One Man’s Martyr Complex Exposes the Rot in the State Department

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 19, 2023

 

It’s not often that the agitprop to which the Huffington Post treats its readership migrates onto the top of the New York Times’ homepage. That was the trajectory followed by the left-wing outlet’s discovery that a State Department functionary had resigned in protest over Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself.

 

Josh Paul served as Foggy Bottom’s director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for eleven years before posting his public resignation letter to LinkedIn this week. In that document, the aggrieved functionary made himself out to be a martyr. “I knew [the State Department] 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,” Paul wrote. But it was the “provision of lethal arms to Israel” that pushed him too far.

 

“It was clear that there’s no arguing with this one,” Paul said of the administration’s decision to transfer aid and arms to Israel following the massacre of 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 200 more Israeli citizens and foreign nationals by the Hamas-led regime in the Gaza Strip. In a fawning profile of the previously unknown bureaucrat in the Times, Paul castigated Biden’s “blind support for one side” of the Israeli–Hamas conflict, called the White House’s posture “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values,” and said Biden’s policies perpetuate “the status quo of the occupation.”

 

You might think that a longtime staffer inside America’s diplomatic apparatus would know that Israel’s war against Hamas does not perpetuate the “status quo of occupation” insofar as Israel unilaterally removed (sometimes physically) every Israeli Jew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The “status quo” that has existed since Paul took up the role in 2012 has been a Hamas-led regime in the Strip backed by the legitimacy of a single fair election in 2006. That regime transformed the territory it governed into an economic basket case utterly dependent on foreign aid for its existence, which is dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish State.

 

Nevertheless, Paul took issue with what he said are the White House’s efforts to support the defense of a nation that is prosecuting “human rights violations.” He bemoaned the discretion the White House has been provided by Congress to interpret statutes that proscribe the provision of that sort of aid to human-rights violators, but at least lawmakers in the legislature sometimes take issue with the president’s priorities. “But in this instance, there isn’t any significant pushback likely from Congress,” he said. Paul is out on an island, and he has convinced himself — and the Times, apparently — that his isolation is everyone else’s fault.

 

For more than a decade, Paul presumably pursued the executive branch’s priorities without too much complaint, though he told the Huffington Post he had his fair share of “debates and discussions” over “controversial arms sales” in the past. None of which over the course of Barack Obama’s second term, Donald Trump’s presidency, and most of Joe Biden’s first term he found so unconscionable that he contemplated resignation. Indeed, a review of Biden’s arms sales to America’s foreign partners alone leaves the impression that Paul’s pang of conscience is quite particular to Israel.

 

The left-wing outlet the Intercept found that, in 2022, the Biden White House distributed arms to at least 48 of the 84 countries Sweden’s University of Gothenburg classifies as “closed autocracies.” Not all the recipients of those transfers are disclosed, but progressives have long expressed displeasure with the provision of arms to some well-known recipients such as Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, neither of which have particularly stellar human-rights records. Under Biden, the United States has provided weapons platforms, munitions, and pricey combat-training systems to its partners in places such as Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, and Thailand. Some of these countries have been accused of violently suppressing domestic dissent, sanctioning extrajudicial killings, and repressing the rights of their minority populations. Nor did the high-profile debate within the administration over its apparent willingness to approve an arms deal with Vietnam provoke a crisis of conscience in this high-minded State Department functionary.

 

Through it all, Paul managed. Indeed, the casual observer could be forgiven for thinking Paul holds Israel to a standard that is reserved for Israel alone.

 

Human-rights protections as a tool of statecraft were never meant to make the perfect the enemy of American geostrategic interests. As Jimmy Carter’s Carter national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said of that administration’s efforts to elevate human rights “vis-à-vis the Soviet Union,” the promotion of civil liberties and natural rights had “instrumental utility” in advancing America’s more tangible interests during the Cold War.

 

No administration before or since would sacrifice its geostrategic interests because a combatant in a declared war against a state entity declined to provide the enemy government with finite resources such as “medical care and electricity” — as Isarel had denied the Hamas terrorists — because they can be applied to military purposes. Every kilowatt hour that is not provided to Gaza’s civilians by Hamas is one that is used by its guerillas. Every medical kit requisitioned by Hamas keeps its fighters on the battlefield. The so-called Israeli “blockade” around Gaza, which is designed to keep dual-use materials from being used to target and kill Israelis, is a banal feature of all declared wars and does not violate the Laws of Armed Conflict. Nor does the word “Egypt” appear in either the Times or HuffPost dispatch, which maintains its own crossing point into Gaza and could serve as a conduit for broad humanitarian relief if Cairo was amenable to such a program. But it is not. If that condition frustrates Paul as much as Israel’s war of self-defense, he has kept those objections to himself.

 

It seems that the media outlets indulging Paul’s martyr complex see the stand he is taking against Israel and Israel alone as an indictment of the Biden administration. Casual observers could be forgiven for concluding, however, that Paul’s selective morality and his boosters’ endorsement of it is reflective of something much darker. Paul concludes by maintaining that his colleagues at State were “very supportive” of his decision. With any luck, those like-minded officials at State will soon follow his lead.