A top State Department official privately said the Biden administration should have demonstrated greater concern for Palestinians at the start of Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed offensive in the Gaza Strip and suggested that frustration among diplomats over the policy should be measured by their leaks to HuffPost.
A Nov. 7, 2023, email, which was subsequently leaked to HuffPost, depicts tense early conversations within the government over President Joe Biden’s embrace of the Israeli military campaign. It also shows officials struggling to use the influence of the U.S. ― Israel’s chief military and diplomatic backer ― for purposes like Biden’s stated goals of minimizing civilian casualties and securing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the email, Ned Price ― then a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken ― described a discussion between State Department leaders and agency officials. The skeptics highlighted global criticism of Israel’s gruesome U.S.-backed airstrikes and invasion of Gaza and argued “we made ourselves complicit in their excesses,” Price wrote.
Price sent the message, marked sensitive but unclassified, to fellow high-ranking officials amid a wave of internal State Department listening sessions and town halls organized as outrage grew among the agency’s staff. He began the email by sharing his view of whether those “workforce discussions” were adequately addressing State Department officials’ concerns.
“The proof will be in the pudding ― or the Huffington Post,” he wrote, using the former name for HuffPost and adding that a session he ran that day “seemed to go fairly smoothly.”
HuffPost first reported on widespread dissent over the Gaza policy among U.S. government officials, and the “mutiny brewing” at the State Department in particular, over the administration’s reluctance to draw a firmer line with Israel as it retaliated for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas.
In his email, Price wrote he was offering a synopsis of a meeting he held hours earlier with officials from across the department. He said he expressed: “There are things that the Administration could/should have done differently at the outset, e.g. focusing messaging on the humanitarian piece from day-one and consistently going to great lengths to differentiate the Palestinian people from Hamas, among other elements.”
Price, a former spokesperson for the State Department under Biden and for the White House under President Barack Obama, added that he sought to explain why the administration chose its post-Oct. 7 approach.
His portrayal echoes public and private arguments from other Biden aides that public support for Israel made it possible for Washington to privately push Israeli officials on matters like humanitarian aid for Palestinians and alterations of fighting plans to shield innocent people. A key factor in that tack was Biden’s view that his years of working on foreign policy meant he knew how best to handle the Israelis, according to current and former officials.
I “walked through that rationale, pegged to our policy goals and the sincerely held belief ― informed by decades of experience among our principals ― re how to maximize leverage with our Israeli partners,” wrote Price, who is now the deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations.
Additionally, he argued the Biden administration had undergone a “constructive evolution” in its remarks about the war.
Price cited news conferences by Blinken, seemingly referring to a Nov. 3 appearance in Israel when the secretary said “we need to do more to protect Palestinian civilians” and his Nov. 6 support for “a pause” in the fighting in Gaza. And he pointed to a Nov. 6 White House statement about a call between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that noted: “The President reiterated his steadfast support for Israel and the protection of Israeli citizens from Hamas and all other threats while also emphasizing the imperative to protect Palestinian civilians and reduce civilian harm in the course of military operations.”
Despite those administration statements, Price wrote, “even among some segments of our workforce, impressions seem to have calcified in the early days.”
State Department spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on the arguments in the email and the specific reference to HuffPost.
“The proof will be in the pudding — or the Huffington Post.”
– Ned Price, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N.
Critics of Biden’s Gaza policy say its chief flaw is not messaging but a lack of tangible pressure that meaningfully shifts Israeli behavior.
Officials at the State Department and other government agencies have urged the administration to consider cutting off U.S. weapons for Israel unless it does more to limit civilian suffering. A sizable coalition of lawmakers and humanitarian and human rights groups have echoed those calls, saying the current American policy allows Israel to violate international and U.S. laws governing conduct in warfare and, by extension, puts the Biden administration itself in breach of the law.
Israel says it respects international standards for military operations and American statutes governing the use of U.S.-provided military equipment.
Though the Biden administration conceded in May it is “reasonable to assess that [U.S.-provided weapons] have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its [international law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm,” the administration has continued sending bombs and other weaponry to Israel and resisting efforts to alter its policy, including a push against some arms deals by senators last week.
Administration spokespeople regularly cite moves by Israel that appear to address humanitarian concerns, but experts say the problem is inconsistency and that ad hoc changes so far are insufficient given the scale of the crisis in Gaza.
Exasperation with Biden’s approach and fears it is enabling atrocities and damaging America’s standing abroad persist inside the administration, officials have told HuffPost.
Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) bolstered global pressure over the Gaza war by issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister. Former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told HuffPost the step was “one more reminder to U.S. officials that they have been aiding and abetting men credibly accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who quit over Biden’s Gaza policy, said he continues to hear internal alarm among government staff.
“The degree of dissent has, if anything,increased over the past year,” said Paul, whose October 2023 resignation was first reported by HuffPost. Since then, four other State Department officials have publicly resigned because of their opposition to the U.S. role, as have several staff at other agencies and military personnel.
Scores of diplomats have signed formal rebukes over the Gaza policy using a special State Department channel for internal critique ― joining a chorus of concerned civil servants across Western countries close to Israel. HuffPost revealed when the first of the so-called dissent cables was in the works. The State Department has said Blinken welcomes different points of view.
Biden’s obstinacy has limited internal pushback since, and some State Department officials skeptical of his approach have told HuffPost they felt the criticism was never taken seriously.
“The degree to which dissent is expressed internally has decreased, and that is because people have found that it is not making a difference, so many people have essentially just given up and decided not to work on these issues,” said Paul, who now runs a lobbying organization called A New Policy that seeks a more balanced U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The State Department’s listening sessions and town halls “even at their peak were only about trying to massage the dissent rather than address it,” he added.
The Biden administration could still ramp up efforts to help Palestinian civilians before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Israel is imposing restrictions on aid that have recently reduced the amount of food entering Gaza to nearly the lowest levels seen during the war, and deadly Israeli strikes continue on targets in the region that include hospitals.
Twenty White House staffers sent an internal letter to the president and top officials on Nov. 18 urging them to pressure Israel to end its offensives in Gaza, Lebanon and the occupied West Bank, and “demonstrate accountability” for sending U.S. support to Israel in seeming violation of American law.
“It’s time for this administration to think about their legacy,” one signatory of the letter, an official with a decade of experience working at the White House, recently told HuffPost.
The Biden team’s decisions arguably have even greater significance now as Trump appears poised to institute a policy that involves less scrutiny of Israel.
On its current course, the outgoing administration is “laying the groundwork” for Trump by disregarding U.S. law and echoing Israel’s condemnations of the ICC warrants, Paul said.
Rather than even consider the advice of government officials, the incoming Trump administration will likely target those who question overwhelming U.S. support for Israel.
Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has demanded investigations of federal employees who signed a letter seeking a cease-fire in Gaza. His choice for ambassador to the United Nations, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), has sought to clamp down on anti-war protests on college campuses.
“There is concern that expressing dissent on this issue at this time will put people at the top of the list for dismissal under Schedule F,” Paul told HuffPost, referring to a policy Trump plans to institute to make it easier to fire bureaucrats.
The Hamas-led attack that sparked the current Israeli-Palestinian fighting killed 1,200 Israelis, the majority of them civilians, and led to 250 people being taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. The Israeli campaign in Gaza since then has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, health officials there report, and has reduced the strip to a wasteland.
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