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A State Department official who worked on arms transfers to foreign powers resigned Wednesday over the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. He said he could not support further U.S. military aid to Israel and called the administration’s response “an impulsive reaction.” “intellectual bankruptcy.”
The official, Josh Paul, was director of congressional and public affairs in the State Department’s Office of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees arms transfers. His departure represents a rare level of internal unease over the administration’s strong support for Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East. More broadly, it was an unusual public display of dissension within President Biden’s foreign policy apparatus, which has prevented such expressions of frustration from coming into focus.
Paul had spent more than 11 years in his role coordinating congressional relations and public communications for a key office that handles military aid. He said he could not imagine continuing a job that he said contributed to the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
“Let us absolutely acknowledge the horror and magnitude of what Hamas has done. And that’s why I fear the extent of the possible Israeli response or the ongoing Israeli response,” Paul said in an interview. “I recognize the right of the Israeli government to respond and defend itself. I guess I wonder how many Palestinian children will die in this.”
Paul said robust U.S. military aid to Israel actually gives the country the green light to do whatever it wants against Gaza, regardless of civilian casualties. The Israeli government has said it wants to destroy Hamas and has told residents of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip to move south, a call that U.N. monitors say would lead to a humanitarian disaster.
The State Department declined to comment, citing policy when discussing personnel matters. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spent the last week exploring the Middle East to build regional support for Israel’s right to self-defense and avoid regional war, but also to urge Israel to respect humanitarian concerns in Gaza.
Biden, who visited Israel on Wednesday, declared that the United States “will stand with you.” However, he called on Israelis to distinguish between Palestinians and Hamas and to minimize civilian casualties.
“The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas,” he said. “The Palestinian people are also suffering a lot.”
Paul said he met others He had encountered problems while working on military aid at the State Department, but he had always felt he could “steer things in the right direction.” That wasn’t the case this time, which was the main reason for his resignation, he said.
“There are no questions. There is no room for substantive disagreement within the system on this issue. And that led me to my decision,” he said. He said there was no single defining moment that led to his resignation on Wednesday, just a feeling that he was involved in a series of decisions that he disagreed with and had no influence over.
Although the state’s Office of Political-Military Affairs also played a major role in arms shipments to Ukraine following last year’s Russian invasion, Paul’s academic background and career have long been tied to Israel and the Palestinian territories. He wrote his master’s thesis on Israeli counterterrorism and civil rights, he said, and worked on security sector governance at the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in the West Bank. And in his resignation letter he said he had “deep personal ties to both sides of the conflict.”
Paul said he took a pre-planned vacation last week that gave him more space to observe what was happening from the outside and think about his decision. Since publicly announcing his resignation in a two-page statement on LinkedIn, he said he has received many expressions of support from State Department colleagues.
“What I’ve heard is ‘Thank you,’ ‘We’re with you,’ and things like that,” he said.