Top USA civil servant Resigns over US military supplies to Israel
20.10.2023
A top American civil servant, Josh Paul resigned Wednesday in protest against the USA sending arms carte blanche to Israel. He considers the arms transfer to Israel for use in Gaza to be illegal – against US policy – as well as immoral – harmful to humanity.
His resignation is a bombshell. It is comparable to if, in Mauritius, the late Binod Bacha had resigned when he was the key man in the civil service.
Josh Paul had for eleven years held the key post of Director of the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in the State Department. This means he was a link in the State Department (Foreign Affairs Ministry in charge of protecting Americans) with Congress, on the one hand, and the Pentagon, on the other, as well as relations with the public and the press.
His resignation immediately made headlines in the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine and a few hours later, even the Biden hawks’ network the CNN.
LALIT writes about his resignation because, as thousands of Mauritians new to geo-politics come to know about the genocide against the Palestinians living in Gaza, we need, to help them distinguish, in their outrage against Israel and the USA, between the “state” and “the people”. It is important that people, as they take a side today for the first time in their lives, do not imitate what the governments of Israel and the USA say and do, in practice, against the families living in Gaza – cage them, starve them, and bomb them – because of what Hamas men did to Israeli families when they broke the fortifications that cage them in Gaza. It is not a time for tit for tat, or bate-rande. We, in LALIT, are not, and have never been, against either “the Israeli people” or the “American people”. People new to geo-politics need quickly to learn this distinction. It is these peoples’ Governments who are the joint-oppressor. The Israeli government is the colonial occupier. The US government is Israel’s arms provider and moral supporter in this colonial occupation, this apartheid, this genocide. We call on the people of Israel and the people of the USA to oppose their Governments. As so many are already doing. Mr. Josh Paul has done exactly that. It reminds us that even a high-up worker at the US State Department can think independently and take a stand. He has given up his job. So, just as in a recent article, we in LALIT chose to quote an Israeli scholar, Raz Segal, who calls what is happening now in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide”, today we quote this American civil servant.
We need to remember that the working people of all countries must unite against the merchants of war that profit from the arms deals behind this Israeli aggression on the people of Gaza. They make profit from wars world-wide, but their biggest contracts are the annual $3.8 billion to Israel, and the $10 billion now ready to be voted for, as soon as Congress can get beyond its own crisis. While in Mauritius, we have a bad Speaker, in the USA, Congress has no Speaker at all, and is, so far, unable to elect one.
Mr. Josh Paul explained to the American National Public Radio in an interview yesterday that “the administration’s new conventional arms transfer policy, enacted earlier this year, explicitly states that no transfers will be authorized under which the U.S. assesses that ‘it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit, facilitate the recipients’ commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949’.” The NPR says these risks include “attacks directed against civilians and other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including acts of violence against children”.
Josh Paul added, in civil servant understatement, “So I think for us to look at the current situation and say the answer is as many bombs as Israel asks for, knowing that their use will lead in a direction exactly opposite to our stated policy goals ... it’s disappointing, to say the least.”
In his resignation letter he takes a clear stand that is very critical of the Israeli State: “Those who know me best know that I have opinions, and they are strong ones. But this is what is at the core of them: that there is beauty to be found everywhere in this world, and it deserves both protection, and the right to flourish, and that is what I most desire for Palestinians and for Israelis. The murder of civilians is an enemy to that desire - whether by terrorists as they dance at a rave, or [in a reference to Palestinian civilians] by terrorists as they harvest their olive grove. The kidnapping of children is an enemy to that desire - whether taken at gunpoint from their kibbutz or [in a second reference to Palestinians] taken at gunpoint from their village. And, 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.” Note that he uses the terms “occupation”, “collective punishment”, “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” referring to the Israeli state. He correctly equates Hamas’ kidnapping children from a Kibbutz with the kidnapping by the Israeli state of children in Palestine over the past decades and until today. He also equates the terrorism of the Hamas men who killed Israelis with the Israeli terrorists (state and settler, we guess) who are known to kill Palestinians who come to harvest their olives.
In LALIT, we commend this brave American civil servant for both his resignation and the tenor of his letter and interview.
