A very encouraging development is that the Israel Lobby is increasingly on the defensive with the Republican base. Both Ron Paul and Rand Paul have proposed cutting the foreign budget. A letter from Ron Paul was headlined “Stop buying friends overseas, save $6 billion!”

“Borrowing money from China — or printing it out of thin air — to hand out overseas in [an] attempt to purchase friends has been a failing foreign policy, as we see most recently in Egypt where there is not even a government in place!” Paul wrote in his Dear Colleague letter. “We should seek friendly relations and trade overseas, but we cannot justify lavish gifts to foreign leaders when American taxpayers are increasingly feeling the pain of our economic crisis…. We cannot afford to have ‘business as usual’ when we are bankrupt.”

The bill is not endorsed by the leadership and probably won’t pass, but “Paul’s amendment represents the rising tide of opposition to foreign aid and the increased difficulty of defending such aid in Congress.”

These calls to restrict foreign aid are framed entirely within the context of a completely out of control federal budget. But that hasn’t stopped the David Horowitz from his usual over the top craziness, painting anyone who doesn’t do everything Israel wants as an anti-Semite: “Ron Paul is a Vicious Anti-Semite and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him.”

Long ago Bill Buckley drummed the anti-Semites out of the conservative movement, and the movement thrived as a result. But the Jew-haters have returned. For years the Texas crackpot, Ron Paul, has been attacking America and Israel as imperialist powers — the Great Satan and the Little Satan, and calling for America’s retreat from the battle against our totalitarian enemies. At the recent CPAC conference Paul’s Jew-hating storm-troopers swarmed the Freedom Center’s table to vent their spleen against Israel as a Nazi state. Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States.

“Vicious anti-Semite”? “Jew-hating storm troopers”??

The “Jew hating storm troopers” refers to hundreds of thugs plastered with swastikas who stormed Horowitz’s table at the CPAC conference and viciously beat up the presenters.

Oh wait. That’s how the scene played out in Horowitz’s diseased mind. In the real world, the people manning Horowitz’s table were confronted by a whole lot of young conservatives who have gotten the message that Israel is an apartheid state bent on ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinians. They seem to be aware of the hypocrisy of Jewish activist organizations that preach multiculturalism for non-Jews and aggressive ethnonationalism for Jews.

One of Horowitz’s operatives, David Swindle (who really should think about changing his name), recounts the avalanche of indifference and hostility that he and the others manning the booth faced. There was a paleoconservative fan of “the infamous anti-Semite Pat Buchanan” and a great many others who confronted the Horowitz group:

We heard it all — some points nakedly anti-Semitic, others nonsensical, and some emanating from the talking points of Ron Paul. Was this really that important of an issue? Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. Israel is a “Nazi state.” It’s hard to be sympathetic for Israel when they oppress the Palestinians so much. People are starving in Gaza….

Swindle says he was “drained” by the experience (probably like I’d feel manning an anti-immigration, pro-White booth at an ADL conference), reviving only at a Shabbat dinner with people who were completely on page with his pro-Israel views.

It’s nice to see a pro-Israel activist beaten down like that, finding refuge only among his Jewish friends. Perhaps the Israel Lobby really is on the defensive now in a way it hasn’t been for years, as the people at Mondoweiss keep saying.

And the really encouraging thing is that a great many young conservatives are turning away from neocon Israelocentrism as a paradigm for what it means to be conservative, and that’s all to the good.