Josh Paul | Breaking Big Money's Grip on America

The current war in the Middle East is just the latest terrible chapter in an intractable 75-year conflict. Clearly, Hamas’s recent terrorist attack on Israel was horrendous. While an Israeli retaliation may seem justified, it must be truly measured at all costs. A full-blown invasion of Gaza would needlessly kill countless of innocent Palestinians and could result in expanding the war throughout the region. While highly unlikely, a cease-fire would be in the best interests of moving toward a peaceful resolution of this long-standing quagmire.

That Israel has relentlessly mistreated the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza over these many decades cannot be ignored as a major contributing factor to the current fighting. Nor can Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s focus on consolidating his own power by overhauling the judiciary while under indictment be overlooked.[1] In fact, Egyptian intelligence officials claim they personally warned Netanyahu that Hamas was planning “an explosion of the situation…and very soon, and it would be big.” Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning.[2]

At the same time, the U.S.’s unconditional military aid to Israel (over $3 billion/year since 2009) has given the Jewish state carte blanche to handle the West Bank and Gaza however it pleases. Consequently, no one has clean hands in this tragic situation.

While the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, denounced Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ‘criminal policy of revenge,’[3] the Biden Administration has given its full support to Israel.

Josh Paul, until recently the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, quit his position. As the director, he helped shape policy regarding sending military arms to other countries. Paul’s resignation was in response to America’s rush to arm Israel in its battle against Hamas.[4]

Paul sent the following email to his Bureau’s leadership noting:

“It’s been clear for decades that the only route to that future — that future being peace — is not through military victory, but through diplomatic compromise, not through creating fear, but through building trust, not through killing enemies, but through making friends, not through imposing suffering, but through inspiring hope. On all these counts, what is happening now in Israel is a tragedy not only for lives it is taking and also for the future, whose possibility it is foreclosing upon for yet another generation. … In this conflict everyone loses, and the longer it lasts, the greater the losses will be.”[5]

Paul then suggested that:

“…maybe the best thing for Israel right now is not security assistance in the sort of volume that makes them think they can afford to just ignore the Palestinian question and hope that, cordoned off, it will go away. Or to put it another way, if we weren’t giving them billions a year for decades, is it more or less likely they would have found it in their interest for the Oslo process to work and we wouldn’t be where we are today.[“6]

[The Oslo Accords were a set of agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that established a peace process for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a mutually negotiated two-state solution. Netanyahu was a harsh critic of the Accords which ultimately failed.[7]]

Like Josh Paul, Ralph Nadar believes the Biden administration has failed to put the current hostilities in the broader picture. Nadar observed:

“Biden seems unwilling to recognize the historical origins of this conflict that now has mighty Israel occupying, colonizing, brutalizing and stealing land and water from the twenty-two percent of the original Palestine left for millions of Palestinians under Israeli daily control.“[8]

Even when Israel was established in 1948, the leading Founder of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion, understood the profound injustice driving the Palestinian resistance: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel….They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”[9]

According to Nadar, Biden’s failure to call for a ceasefire disregarded his own military’s private advice against an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. They knew it would increase the risk of a larger war in the Middle East that would clearly be against the national interests of the American people and U.S. security.[10]

While most Americans support diplomatic efforts to end the conflict,[11] Biden endorsed Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas. However, he did say, “it would be a big mistake for Israel to occupy Gaza again.”[12]

As Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer living in Haifa, explained, “If there is one lesson of this, it is not that this was a security failure. It was a failure on the part of the world to address the conflict.”[13] America’s unconditional military support of Israel over the decades has played a huge role in that failure. If the Biden administration learns that lesson, it would be one very positive thing that comes out of this tragic war.

Bruce Berlin

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics, a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.

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[1] https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/netanyahu-israel-warning-america-trump-20231019.html

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/

[3] https://www.commondreams.org/news/btselem-israel-gaza

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/20/josh-paul-israel-civilians-00122716

[5] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/20/josh-paul-israel-civilians-00122716

[6] Ibid.

[7] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oslo-Accords

[8] https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/biden-will-not-escape-history-s-judgement-for-failure-to-stop-gaza-assault

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/wall-street-journal-ipsos-poll-israel-hamas

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/us/politics/biden-israel-gaza.html#:~:text=officials%20have%20warned%20of%20a,and%20aired%20on%20Sunday%20night.