A US State Department official resigned on Wednesday in protest against Washington’s decision to increase military aid to Israel and said the US-supported Israeli war on Gaza would bring more misery to both Israelis and Palestinians.
In a memo posted online on Wednesday, Josh Paul, a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, said that President Joe Biden’s administration was making the same mistakes that Washington has been making for decades.
He added, “Israel’s response, and with it the American support both for that response and for the status quo of the occupation, will only result in more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people.”
He said that Biden administration’s “blind support for one side” was causing policy decisions that were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse”. He said, “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.”
“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,” wrote Paul, who was involved in the delivery of armaments to US allies for more than 11 years.
Hamas, the armed group that dominates Gaza, attacked southern Israel on October 7, prompting Israel’s retaliatory attack on the besieged Palestinian enclave. The violence has killed at least 1,400 people in Israel and nearly 3,800 in Gaza.
He stated, “I feel I have reached the end of that bargain in our current trajectory with regard to the continued – rather, enlarged and expedited – provision of lethal arms to Israel.”
Paul stated in an interview with The New York Times that “continuing to give Israel carte blanche to kill a generation of enemies, only to create a new one, does not ultimately serve the interests of the United States.”
On his Wednesday visit, Biden expressed his support for Israel and gave it “the green light to act as it sees fit” in Gaza.
United Nation resolution on Palestine fails as US vetoes in support of Israel
