Jim Antle tries to find a silver lining in Rand Paul’s “pro-Israel” pandering:

This volatile climate makes clear that support for intervention abroad is not always conterminous with support for Israel. It is similarly an opportunity to demonstrate that skepticism about such interventions isn’t synonymous [with] indifference or hostility to Israel—quite the opposite.

There might be some advantage in doing this if “support for Israel” didn’t usually mean giving the Israeli government a blank check in practice. One of the problems with Sen. Paul’s shows of “support” for Israel over the last few years is that he seems to accept too many hawkish assumptions about what being “pro-Israel” requires, and he then tries to beat “pro-Israel” hawks at their own game. This is not only a losing proposition politically, since the only people likely to be impressed by this will never support him on most other foreign policy issues, but it also undermines the larger critique of aggressive foreign policy that Paul wants to make. It hardly advances the cause of a foreign policy of restraint to say that “sometimes restraint can work against you.”

There is nothing wrong in calling on Israel to exercise restraint in its response to kidnappings and attacks, and it makes no sense to treat this as some terrible error on the administration’s part. Restraint is what we would hope that any government exercised in these circumstances, and it is certainly what we should want from the government of a client state. More to the point, it is almost always in the best interests of the state in question to respond to provocations and outrages with restraint, not least because its enemies benefit politically from overly militarized and heavy-handed responses. Indeed, Israel waged a mostly fruitless war in 2006 against Lebanon while ignoring such calls for restraint. Despite initially having broad international support for striking against Hizbullah, Israel frittered it away by escalating the conflict. Had Paul been in the Senate eight years ago, would he have been defending Israel’s right to “self-defense” as it bombed Lebanon for weeks, or would he have argued that the worst thing that Israel could do in that situation is to overreact and further isolate itself in the world? There isn’t anything particularly “pro-Israel” in endorsing reckless Israeli actions, and both the U.S. and Israel would benefit by exercising restraint.