The Anti-Israel Mutiny at the State Department

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 15, 2023

 

A little over a week after the October 7 massacre, Josh Paul, a midlevel official in the State Department, resigned in protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The unbearable guilt Paul experienced when Israel retaliated against the terrorist organization responsible for the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust was the only remarkable thing about his resignation. Nevertheless, his departure from Foggy Bottom received outsize coverage in left-wing media venues like HuffPost and the New York Times.

 

Those outlets and others somehow concluded that Paul’s inability to stomach America’s support for Israel’s war of self-defense — as opposed to America’s provision of arms to states like Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, none of which produced similar qualms — said more about the Biden administration than about Paul.

 

Last week, Paul popped up as a source for Times reporter Ed Wong’s dispatch on the frustrations at lower levels of the State Department with the White House’s decision to bypass Congress and approve the emergency sale of thousands of tank shells and small-arms munitions to Israel. The efforts by confirmed officials in State to carry out the president’s orders “should cause some serious consideration of whether the secretary’s repeated assertions that the U.S. seeks to minimize civilian casualties in Israel’s operation in Gaza are sincere,” Paul said, speaking for the unnamed former colleagues who share his hostility toward Israel’s conduct.

 

Paul resurfaced again on Friday as a source for a Politico report detailing the efforts underway at the State Department to undermine the Biden administration’s conduct of American foreign affairs.

 

According to Paul, functionaries at State are quietly “collecting reports of potential Israeli violations” of human rights in Gaza — a database that could be used at a later date to pressure the president not to provide lethal arms to states like Israel if State determines that they are “more likely than not” to be used in violations of international law. Moreover, “Paul said some officials within the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs have asked State’s legal wing to ‘provide information about their potential international law exposure as a result of approving these sales.’”

 

State Department officials declined to confirm Paul’s allegations. Those who spoke on the record reiterated the White House’s rhetorical defenses of Israel’s right to neutralize the threat posed by the group responsible for the 10/7 slaughter. But beneath the surface at Foggy Bottom, diplomatic officials are busily tying the president’s hands.

 

State abruptly delayed the provision of 20,000 M16 rifles to Israeli custody over its alleged concerns that they could find their way into the hands of West Bank settlers — an expression of contempt for the Israeli coalition government, which includes an “ultranationalist minister of national security,” according to the U.S. officials who spoke with Axios.

 

The mutiny at State is gaining allies elsewhere in the administration. The conspicuous release of an intelligence assessment compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence alleging that unguided munitions account for just under half the ordnance Israel is deploying in Gaza from the air derailed press briefings on Thursday as reporters questioned Israel’s commitment to limiting collateral damage. The release forced administration officials to explain to reporters that unguided munitions have valid battlefield applications and are not an instrument designed for the purpose of killing civilians.

 

This staffers’ revolt must be a bewildering experience for Joe Biden and his inner circle. Democratic presidents are unaccustomed to rebellions among fixtures within the permanent bureaucracy who resent having to carry out the will of presidents with whom they disagree. Republicans, by contrast, are intimately familiar with insurgent campaigns of this sort.

 

George W. Bush withstood similar rebellions against his policy preferences from functionaries within State. His two chief diplomats, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, oversaw a department that was deeply skeptical of the prospect that electoral democracy could take hold in Iraq (which, regardless of Baghdad’s many shortcomings, has so far proven unfounded). Its policy directors were accused of making it their “mission to loosen sanctions on Iran” against the president’s wishes. Its members resisted efforts to reorganize the executive branch to meet the threats posed by transnational Islamist terrorism. Foreign-service officers engaged in an outright “revolt” over the prospect of serving a tour in Iraq — a rebellion quelled only when the White House credibly threatened its “usually hostile” diplomatic personnel with dismissal.

 

Donald Trump, too, faced his share of insurrections among America’s diplomats. State officials objected to Rex Tillerson’s effort to make it easier to export arms to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Myanmar — a consideration that put the prosecution of the Global War on Terror over human-rights concerns, their dissenting cable read. Tillerson’s record at State left much to be desired, and many accounts suggest his subordinates did not regard him as a highly competent head of the agency. But there was another “open revolt” when Trump summarily dismissed his first secretary of state. For all his deficiencies, former State officials with contacts in the agency told reporters that Mike Pompeo was a bigger threat — particularly in regard to his hostility toward Iran. Pompeo endured his own “diplomats’ revolt” having presided over a culture in which the agency was being “hollowed out from within.” By 2019, “declining morale at the State Department” combined with the president’s “go-it-alone foreign policy” had contributed to declining demand for Foreign Service Officers Tests,” NBC News reported. All of the internal tension that spilled out onto the pages of American newspapers was fueled by State Department functionaries who saw themselves as bigger, somehow, than the presidents they served.

 

It is no coincidence that the mutiny in Joe Biden’s diplomatic corps was sparked by his pursuit of policies typically pursued by Republican administrations. Democratic-leaning diplomatic professionals who cut their teeth under Barack Obama, whose administration was inordinately antagonistic toward Israel and its prime minister, must be disoriented by Biden’s deference toward Netanyahu’s wartime government. Biden can put this rebellion down by adopting yet another Republican position: let the mutineers go.