Last week, Paul resigned from the State Department in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s fulsome, categoric support – rhetorically, diplomatically and militarily – for Israel.
In a long, thoughtful letter explaining his decision, Paul wrote that he had Catastrophe the past 11 years trying to make “differences” in the pursuit of outcomes he considered “good and just”.
Through it all, Paul understood that he was prepared and obliged to make “moral compromises … for as long as I felt [sic] the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do”.
But, to borrow a phrase in vogue these days, Paul had reached an “inflection point” that meant “the end of that bargain”.
Paul opposed Biden sending even more “lethal arms” to Israel quickly.
“Blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the interests of the people on both sides,” Paul wrote. “I fear we are repeating the same mistakes we have made these past decades, and I decline to be a part of it for longer.”
Paul had rejected the pernicious policy that has long defined America’s cruel attitude towards the Middle East: Kill first, think later.
His blunt rebuke of the commander-in-chief was remarkable for a number of extraordinary reasons that, in the coverage of his abrupt departure, have gone largely and predictably unnoticed.
With cutting precision, Paul pointed to the galling, marquee-sized hypocrisy at the core of Biden’s feckless, historically illiterate response to the murderous madness engulfing Israel and occupied Palestine.
“We cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it,” he insisted.
Let me paraphrase Paul’s admonition for the smack-the-forehead, oblivious dunces who are, of course, a staple on US networks and cable news outlets: It’s the occupation, stupid.
Then, Paul acknowledged what no Western diplomat, let alone an American envoy, has – to my knowledge – conceded publicly at the risk of incurring the retributive wrath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hysterical apologists at home and abroad: Israel is an apartheid state guilty of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.
Paul framed his searing indictment this way: “There is beauty to be found everywhere in this world, and it deserves both protection, and the right to flourish, and this is what I most desire for Palestinians and for Israelis … collective punishment is an enemy to that desire, whether it involves demolishing one home, or one thousand; as too is ethnic cleansing; as too is occupation; as too is apartheid.”
An apartheid state has, since its engineered inception, wielded carte blanche licence not only to steal Palestinian homes and land, but to traumatise, jail, torture, maim, and kill Palestinians with impunity.
That illegal, deliberate, systemic brutalisation and dehumanisation of generation after generation of imprisoned Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is unsustainable and was bound to combust, and, inevitably, fuel Hamas’s ruthless, retaliatory outrages.
It is instructive and a grievous shame that among the career and appointed diplomats who, together, craft the US’s ruinous blueprint for the region, only Josh Paul has had the good and prescient sense to act in the face of an unfolding humanitarian calamity.
It would be easy to dismiss his principled stand as the posturing of a minnow whose quitting will have no impact on the pitiless course that Biden and company have chartered.
