Josh Paul was the director of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs until his resignation in October over the U.S.’s policy of lethal military assistance to Israel in the war on Gaza.
Standing at the White House podium, U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was tearing up. “It’s difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that,” he said, choking down clear and genuine emotion at the horrors of war. I watched his press conference from my office at the State Department, and I shared his real pain at the suffering we were seeing.
But that was last year, about the people of Ukraine, and Russia’s unconscionable war of aggression.
A year and a half later, Mr. Kirby was at the podium again, this time talking about Gaza. At that point, three weeks into the conflict, thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been killed by the Israeli bombardment. As it stands today, almost 20,000 have died – among them poets, journalists, doctors, aid workers, mothers, children and grandparents. Scores of bloodlines have been wiped out – every generation within a family, killed.
Mr. Kirby did not tear up that day. Instead, he told America: “Being honest about the fact that there have been civilian casualties, and there likely will be more, is being honest, because that’s what war is. It’s brutal, it’s ugly.”
There is a disconnect between the empathy shown across the U.S. government to Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression, or the Israeli victims of Hamas’s atrocity of Oct. 7, and Washington’s response to the immense tragedy that has unfolded in Gaza in the weeks since. By continuing to flow weapons while vetoing any effort in the United Nations to establish a ceasefire, the U.S. appears to have a complete lack of recognition of the humanity of the Palestinian people.
Perhaps it is because what is happening in Gaza is being done with our arms, and our funding. Since Oct. 7, America has supplied Israel with thousands of bombs, missiles and shells, on top of the tens of billions of dollars we have provided in military assistance in the past decade alone. President Joe Biden’s latest supplemental request would provide more than US$14-billion in additional armaments while reserving a mere US$100-million for direct humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
Perhaps it is because free speech is being quashed in what appears to be a most un-American return to McCarthyism. Powerless students are being doxxed by well-funded entities such as Canary Mission; lawyers and journalists are being fired for speaking up against war crimes; Congress, having equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is considering impanelling a commission with subpoena powers to haul in anyone who dares criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Perhaps it is because the U.S. has absorbed decades of Israeli propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians, leading to the argument that, in the words of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the Oct. 7 attack.
Or perhaps it is because, from the sterile corridors of Washington after two decades of our own (very different) battles with terror, it is easy to lose sight of the complexity of the situation and to prioritize simplified and misguided strategic goals over what should be our true values.
But whatever the reason, our lack of ability to see the suffering of Palestinians – to recognize in them the same humanity we see from Bucha to Be’eri – does not extend to Bureij or Beit Hanoun. And this is doing deep damage – not only to the people of Gaza and the Palestinian people writ large, but also to our own foreign policy and global national security interests. We are tearing apart our relationships with key partners across the Middle East, setting the stage for another generation of conflict in the region, and sacrificing our moral leadership in the field of strategic competition with adversaries such as the People’s Republic of China, at a long-term cost to America and our allies, such as Canada. In doing so, we are risking the future of democracy itself.
When I served on the U.S. Security Coordinator’s team in Ramallah, I did so alongside not only American and British officers, but Canadian ones as well. In addition to the competence Canadians brought to that mission, which assists with security co-ordination between the Israel Defence Forces and Palestinian Security Forces, Canada offered a valuable and balanced third-party perspective.
Today, as America seems to have lost its basic moral compass, we need that perspective more than ever. America needs Canada to speak up, to remind us that what we are doing harms not only our shared strategic interests, but goes against the very values that bind us together as neighbours, allies and friends.
Editor’s note: (Dec. 15, 2023): A previous version of this article incorrectly identified a paraphrase of Israeli President Isaac Herzog's statement as a direct quote. This version has been updated with Mr. Herzog's quote.