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A top official within the State Department office overseeing U.S. arms transfers to foreign powers has resigned in protest over what he says is the Biden administration’s “expanded and expedited” movement of weapons to Israel as it blockades and carries out air strikes on Gaza in its war with Hamas.
The resignation of Joshua Paul, director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, exposes an apparent rift among administration officials over President Biden strong expression of support for Israel in the most recent clash.
The rift has been on display among Democrats since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and sparked Israel’s retaliation in Gaza. Biden administration officials and other Democrats have publicly chastised a small number of party members who’ve criticized Israel since the attack.
Mr. Paul, a well-known State Department spokesman for more than a decade, said in a resignation statement Wednesday that he was quitting because of the Biden administration’s “blind support for one side” in the Israel-Hamas war.
“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,” Mr. Paul wrote in a statement posted online.
The United States has long had a policy of providing weaponry and other military aid to Israel. The Iran-backed Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rules over the Gaza Strip, has been officially designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997.
Mr. Paul touched on such factors in his resignation statement.
“Let me be clear: Hamas’ attack on Israel was not just a monstrosity; it was a monstrosity of monstrosities,” he wrote. “I also believe that potential escalations by Iran-linked groups such as Hezbollah, or by Iran itself, would be a further cynical exploitation of the existing tragedy.”
“But I believe to the core of my soul that 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 — and is not in the long-term American interest.”
“I acknowledge and am heartened to see the efforts this administration has made to temper Israel’s response, including advocating for the provision of relief supplies, electricity, and water to Gaza, and for safe passage,” he wrote, but added that “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 … a world built around a rules-based order, a world that advances both equality and equity, and a world whose arc of history bends towards the promise of liberty and of justice for all.”
The Pentagon is surging troops, ships and weaponry to the Middle East in an attempt to keep the Israel-Hamas clash from metastasizing into a regional war.
Mr. Biden is slated to deliver an address from the Oval Office Thursday in which he is expected to request that Congress approve tens of billions in fresh U.S. military aid for Israel and for Ukraine, the latter of which remains at war with Russian invaders.
Mr. Paul suggested in his resignation statement that he wholeheartedly supports arming Ukraine. Part of his role over the past 11 years within the Bureau of Political and Military Affairs has involved working on U.S. “support for Ukraine’s defense in the face of murderous Russian aggression,” he wrote.
But he also wrote that he has “deep personal ties” to both sides in the conflict in the Middle East, having worked with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and as a liaison with the Israeli Defense Forces during his career.
“It is my firm belief that in such conflicts, for those of us who are third parties, the side we must pick is not that of one of the combatants, but that of the people caught in the middle, and that of the generations yet to come,” he wrote.
Neither the White House nor Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Jessica Lewis, under whom Mr. Paul served, has commented on the resignation.
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