By Noah Rothman
Monday, January 13, 2025
On Sunday night, Americans were treated to a variety
of spurious allegations promulgated by several former State Department
employees who have made a vocation of insisting that no one will listen to
them. Hala Rharrit was among them. Once a career diplomat who occupied several
high-ranking posts, Rharrit left the State Department in April of last year to
protest the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel after the October 7
massacre. Her righteous self-imposed exile notwithstanding, Rharrit’s non-stop media blitz and speaking tour on which she embarked in the immediate wake of her resignation has yet to abate.
Rharrit claims she was singled out for criticism,
censure, and marginalization because she was willing to tell the truth about
Israel’s monstrous wartime policies and America’s diminished standing abroad as
a result of its support for those policies. But it seems that tidy narrative
cannot survive first contact with a single follow-up question.
“I was stopped from doing this, but I kept on doing it,” Rharrit told NPR two days after her resignation. “From the
get-go, I refused to do, as a spokesperson in the region, I refused to do
interviews on Gaza,” she added when asked to explain why her position became
untenable. “I was accused of having misconduct, that it was a conduct issue,
that I was refusing to do my job.” It sounds rather like that accusation was
well-founded. She said she was given “an ultimatum” — either to do her job,
take on a new detail, or resign. She chose the latter.
A casual survey of Rharrit’s advocacy since she returned
to private life ratifies her fed-up employers’ wisdom. She told one far-left media outlet last spring that Israel was
engineering a “famine” in Gaza and “children have died of starvation.” It was not true. “Facts are facts,” she told Amy Goodman, host of
the far-Left talk show Democracy Now! “Hamas has repeatedly agreed to
cease-fire deals. It is Benjamin Netanyahu who has reneged on those deals.”
Again, not just false but obviously so to all but the most credulous observers.
Rharrit’s tenuous relationship with the truth was on full
display in her sit-down with 60 Minutes’ Cecilia Vega. “I would show the
complicity that was indisputable,” she said of America’s complicity in the
slaughter of children. Indeed, “It’s been overwhelmingly children.” Even if we
take the United Nations’ November
2024 estimates at face value (and we should not), the civilian casualties
in Gaza are not “overwhelmingly” or even a majority children. Those deaths are
nothing to celebrate, but that is the kind of collateral damage that Hamas
deliberately ensures when it positions its fighters and weapons in non-military
facilities to maximize civilian casualties. Despite Israeli efforts to conduct
what some military historians maintain has been the most cautious campaign of urban warfare in modern history, some
inadvertent death is unavoidable.
“You believe this has put a target on America’s back?”
Vega asked. “Yes,” Rharrit replied. “I say it as someone who has worked
intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two
decades.” Surely, given her pedigree — one to which Rharrit constantly refers —
she could not be suggesting that Islamist and Iran-backed elements in the
Middle East would evince less hostility toward the United States if it just
gave up on its support for Israel. To entertain — much less retail — that notion
would call her judgment into question, to say nothing of her value to the State
Department.
CBS didn’t rely only on Rharrit to indict the Israeli
government and, by extension, the United States. They brought in former State
Department officials Josh Paul and Andrew Miller to advance her pernicious
narrative.
Paul, too, resigned to much fanfare just eleven days after Hamas slaughtered
hundreds of Jews — well before Israel’s campaign against Hamas in the Gaza
Strip began in earnest. He had served as director of the Bureau of
Political-Military Affairs for over a decade prior to his resignation. There,
he oversaw the disbursement of lethal American aid to its partners abroad;
among them, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the Philippines, and Thailand.
It is at least noteworthy that allegations of state-sponsored repression and
extra-judicial killings that plague some of these countries did not prompt any
pangs of conscience. Only the prospect of Israeli retaliation for the worst
single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust convinced Paul that the Biden White House’s “shortsighted,
destructive, unjust, and contradictory” support for “the status quo of the
occupation” must be opposed.
If you think you smell a bad faith actor, the comments
Paul provided CBS News should confirm your suspicions. “I think the moment of
October 7 was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel,” he said
with mock solemnity. “And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real,
just and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in
which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and
in which its hostages would be free.” What bunk. Paul himself exhibited
none of the pro-Israel “solidarity” he attributes to the rest of the world. And
those who share his outlook would not have shown even grudging affection for
the Jewish state if it had responded to the slaughter of its citizens with a
defeated shrug. Nor would their “solidarity” be desirable if it comes only at
the cost of Jewish blood.
Lastly, CBS trucked in former deputy assistant secretary
of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Andrew Miller, who did not resign
from the Biden administration in protest but is critical of it nonetheless.
Miller insisted that the Biden administration had done next to nothing to rein
in the Israeli government. “I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu
received is that he was the one in the driver’s seat, and he was controlling
this, and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for
granted,” Miller insisted. What a bizarre misapprehension for Netanyahu to be
operating on given the Biden administration’s petty restrictions on the
disbursement not just of weapons and bombs but the bulldozers
Israel uses to clear hostile areas of improvised explosive devices.
Miller closed with the contention that the U.S. response
to October 7 should have been to withhold certain classes of weapons
from Israel while assuring our mutual enemies in Tehran that those restrictions
would be lifted if “attacks against Israel” “accelerate.” The moral vacuity in
this line of reasoning is matched only by its strategic ineptitude. The notion
that the U.S. should only refuse to tolerate the acceleration of Iran-backed
attacks on Israel implies that there is a level of terrorist violence against
the Jewish state Washington should be able to stomach. Indeed, some of the ordnance Biden withheld from the Israelis had nothing to do
with whether they were being used “inappropriately,” in Miller’s subjective
estimation (they were not). Rather, it was an unsuccessful effort to compel Israel to forgo an offensive in Rafah, where it
subsequently liberated some of its hostages and neutralized Hamas leader Yahya
Sinwar.
What a hash 60 Minutes made of this affair. Its
humiliation was probably inevitable when its producers decided to sell us on a
lopsided narrative fueled by the irrational anti-Israel animus that the State
Department has long incubated. It’s good to see those who do not believe they
can carry out America’s mission abroad extricate themselves from public life,
but there’s more where they came from. One thing is sure: Marco Rubio will have
his work cut out for him at Foggy Bottom.
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