Why Josh Paul, a State Department Official Lost Hope in Israel

Why Josh Paul, a State Department Official Lost Hope in Israel

On October 17th, ten days after Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, a State Department official named Josh Paul quit his job and posted the resignation letter on LinkedIn. In Washington, sympathy with Israel was near-ubiquitous, and President Joe Biden’s vigorous support for the Israeli government had few public dissenters within the national-security state. This had the effect of drawing extra attention to Paul, who said he was resigning both because he disagreed with what the U.S. had already done to back Israel and because he feared what would likely come next. “I believe to the core of my soul,” Paul wrote, “that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support for both that response, and for the status quo of the occupation will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people—and is not in the long-term American interest.”

The document spread quickly, and by the start of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza Paul was being interviewed on CNN, the BBC, PBS, and elsewhere, as the emblem of internal dissent. Shaven-headed and thick-necked, with an unexpected British accent, he spoke with the same clipped, rapid precision with which military spokesmen announce casualty reports. If you set aside what he was saying, he seemed, in appearance and manner, something like the opposite of a peacenik.

He was also a former high-school classmate of mine. I remembered Paul as an intense, outdoorsy teen-ager who had moved from England to New York at the beginning of eighth grade, remained slightly aloof, and then returned to the United Kingdom for college. We had since lost touch, but I still kept track of him—he had gone to Iraq to work with George W. Bush’s Coalition Provisional Authority, then spent the better part of a year in Ramallah, in the West Bank, working for a U.S.-led project to build up the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. Afterward, he spent a decade at the State Department working for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, also known as P.M., which manages arms transfers to allies and partners, some of which have extensive histories of human-rights violations. Once, out with friends in New York, I had run into Paul as he was showing three Iraqi security officials a night out in the city. If he occupied a place in my imagination, it was an anachronistic one, as a sincere foot soldier of the American empire.

The news of his resignation left me with a slightly dissonant feeling: If all of official Washington was behind Biden’s Israel policy, why was this the guy who wasn’t? In Paul’s resignation letter, he had alluded to the ethical complexities of arms-transfer work at the State Department: “In my 11 years I have made more moral compromises than I can recall, each heavily.” I reached out and, a few hours later, received a message from him on Signal: “Funny old world, isn’t it?” Two weeks ago, I went down to Washington to meet him, and to try to gauge whether the rest of us, as Americans, should feel as implicated by the war as he did.

When I met Paul, at an outdoor café in Friendship Heights, he didn’t seem much cut loose from his former life. He was wearing a suit, and his demeanor was warm but not exactly relaxed. Texts and phone calls came from think tanks and university departments hoping to schedule events. He was still in a fight over bombs that were already being dropped. The day before, Paul said, he’d been to Capitol Hill for meetings and had stumbled upon a peace protest in a member’s office. Then he’d headed over to his old haunt at the State Department, where pro-Palestine activists were protesting. “It was going on literally outside my old window,” he said. “So I knew that all my former colleagues were listening.” At one point, the demonstrators chanted, “Quit! Your! Jobs!”

There was a generational arc to Paul’s experience. Most of our high-school classmates graduated from college in 2000. Paul earned a master’s degree at Georgetown, in national-security studies, and managed to get a job, via the Bush White House, with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. “At the time, I would have said I was an adult, but looking back I was just an excited kid,” he said. Paul arrived in March, 2004, two weeks before the start of the First Battle of Fallujah. His assignment was to serve as a civilian adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry as it trained security forces. For a time, he flew twice a week from Baghdad to Fallujah to encourage the Marines, the Iraqi police, and the tribes to work together. “How did that go?” I asked. Paul said, “I mean, my immediate counterpart in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior was assassinated.”

The U.S. had helped create a unit called the Iraqi police commandos, which eventually became the Iraqi Special Police, with the intent of taking over some of the missions of U.S. Special Forces as they transitioned out. “It very quickly was taken over by former regime Baathists, who the U.S. was very closely allied with and was embedding Special Forces advisers with, but who were committing torture, and all sorts of human-rights abuses, and extrajudicial killings,” Paul said. “But the American view was it was all right because these were our guys.” Seeing how that played out, he went on, “was something that made me very uneasy.”

Elsewhere in the region, efforts to build a Palestinian state under the principles of the Oslo Accords were under way. Paul, who had written his master’s thesis on Israeli counter terrorism, spent a year in Ramallah, working on an initiative to bolster Palestinian security forces based on the premise that “if we give Israel more security, then they will make concessions for peace.” The Israeli argument, Paul went on, was that what was holding the Palestinians back was a lack of prosperity, “and if we can open some trade routes then things would flourish.” But, in Ramallah, Paul came to doubt that this was the case. “Even with the privileges of being a Westerner there, with a government pass, able to go through the checkpoints, when you see the humiliations that Palestinians go through every day, you see how impossible it is.” There might be two towns right next to each other, tied by family, but there was no direct road to get from one to the other “because the road is now for settlers only.” Water was diverted; Palestinians with dry farms could look up at hilltops and see developments with swimming pools. Members of the Israel Defense Forces sometimes staged security raids in Palestinian communities. “The Israeli military took us on a tour of a neighborhood in Jenin, and they said, ‘It’s very dangerous, every time we come here, they shoot at us,’ ” Paul recalled. “Well, have you tried not going?”

Something about the way Paul said this—the sarcasm, as if it were all self-evident—reminded me of his adolescent self. He seemed to pull back, too. He had a tight line to walk—to sound not like he was making an a-priori ideological case for peace, as an activist might, but like his skepticism of supplying the Israeli military reflected the hard-won experience of the national-security state. Sometimes, when he spoke about Israel, I detected a political self-consciousness in the phrasing. “The Israeli story is an absolutely amazing one,” he said at one point, sounding a bit like an ambassador at a ribbon-cutting, “how it has transformed itself technologically and economically in seventy-five years.” At another point, he paused while mentioning the “horrors” of the Hamas attack, looked at my recorder, and said, “which of course I condemn.” He added, “One shouldn’t have to say that, but one does.”

The year in Ramallah had left him with the impression that security and prosperity for peace was an impossible proposition, because you could not have any of those things amid an occupation. “You cannot bomb the resistance out of the Palestinian people,” Paul said. “You can contain them, as Israel has done for a long time. But, if ultimately that is the path you take, it will not lead to security for the Israeli people.” Because, he went on, “if you bomb them continuously, and traumatize them continuously, and restrict them from leaving the land, and refuse them medical care, and control their electricity and water, they will hate you. In addition to my concern for Palestinian lives, my concern was and remains that Israel is not doing itself any favors here. That it is extending the trauma of the conflict to another generation of its own people.”

The question of exactly how much the United States is implicated in the crimes or excesses of its allies is present in much of foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere is it as tangible as within the three-hundred-and-fifty-person Political-Military Bureau of the State Department. Many of its officials are affiliated with the military. “This is not an office that attracts a lot of hippies,” a former State Department official told me. In 2012, Paul joined P.M. as its director of congressional and public affairs, a position he held until his resignation, which meant that his job was to help manage relations with Capitol Hill and public messaging about decisions to send deadly weapons systems to sometimes questionable regimes. He was also involved in the approval process for major weapons sales. The laws and policies governing such arms deals require scrutiny of the human-rights records of the governments, militaries, and units receiving weapons, meaning that Paul was often immersed in debates over the humanitarian consequences of sending so many bombs, or so many aircraft, to a particular ally or partner. It was a good place to see exactly what alliance required.

Paul joined P.M., he told me, because he thought the United States was, relative to its competitors, a positive force in the world, and that arms transfers could be a way to save civilian lives and protect democracies. (Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system, Paul said, is an example of the good version of such military aid, since it is used to protect the lives of Israeli civilians.) He also came to believe that he could exercise some moral influence over the use of such weaponry. The longest debate of Paul’s tenure at P.M. was over the decision (made first by the Obama Administration, and extended under President Trump) to arm Saudi Arabia during its campaign against pro-Iranian Houthi militias in Yemen. For nearly a decade, the State Department’s attention to the consequences of this decision were, Paul said, “microscopic.” Charts would be made estimating the number of civilian casualties each month and then there would be lengthy debates—were the Saudis killing more innocent Yemenis, or fewer? The U.S. government sent a senior adviser, Larry Lewis, out into the field to help the Saudis with their targeting and with the rules of engagement. “There was a long debate about how far into Saudi and Saudi-coalition military processes can we get without actually implicating ourselves,” Paul told me. He had been part of an internal push to get the U.S. to further restrain the Saudi military, and felt that these efforts had helped preserve the lives of Yemeni civilians. But, when I asked Paul whether he felt that the U.S. had got the balance of interests and humanitarian aims more or less right in Yemen, he said, “No, we got it very wrong.”

During the two years before Hamas’s act of mass murder, the world of arms transfers had been preoccupied with weapons for Ukraine. One of the most divisive issues at the State Department was whether the U.S. should supply Kyiv with cluster munitions, which, because of the high rate of civilian casualties associated with them, have been banned by a number of U.S. allies. In the end, Paul supported sending them, a decision that the Biden Administration eventually arrived at, too. Paul said, “Having made all these arms transfers and having made the ultimate decision that ‘Hey, these aren’t always bad,’ one of the differences I have with the left is that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.”

Paul was overseas on personal leave in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, but it was obvious to him that the U.S. would be transferring arms to Israel after the attack. Many of those transfers, Paul knew, would happen almost instantly. For decades, the United States has maintained a vast weapons stockpile in Israel, which the I.D.F. can draw from if Washington authorizes it. (In the first days after Hamas’s attack, that authorization process was already under way.)

Paul noticed some aspects of the diplomatic situation that should have raised alarms back in P.M., among them the suggestion by Israeli leaders that Palestinian civilians were implicated in the Hamas attacks. On October 13th, Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true—this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved—it’s absolutely not true.” Israel is a technologically advanced country with a well-resourced military; it has, as Paul put it, “a lot of bombs.” But the difference made by American support, he went on, was the difference between a vast but limited lethal capacity and a functionally unlimited one. “There would come a point without American support where Israel would have to say, ‘Well, we need to be more selective.’ If they are resource-unlimited, then they might say, ‘Well, we might miss the Hamas guy here, and there might be twenty dead civilians. But it’s worth a shot anyway, in case he’s there, because there are enough bombs to do it.’ ”

Before he even got back to Washington, Paul began to draft his letter of resignation. But he also thought there was a chance that, beneath Biden’s promises of military aid, some bureaucratic checks—against human-rights violations and against the killing of civilians—were under way. “A very simple thing that would have made a difference for me is, you know, knowing that there are units in the Israeli security forces that are of concern because of their track record of extrajudicial killings, seeing that some effort was being made not to give them more weapons,” Paul said. “That was not the case. In fact, where there had been debate, there was now no longer debate. It was, ‘Let’s give them weapons. It doesn’t matter.’ ” Both he and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor raised concerns about the lack of review of these arms transfers to certain Israeli units, Paul said. What they wanted, he went on, was to see “some space for, ‘O.K., we still have these values. We still have these concerns, they haven’t gone away.’ But there was none of that. It was, ‘Open doors. Go.’ ”

Paul had spent the four years of the Trump Administration with a letter of resignation pre-written and tucked inside his desk, prepared for the worst. He never saw enough reason to submit it. When Biden was elected, he had been relieved: Biden’s foreign-policy advisers emphasized human rights, and his campaign proposals included some initiatives, among them further restrictions on the overseas transfers of guns, that Paul believed in. Many of Biden’s senior aides, from the national-security adviser Jake Sullivan on down, were only a bit older than us, and their formative experiences were also of the post-9/11 war on terror and its excesses and errors. But Paul thought that he and they had taken slightly different lessons from watching the same bad wars. “It’s interesting,” he said. “There’s not a lot of people on the civilian side of government in this Administration who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it’s a Democratic Administration and those were Bush wars.”

The war in Israel and Gaza is now, in part, Biden’s. A week after Paul and I had met in Washington, I wrote back to him to see what he made of it. Israel’s promised ground invasion of Gaza had not yet begun in full, but the devastation was immeasurable, and, in a week when the grimmest news was an Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp, many Palestinian civilians had already been killed. When he wrote back, he sounded both attuned to the bleakness of the situation in Israel and Gaza, and frustrated at how little the U.S. seemed to be doing to alleviate it. “We wasted thirty years in which we could have remade the world,” Paul wrote. “Where once we were guided by hope we let ourselves be overtaken by fear. I think that’s the legacy of the Great War on Terror—a nation whose greatest fear is not terrorism, per se, but rather that it may succumb to a destiny it did not choose.”

Americans are fond of talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict as if it were stuck in a permanent historical loop, but maybe the U.S. is stuck in a twentieth-century loop, too. “I feel increasingly like we are making the same mistakes,” Paul said.