification and pride has laid its hand on the American tiller of state in the interests of someone's homeland. n n
Moreover, unlike the case of the Irish struggle with Britain, there is an undeniable enmity in the Moslem world toward all things Western, predating and quite independent of anything to do with Israel. An "alliance" is predicated on a common enemy and, thus far, we do not (and likely do not have cause to) view the Moslem world as our enemy. So Israel is not an "ally" of the US, it is a "client state." Israel may wish it otherwise, but they would not exist were the Moslem world to have their way and so the Moslem world is their enemy. That could change but the Paulist view seems to be one of disengagement and retreat from world hegemony. A byproduct of that overall world view would be a less visible role in the Middle East (as well as everywhere else). It takes a uniquely unpatriotic and unAmerican (I hate that word but how else to say it in shorthand) perspective to interpret disengagement as anti-Israel.
Uh…no. Rand Paul's view of U.S. aid as a form of control that inhibits Israel from "doing what she needs to do about Arab bombs" is a far cry from either the Obama or Bush/Rice viewpoint. n nThe idea that everyone wants to stick it to Israel but are restrained from doing so by the all-powerful JOO lobby is not a view that puts you with "the majority of the American people." Back to your hole. n n n n n n n n n n
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." n n- GEORGE WASHINGTON
Saying Rand Paul is against Israel is the same thing as saying God is against Israel.
Washington was fighting a rear guard action against the inclinations of many Americans to join the cause of Republican France against the British Monarchy. There was not only the "republican" and "revolutionary" connection but also the recent critical contribution that France had made toward the success of the American Revolution, a debt as it were. Not only were the true radicals, like Tom Paine and his ilk but even Jefferson drawn instinctively toward the appeal of the French Revolution. n nWashington was determined not to risk or squander the dearly-bought freedom and independence of the United States. For all of his flaws, he was our Cincinnatus.
Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Are the Paulists using disengagement (isolationism if you wish to use the pejorative) as a cover for anti-Semitism? Or is the Paulist resistance to the stubborn and disproportionate devotion to "having Israel's back", a natural byproduct of their general policy of retreat from world hegemony? Now Tobin, with what appears to be a greater loyalty to Israel than the US, seems to be saying that it makes no difference, because the end result for Israel is the same whether your foreign policy is based on Obama's ill-disguised enmity toward Israel or Paul's dogmatic and even-handed indifference to all things foreign…the singular test for him seems to be how well you support Israel. I think that to be an ugly and ultimately unsaleable standard, even to the Christian Evangelicals and many Jewish Americans who are deeply concerned for the fate of their bretheren in Israel and take seriously the motto "never again."
The article is and should have remained an article about Rand Paul, not Ron Paul. What's up with you and Tobin (the author) not getting this?
While I reject Tobin's criticism of the "Paulist" position as one of (specific) antipathy towards Israel, we are not writing dissertations here. I am willing, for argument's sake, to accept the notion that, while it is intellectually indefensible to visit the sins of the father on the son, there is a libertarian/isolationist core there that they share. We can debate how far the apple has fallen from the tree and note that Rand Paul has some of the character of a practical politician while his father was never anything but a cause… but I don't see where splitting ideological hairs gets us very far: they are cut from the same cloth and lumping them together is not an altogether dishonest approach to the real issue here.
Claiming that Rand Paul is against Israek is tantamount to claim that God is against Israel.
In the mean time the world refuses to acknowledge that it is massively funding the war effort of the fascist countries of the ME against itself. The events that just occurred in Algeria require from the world to ask who fund these fanatics and to focus on these people and countries. This does not mean that these people may not ave justified grievances (religion cannot be accepted as justifying these grievances). The West has cowardly submitted into blackmail, which Algeria has rejected. Yet initially Algeria was blamed by some gvts for not giving in into this blackmail. Slowly the ME is imposing on the west the reality of a very dangerous conflict. The west is deliberately procrastinating rather than addressing the issues. Israel is the first line of defense.