In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post today, “The Rush of Arms to Israel Caused Me To Resign from the State Department,” Josh Paul, former director of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, explains his Oct. 18 resignation from that position, to protest the State Department’s ignoring standard protocol for responding to arms requests from foreign countries—in this case Israel—and refusing to hold a serious debate before approving sending weapons to Israel following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. In the past, he noted, he had been involved in many “complex and morally challenging debates over what weapons to send and where. What I had not seen until this month, however, was a complex and morally challenging transfer in the absence of a debate.”
Paul remarks that the standard thinking since the 1993 Oslo Accords was that providing Israel with weapons would help secure peace. But Israel’s track record has shown the opposite to be true. And bombings in Gaza have not only inflicted casualties and trauma, they have contributed nothing to Israel’s security. He reports that when Hamas’s Oct. 7 bombing occurred, he felt sick to his stomach “not only because of the horror of the act, but also because I knew what would come next.” Israel’s request for munitions started arriving immediately, including “for a variety of weapons that have no applicability for the current conflict.” There should have been a frank discussion about this request, he notes. The idea that the U.S. shouldn’t send weapons that are used to kill civilians was never a controversial idea in his department, he writes.
