How Did Rand Paul Become the GOP's Point Man on Cutting Funds to the Palestinians?

The international furor over the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris has obscured this a bit, but the Senate's foreign policy week was supposed to begin with a fight about Palestine. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who has never won over the more hawkish or pro-Israel voices in his party, rushed out a bill that would end all American aid to the Palestinian Authority unless its leaders ended their bid to join the International Criminal Court. (The news was broken by the Washington Free Beacon's Adam Kredo, whose colleague Alana Goodman had given Paul some of his worst-ever press with 2013 stories about a key staffer who'd moonlighted as a neo-confederate shock jock.)

Paul's bill came as a surprise because this issue was 1) a shift away from the status quo on PA funding and 2) one that had previously belonged to senators who rarely agreed with him. As John Hudson wrote in Foreign Policy, aid for the PA had been sacrosanct for years, and a previous Paul stab at the money was opposed by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee. (Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post columnist supportive of Israel's government and held in little esteem by the Paul network, called this a failure of "Paul's phony pro-Israel bill".) Yet this week, Israeli's Likud-led government was supportive of efforts to defund the PA.