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 counterterrorism, 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.”
