Addition by Subtraction at the State Department

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Although defections and resignations can come in waves, the extent of opposition to President Biden's policy of favoring Israel over Hamas has yet to kindle much of an exodus from his administration. Mostly we're subject to a lot of whining from people who continue to accept a paycheck from the man they claim is genociding Palestinians.

That tells you something about how many of the complainers actually believe the rhetoric they're parroting. It also provides a clue as to the cynical motivations of the few who actually resign.

Josh Paul was the first to do so, back in December, to great media fanfare. Paul, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee, was in charge of arms transfers. He could abide those weapons going to many governments around the world, but not Israel's.

At the time, I detailed the distortions in Paul's explanation for his resignation. These in part had to do with Paul's refusal to read past the headline of a news story about a sudden lack of donkeys in Gaza. I had hoped that he would devote his newfound free time to reading the rest of the article on the donkeys, but it appears he had other plans. He has resurfaced at DAWN, a nongovernmental organization called Democracy for the Arab World Now. The director of DAWN is none other than Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Human Rights Watch official who was found to have been raising money from Arab governments by complaining about the need to battle pro-Israel (read: Jewish) money in U.S. politics.

Funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others, DAWN is a fierce advocate of boycotting Israel and of pressuring Israel's fellow democracies to enforce an arms embargo against the Jewish state. It also opposed the Abraham Accords—that is, it is opposed to peace in the Middle East. Josh Paul will fit right in.

Then in March, there was Annelle Sheline, who worked for the State Department for a year before leaving. The State Department has a Dissent Channel through which employees can raise concerns about policy with protection from professional retribution, and Sheline utilized the channel. But she gave up after a year because her bosses wouldn't change their policies to fit her ideological worldview.

In Sheline's (very limited) defense, she was used to working for a employers who were more receptive to her anti-Israel activism. Sheline came to the State Department from the Quincy Institute, whose executive vice president is Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council. NIAC is a major pro-Iran pressure group with influence in Democratic Party policymaking circles. Also at Quincy are such international-relations luminaries as John Mearsheimer, mostly infamous for his campaign against American Jews' participation in the democratic process. This includes the book he co-authored with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy—a shoddy work of agitprop aimed at raising suspicions against Jewish political activists. Mearsheimer is also a proponent of the "good Jew/bad Jew" worldview, wherein non-Jews decide which Jews can be trusted and which cannot. Judging by Sheline's hero worship of Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force service member who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., she must have been quite comfortable at Quincy as well.

The latest administration official to walk away over Gaza is Hala Rharrit. She had served for nearly two decades before quitting over the Israel-Hamas war. As well, the Washington Post reminds us, Rharrit was based not in Washington but in Dubai.

And yet one can't help but notice that Rharrit takes a troublingly primitive view of Arabs. She explained why she refused to present the administration's line on the conflict in public settings: "All that that would have done is have caused someone to want to throw their shoe at the TV, want to burn an American flag or, worse, throw a rocket at our troops.

"I said, 'I will not be the reason why someone hates America more.'"

Her dedication to the security of television screens in Dubai is admirable, I suppose, but a career in the foreign service is supposed to impart more than a one-dimensional caricature of Arabs. Either way, Rharrit's posting is interesting because the United Arab Emirates is a party to the Abraham Accords (starting to sense a theme among the brave dissenters of Foggy Bottom). While its citizens are certainly conflicted about Israel's war against Hamas, the UAE—as any foreign diplomat, especially one posted in Dubai, surely knows—is seen by the U.S. and Israel (and almost certainly Egypt) to be an important player in a post-Hamas Gaza. Rharrit's undermining of the UAE on behalf of some imagined Arab Street is bizarre. She claims she went into the foreign service "to try to strengthen relations between other nations and the United States," but that does not at all appear to be the case.

Additionally, Rharrit claims her colleagues have been afraid to speak out against the president's support for Israel against Hamas—and we know that is manifestly untrue. In fact, as Jewish Insider has reported, "Staffers feel comfortable venting about Biden's support for Israel, and receive little pushback from senior department officials" at regular sessions. Indeed: "What stood out to some department employees at recent listening sessions was senior leaders' unwillingness to defend Biden's support for Israel's security, particularly in response to a chorus of employees seeking a harsher stance toward the Jewish state. One result of their reticence is that other lower-level employees who stand by Biden's support for Israel also do not speak up in those meetings."

Thus far, those who have resigned from the administration in protest of Biden's support for the war against Hamas, which is currently still holding Americans hostage, are few in number. But their absence is likely to materially improve the workings of American foreign policy.