I’ve spoken with the State Department official who’s resigned in protest against the Biden administration’s approach to Israel and its war with Hamas.

Josh Paul headed the bureau that oversees arms transfers, and he said he could not support the US decision to keep sending weapons to Israel while it lays siege to civilians in Gaza, which is governed by Hamas.

Paul told me he believed that Israel’s actions violated US legal provisions meant to restrict weapons sales to human rights abusers and those who broke international humanitarian law.

He cited its weeks-long blockade of food, water and medicine to the enclave, the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people and the killing of thousands more in bombing raids.

Paul acknowledged that during his tenure he’d seen many military sales to Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia, that had poor human rights records.

But in those cases, he said there were “thorough policy discussions…literally years of debate within the administration” and then strong pushback from Congress.

With Israel, “everything's just moving through as quickly as it can with no interest from either the executive branch or Congress in doing anything but rushing forward”, he said.

Paul said the US government had a history of letting Israel off the hook for incidents that constituted a “credible gross violation of human rights” because of “political concerns”.

“I think our mechanisms for determining violations are broken,” he said.

He added that the historical record shows Israel’s military campaigns and what he called “collective punishment” do not ultimately lead to security or peace.

The State Department said it was not commenting on what it called a “personnel matter”. But spokesman Matthew Miller said the administration was not concerned that it might be involved in possible war crimes by supplying weapons to Israel.

“We expect Israel to conduct its operations in compliance with international law,” he said. “We will continue to deliver [those] messages to them.”

SpaceGazelle wrote:

This apologist argument that it's not the Israeli people, it's the Israeli government is starting to get on my tits. At least with Hitler you could possibly understand the rise of the cunts in the face of such economic pain. WW1 reparations, Weimar Republic, maybe the 'winners' were equally responsible for WW1 etc.  This is an educated, wealthy nation bombing the shit out of one of the poorest on top of decades of abuse. It's unforgivable and they've had decades to elect someone who remotely thinks they might be wrong on this.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

As horrible as the hospital bombing is it's still a distraction from the stats. And the stats are Israel kills way more people than the 'other team'.

ZMM wrote:

I've learned a very important lesson today, in that referring to Gaza as the world's largest open-air prison, implies that the Palestinians of Gaza are incarcerated for some kind of wrong-doing, when in fact they have done nothing wrong. So, I'll make sure to be annoying on social media and call that out.