(NewsNation) — A State Department official resigned Wednesday over the Biden administration’s decision to send weapons to Israel.
Josh Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, said in a letter posted to LinkedIn that in the 11 years he worked there, he has made moral compromises that weighed heavily on him.
But the provision of lethal arms to Israel, Paul wrote, was more than he was willing to take.
“That fact is, blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the interests of the people on both sides,” 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.”
Biden is seeking billions of dollars of aid to Israel, and the United States provided emergency munitions to the country after an attack by militant group Hamas on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 people.
Israel swiftly declared war after the attack and had its military send relentless airstrikes into Gaza. Hamas militants, meanwhile, are firing rockets into Israel and have taken nearly 200 hostage while tensions flare in the West Bank.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,785 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, a majority of them women, children and older adults. Another 12,500 have been injured in Gaza, with 1,300 believed to be buried under rubble.
Paul called Hamas’ attack a “monstrosity of monstrosities” and decried potential escalations by Hezbollah or even Iran itself as “further cynical exploration” of the existing tragedy.
But the response Israel is taking with American support for it and 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.”
“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,” he said. “That is to say, it is immensely disappointing and entirely unsurprising.”
At a press briefing, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the agency expects and appreciates its employees having different beliefs. While it is the president who sets the policy the State Department encourages employees to let leadership know if they disagree, Miller said.
However, he also added, in regard to the specific criticisms in Paul’s letter, that the United States has made it clear that it “strongly” supports Israel’s right to defend itself, though still expects officials to abide by international law.
While Paul still believes the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs can do a lot of good, he does not think people can be both for and against occupation or freedom.
“We cannot be for a better world while contributing to one that is materially worse,” Paul said.
More than 1 million Palestinians fled their homes in Gaza City and other places in the north of the territory after Israel told them to evacuate, even as Israeli airstrikes pounded places in the south that were told to evacuate. The United Nations said such an evacuation would be calamitous after Israel sealed off food, water and electricity from Gaza and that forced population transfers could even constitute a crime against humanity.
Israel said Wednesday it will allow Egypt to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the first crack in the 10-day siege.
The murder of civilians and kidnapping of children goes against what Paul said is his desire to see both Israelis and Palestinians flourishing.
“Collective punishment is an enemy to that desire, whether it involves demolishing one home, or one thousand; as too is ethnic cleansing; as too is occupation; as too is apartheid,” he wrote.
The Biden administration wants to provide $100 million in humanitarian assistance for Palestinians affected by the conflict, a fact that Paul said he was heartened by in his letter— but he added this still didn’t make him comfortable with his role.
“My responsibilities lie solidly in the arms transfer space, and that is why I have resigned from the U.S. Government and from (Political-Military Affairs),” he explained.
Added Paul: “While I can, and have, worked hard to shape better policy making in the security assistance field, 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, and which I wholeheartedly endorse: a world build around a rules-based order, a world that advances both equality and equity and world whose arc of history bends towards the promise of liberty and of justice for all.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.