A veteran State Department official, Stacy Gilbert, resigned from the department this month to protest the administration’s policy and the department’s false claims that Israel isn’t blocking aid. She spoke to Akbar Shahid Ahmed about her resignation:
“It drives me crazy when people say, ‘You’re so principled for resigning,’” Gilbert said. “You can’t work in the government that long and be completely principled but I’m practical. I understand compromises and that there are trade-offs. But in the end, I know the difference between right and wrong. What happened in this report is wrong, and this report is being used to justify continuing to do what we’ve been doing.”
It was obvious that the department’s conclusions in the report were wrong. No one could look at the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza for months and then honestly say that it has not been blocking the delivery of aid. If the department had followed the evidence and the recommendations of its own experts, it would have had to admit that Israel was violating international law and it would have had to conclude that U.S. arms transfers could not continue. As Gilbert says, the department leadership chose to twist the facts and make a “patently, demonstrably, quantifiably false” claim that Israel isn’t blocking aid when everyone could see that they are.
The National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20) report was the result of a process that the White House created as a sop to Democratic critics in Congress. Like Biden’s so-called red line, it was set up to create the false impression that there was some limit to what the administration would tolerate from the Israeli government. In both cases, the president had no intention of imposing any penalties, and the administration has done whatever it could to avoid reaching conclusions that might lead to penalties. As Sarah Harrison correctly pointed out when the process started, “it isn’t obvious how, in the context of Israel, this policy avoids being another performative measure, creating additional processes that keep policymakers and lawyers in the bureaucracy busy while maintaining the status quo with respect to arms transfers.”
The final report confirmed that the entire exercise was a farce. The administration asked the Israeli government for assurances that they weren’t violating international law, the Israeli government duly gave its non-credible, unreliable assurances, and the administration accepted them at face value. Faced with a mountain of evidence that Israel’s assurances were meaningless, the administration simply ignored it. No wonder more people are resigning in protest. What is the point of putting in the work of documenting violations when the leadership is going to give Netanyahu a pass anyway? Gilbert commented on the department’s whitewash, “It just doesn’t matter… We could have AI write the report because it is not informed by reality or context or the informed opinions of subject matter experts.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
It's great that Stacy Gilbert resigned, she is the 2nd person in the Biden Administration to do that for his ironclad support to Israel, I hope there will be even more people doing the same thing.
Biden can't stand up to Israel. People criticizing him for not doing that should not vote for Trump. He'll do the same thing, only with no criticism of Israel and no demands for pauses in the genocide and no aid getting in.
Who knows what Trump will do? I realise now that he wants both the Neocon vote and the Libertarian vote. He wants all sides, and I guess that’s working, somehow.
What part of "finish the job" don't you understand? He's no different than Haley.
He is on record as saying that the rest of the Golan Heights should be taken by Israel. He moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Yep, no difference at all.
He positions himself as both better and worse than Haley.
On Gaza? I see little difference. Actually, none.
Well, only occasionally better on Gaza. Israel is special. He sounds better on the rest sometimes, sometimes worse. It seems to work for him.
Is anyone surprised? When are you people going to recognize that 1) your government is corrupt, criminal, and indeed, crazy, and 2) there's nothing you can do about it because you have NO mechanism to correct the problem (election are a farce)?
“The people” always have a little power in any system. Even slaves have a little power. A big problem is the masses are fickle and often don’t know what they want.
It is not just our administration. It is the combined efforts of both political parties that we have been brainwashed since we entered the educational system in the U.S. to think are the only to choose to vote for. The UNIPARTY. It is the front for the true power that has the levers, the donor class, including the power of AIPAC and Hollywood. The donor class has created h*ll on earth for the college kids who are exercising their rights under the Constitution (which is being urinated on by the donor class). This brilliantly written article in Consortium News spells it out: https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/31/the-homeland-security-campus/ Big Brother is alive in the U.S.
"The administration asked the Israeli government for assurances that they weren’t violating international law, the Israeli government duly gave its non-credible, unreliable assurances, and the administration accepted them at face value." Then Mr. Biden, eyes squinting, hands gesturing in robotic fashion, proclaims to the world, "see, Israel said that genocide isn't being perpetrated on the Palestinians because they said so". So it goes.
May 27, 2024 These Brothers Are Fighting Famine As Israel Starves Palestinians in Gaza
This is the story of how two Palestinian brothers living a world apart – Mahmoud in northern Gaza and Hani al-Madhoun in Virginia — are fighting against Israel’s forced starvation in northern Gaza.
https://youtu.be/3lTRHkDBLUE?si=M-JtHsuhvjqymxse