Josh Paul, director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for more than a decade, said in a public post on his LinkedIn profile Wednesday that he had resigned "due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel."
The bureau takes the lead when approving proposed foreign arms sales and transfers, and Paul said he was fully aware when joining the bureau that his job would involve "moral complexity and moral compromises" and had pledged that he would stay in the role as long as he believed that any harm he might cause would be outweighed by the good he could do.
"I am leaving today because I believe that in the current course with regards to the continued — indeed, expanded and expedited — provision of lethal arms to Israel — I have reached the end of that bargain," he wrote. "I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden had both pledged in the immediate aftermath of Hamas' Oct. 7 deadly terror attacks that the U.S. would provide military assistance to Israel, and the president is expected to call for additional military aid for Israel and Ukraine in an address scheduled for Thursday evening in which he will "discuss our response to Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel and Russia's ongoing brutal war against Ukraine."
While Hamas' attacks were a "monstrosity of monstrosities," Israel's U.S.-supported response to that attack within the Gaza Strip, where those terror attacks originated from and where more than 2 million Palestinians live, as well as the U.S.' effective support for the "status quo" of Israel's "occupation" of Gaza, "will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people — and is not in the long term American interest," Paul argued in his post.
Those responses, which include a form of "collective punishment" for Gaza residents, are just the latest example of decades of a "security for peace" approach that has not worked to actually secure peace, according to the former official.
"This Administration's response — and much of Congress' as well — is an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia," Paul wrote.
Paul urged that the U.S. "pick the side of the people caught in the middle" in any similar future conflicts, and put human rights at the center of any related decision-making process, including being willing to "name gross violations of human rights no matter who carries them out," even if the perpetrators are U.S. allies or partners.
Paul did not immediately respond to questions from Law360 on Thursday regarding his specific concerns, the reaction of the State Department to his resignation and his post-government plans.
At the agency's daily press briefing Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that "we understand, we expect, we appreciate that different people working in this department have different political beliefs, have different personal beliefs, have different beliefs about what United States policy should be — in fact, we think that's one of the strengths of this government, one of the strengths of this department."
The department specifically encourages staff to speak out when they disagree with policy or proposed policy, according to Miller.
Responding to the concerns raised by Paul in his letter, Miller said that arms transfers to Israel receive the same vetting under the so-called Leahy Laws, which bar U.S. military assistance to countries with significant human rights violations, that any arms transfer to any other country would receive and that Biden and Blinken have "very clearly" stated that "we expect Israel to abide by all international law as they defend themselves."
Miller also said, however, that the Biden administration has "made clear that we strongly support Israel's right to defend itself; we are going to continue to provide the security assistance that they need to defend themselves; we think that they have a right — not only a right, but an obligation to defend themselves against these terrorist attacks."
--Editing by Andrew Cohen.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
