Amidst the ongoing crisis between Israel and Gaza, a top official from the State Department publicly resigned his position citing the Biden administrations lack of support for Israel.
For the past 11 years Josh Paul, the director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, made his resignation letter to President Biden public citing Biden’s “blind support for one sidev(Israel) is producing policy decisions that are “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.”
“The response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. I fear we are repeating the same mistakes we have made these past decades, and I decline to be a part of it for longer,” he wrote.
Paul blasted Hamas’ terror attacks leaving over 1,400 Israel’s dead. “Let me be clear: Hamas’ attack on Israel was not just a monstrosity; it was a monstrosity of monstrosities.”
During an interview with the New York Times Paul said, “that Israel’s cutting off of water, food, medical care and electricity to Gaza, a territory of two million people, should prompt protections in a number of longstanding federal laws intended to keep American weapons out of the hands of human rights violators. But those legal guardrails are failing.”
“The problem with all of those provisions is that it rests on the executive branch making a determination that human rights violations have occurred,” he said. “The decision to make a determination doesn’t rest with some nonpartisan academic entity, and there’s no incentive for the president to actually determine anything.”
“I have had my fair share of debates and discussions and efforts to shift policy on controversial arms sales. It was clear that there’s no arguing with this one. Given that I couldn’t shift anything, I resigned,” he said during an interview with the Huffington Post.
In the resignation letter he wrote, “When I came to this bureau … I knew it was not without its moral complexity and moral compromises, and I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt … the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do. In my 11 years I have made more moral compromises than I can recall, each heavily, but each with my promise to myself in mind, and intact.”
