From Iowa, Washington’s top Gaza dissenter plots a second act

The sole compromise was a watered-down rejection of “violence” that didn’t name perpetrators or victims.

“You’re the one group that got to some sort of agreement — by being so general that it was almost meaningless,” Paul said, to laughter from the students. “Congratulations, that’s how diplomacy works.”

That lesson in the frustration of Middle East policymaking came from bitter experience. Paul, 45, is a veteran civil servant who for more than a decade helped send weapons to foreign nations, including to Israel for the war it launched after Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostage during an Oct. 7 attack.

But on Oct. 18, when the death toll in Gaza had climbed past 2,000, Paul hit his breaking point. He announced his resignation from the State Department in a public LinkedIn post outlining concerns about U.S. weapons being used against Palestinian civilians. He described “rushing more arms to one side of the conflict” and other policies as unjust and “contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.”

With those words, Paul had broken the ultimate taboo for a government official: publicly criticizing Israel, the top U.S. ally in the Middle East.

Four months later, he was on the wind-whipped plains of Iowa, leading a classroom simulation of the war that had cost him his State Department career.

Paul spent February teaching at Grinnell College, a tiny liberal arts school in the heart of Trump country, as his old life imploded and another took shape around his new identities as “dissident” and “whistleblower.” The brief exile gave him space to reflect on a question he’s wrestled with since his resignation: What, if any, was the impact?

Overnight, he had become radioactive in pro-Israel foreign policy circles. Prominent think tanks kept their distance. Some Senate staffers iced him out. Paul figured he’d have to look abroad for new work, maybe with defense firms in the Middle East or Europe.

“It is a third rail when you’re criticizing Israel and is, historically, career suicide,” Paul told The Washington Post during interviews in Iowa last month. “I thought I would get some expressions of support from friends and colleagues, and maybe a day or two of some sort of media coverage, and then I’d be looking for another job.”

The calculation changed, however, when Paul’s resignation letter went viral, boosted over several days by activist networks and social media.

Next came high-profile broadcast interviews — on CNN, “Democracy Now!” and “PBS NewsHour” — that racked up millions of views across platforms. A talk Paul gave at a D.C. restaurant known for supporting social-justice causes drew policy wonks and kaffiyeh-wearing activists who crammed into a main hall and two overflow rooms.

Strangers contacted him on LinkedIn — hundreds, then thousands, of messages that Paul categorizes by sender: government workers, veterans, Palestinians, Israelis, and people with no connection to the region who still felt compelled to write.

Paul allowed a Post reporter to skim through the messages, but asked that they not be quoted at length or the senders be identified out of privacy concerns. They contained unfiltered anger at Hamas and Israel, outrage and shame over the Biden administration’s response, and respect for Paul’s decision to take a stand when, as one person wrote, “the dialogue is uncomfortable and the stakes are immense.”

Accustomed to unseen, confidential work at the State Department, Paul said, he was overwhelmed by the response. His overflowing inbox signaled to him that “a conversation is bubbling up in America,” a nascent movement demanding a recalibration of U.S. policy as the death toll in Gaza soars past 32,000 — the majority of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The State Department did not respond to questions about Paul; previously, the department has declined to comment on the resignation, citing policy on discussing personnel matters.

Paul said he began to see a future where he remained in the United States, using his newfound platform in service of a lobbying effort to “rebalance” Middle East policy. He needed to hit pause and think strategically, he said, but that was difficult in the Washington fishbowl, where passersby had begun to recognize him from television.

When an invitation to visit Grinnell arrived, Paul said, it was the first — and, for weeks, the only — overture from a university as tensions over the war turned campuses into political battlegrounds.

He looked the school up on a map: an hour outside Des Moines. Perfect.

“It was a nice, out-of-the-way place where I could focus,” Paul said. “Theoretically.”

Rumbles of dissent

For all the grass-roots support, Paul’s resignation did not spark a chain reaction.

More than five months into the war, only one other government official, Tariq Habash in the Education Department, has quit in a similarly public way. Defenders of the Biden administration’s Israel policy underline this to suggest that reports of internal strife over Gaza are overblown; one right-wing pundit accused Paul of having a “martyr complex.”

Some officials who have considered resigning say privately that they’re staying because they can better influence policy from inside, or because they’re worried about being replaced by people who will quash dissent and maintain the status quo. Others simply can’t afford it, saying they have family obligations and little savings.

Paul is divorced, financially sound, with no children at home — all factors he weighed in his decision. He also notes that he’s White, which he said means he’s been spared the online vitriol received by Habash, a Palestinian American presidential appointee.

The idea wasn’t to be “a pied piper,” Paul said, but he admitted to some frustration that others haven’t felt similarly compelled to leave. In Gaza, tens of thousands are dead. Homes, schools and hospitals are destroyed. Children have begun dying of malnutrition as top humanitarian officials warn of impending famine in what they call the broadest and severest food crisis in the world.

“I have asked myself, ‘What would it take if this isn’t it?’” Paul said.

Rumblings within government have grown louder as the war in Gaza nears the half-year mark with no end in sight. State Department personnel have filed multiple cables through an internal dissent channel that was originally set up for diplomats who opposed Vietnam War-era policies. White House officials have held “listening sessions” with employees across government who are angry over the money and weapons the Biden administration is sending Israel.

“This is not going away,” Habash told the Post Reports podcast. “If anything, I think it’s escalating, and the level of dissent and consternation within the staff ranks are real and serious.”

Secret chat groups have sprung up connecting government staffers who support a cease-fire and want to hash out the most effective — and professionally safe — ways to register their dissent. The Post confirmed one channel on an encrypted messaging app with about 200 members identifying as current employees from across the federal government.

“It’s hard to put on this mask when I go to work,” said a contractor at a major defense firm that manufactures U.S. arms sent to Israel, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to make public statements. “Nobody talks about what’s going on in Palestine — it’s just ‘work.’ But it eats at me.”

Some government staffers have signed rare open letters, including 1,000 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development who demanded an immediate cease-fire.

Last month, more than 800 civil servants in the United States and Europe issued a joint public letter of dissent, saying they had tried to voice concerns internally but were ignored. The open warning from transatlantic officials was “unique in my experience of watching foreign policy in the last 40 years,” Robert Ford, a retired U.S. ambassador who served in the Middle East, told the BBC.

Congressional Staff for a Ceasefire Now, an underground group of Capitol Hill personnel, made a splash in November when about 100 masked aides piled flowers outside the U.S. Capitol to draw attention to civilian casualties. Since then, a GoFundMe set up to “support Gaza and all hostages” has raised more than $8,000 for aid groups.

Roll Call quoted an organizer as saying the aides would protest until U.S. policy changes, “and if that means putting our jobs on the line to do so, so be it.”

And yet, for bureaucrats turned activists, the hard truth is that U.S. policy hasn’t budged in a significant way.

The Biden administration’s tone in addressing Israel has become sterner: after weeks of negotiations, the United States proposed a U.N. resolution calling for an “immediate and sustained” cease-fire. Russia and China vetoed the measure, saying it fell short of a direct demand to end the fighting. The White House also has authorized parachute drops of food into Gaza and is working to build a temporary pier to deliver humanitarian aid by sea. But it hasn’t imposed consequences such as restricting military aid to Israel, as proposed by some Democratic lawmakers.

“The administration has not used the leverage it has to date,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “I don’t know how many more kids have to starve before we use all the levers of our influence here, but they really need to do more.”

Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned that Israel risked becoming a “pariah” under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for new elections, a rebuke indicating a shift among Democrats on U.S. support for the war.

Israeli officials blame the Gaza death toll and widespread suffering on Hamas fighters they say hide among civilians.

Paul, a registered Independent voter in Maryland, has endorsed the “uncommitted” vote for primary season to send a message to Biden and the Democratic Party to change course in the Middle East before it potentially costs them in the November election. Palestinian suffering probably would be even worse, he said, under Donald Trump; as president, Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and cut off aid to the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

“We are stuck between a rock and a hard place on this issue, and it’s not going to change in American politics at least until the 2028 election,” Paul said.

Paul’s old workplace of 11 years, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, continues greenlighting arms transfers even as top U.S. officials and lawmakers express deep reservations about Israel’s military tactics. Since Oct. 7, the United States has approved and delivered more than 100 separate military sales to Israel — thousands of precision-guided munitions, bunker busters and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.

In terms of moving the needle on U.S. policy, Paul said, he doesn’t dispute that his resignation made no impact. But his focus is on the long game: creating a new political force of Americans who are fed up with the cycle of violence and want a reset.

“That’s how policy change happens,” Paul said. “It doesn’t happen because of one person. It happens because you have a critical mass of people.”

An insider goes rogue

Paul is an unlikely face for pro-Palestinian organizing, which makes him harder for critics to villainize than the protesters who splash blood-red paint outside the home of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

He is a middle-aged White guy, nearly always in a suit, with a crisp English accent from a childhood spent between London and New York. His father is British; his mother is from New Jersey.

In speeches and interviews, Paul makes it clear that he’s no peacenik. He believes in the power of weapons for defense and deterrence, including for Israel to protect against rocket fire and other attacks. His master’s thesis at Georgetown University was on Israeli counterterrorism and civil rights. He has repeatedly condemned the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, which he described on CNN as “a thousand atrocities.”

Paul chooses his words carefully in critiquing the U.S. government, saying he doesn’t want to give hostile nations material to bash America. In the first paragraph of his public resignation letter, Paul made sure to reference the “murderous Russian aggression” in Ukraine. He’s also selective about giving interviews to Arab or Israeli outlets whose “audiences have already made up their minds.”

“I’m not trying to damage U.S. standing,” he said. “I’m trying to change the U.S. position.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mentioned Paul by name in an appearance on MSNBC, saying his concerns over how U.S. arms are used in Israel comes “from an individual whose role directly involved the assessment and the deployment of these weapons.”

Paul’s insider status is what makes his stepping down compelling to Middle East observers. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a journalist for the New Yorker who went to high school with Paul, has written about the shock of a protest resignation from someone he’d regarded as “a sincere foot soldier of the American empire.”

Zaha Hassan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a human rights lawyer who has advised Palestinian negotiators, said Paul’s candor offers a rare look at internal decision-making on U.S. military aid.

“There’s so much mystery, obviously, for those of us not on the inside about why is it that there hasn’t been more scrutiny over weapons systems that are transferred to Israel,” she said.

In speeches and interviews, Paul typically explains how weapons transfers are supposed to work — a process of robust debate and extensive human rights vetting. But for America’s closest ally in the Middle East, exceptions are made, he said. Israel, which receives $3.8 billion a year in defense aid, has long been the largest recipient of U.S. military largesse, eclipsed only recently by Ukraine.

Paul points to the uneven application of the Leahy Law — named for former senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) — which prohibits funding foreign security forces that violate international human rights laws.

Most aid recipients are vetted before they can access funding, Paul said, but for Israel, “the process is reversed.” The aid is released and then a vetting forum looks into any reported infractions. In addition, according to a recent investigative report by the Guardian, there is a higher bar for determining that a potential violation has occurred, and Israel must be consulted and given time to respond to any alleged violation under review.

The Leahy process, Paul said, has “never sanctioned a unit” in Israel despite years of credible allegations of human rights violations.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington said in a statement that Israel is committed to the Leahy law, and recently added assurances “that it will use U.S. weapons in accordance with international law and not block U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.”

The Independent, a British newspaper, recently asked Leahy whether U.S. aid to Israel was in compliance. “No,” he replied. “Is that succinct enough for you?”

The State Department said in a statement that all arms transfers to Israel, before and since Oct. 7, “have been processed in compliance with statutory and policy requirements,” including notifications to Congress.

The statement said the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs had consulted with Congress more than 200 times since Oct. 7 to transfer arms to Israel, and rejected claims that officials had skirted rules or kept Congress in the dark. “We handle requests from Israel just as we do for the same kinds of requests from similar countries,” the statement said.

The State Department added that the Leahy review process for Israel is “consistent with the requirements under the law” and that the department “routinely consults foreign governments on Leahy vetting matters, not just Israel.”

The difference in Israel’s treatment is stark when compared with Ukraine’s request for controversial cluster munitions. The review, which Paul was part of, stretched on for more than a year as officials “at every level of government” weighed the urgent needs of an ally against the potential for human rights violations.

“It was not a decision we reached quickly or easily, to Ukraine’s repeated frustration,” Paul said. “The comparison is: When Israel comes in asking for something, there is no extended debate.”

For highlighting such cases, Paul is lauded by pro-Palestinian activists as a whistleblower, a mantle he said he’s uncomfortable with because almost everything he “exposes” about Israel policy is public record.

Hassan, the Carnegie analyst, said the information sounds revelatory because Americans seldom delve into the details. She said the magnitude of Israeli operations in Gaza and the ability for the world to watch in real time through social media have stirred segments of the public that had tuned out the decades of conflict.

“I have never seen this kind of education — self-education — going on about the situation among young people,” she said. “I have never seen people so upset, people that have no dog in this fight. They’re not Palestinian, Arab American, Jewish. And these people are just like, ‘Why? Why are we a part of this?’”

Conflict on campus

Grinnell College and the town where it sits are named after Iowa’s leading 19th-century abolitionist, Josiah B. Grinnell, a White preacher, member of Congress and active “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

The anti-slavery militant John Brown once hid people and weapons in Grinnell’s house on a journey north to freedom, according to an account on the college’s website.

That “right side of history” legacy is infused into the ethos of the college. The core of the academic mission is free inquiry, a learning process “tolerant of disagreement and committed to civil dialogue.” Each year, the school hands out a $50,000 social justice prize.

In that progressive spirit, political science professor Barry Driscoll invited Paul to campus after watching a PBS interview about his resignation. The war was then in its first month and Driscoll’s students were eager to discuss it, but the Middle East wasn’t his area of expertise and he knew better than to wade in. An immigrant from Ireland, Driscoll said he had learned quickly that “the Middle East is different” when it comes to U.S. foreign policy debate.

Driscoll asked Paul to speak on campus, and later proposed a pop-up course on conflict resolution.

“In my mind it is very much linked to the social justice mission of the college,” Driscoll said one recent morning over coffee near campus. “And also an appreciation of what on earth the point of tenure would be if we weren’t using it for something like this.”

He sighed and added: “Which is another way of saying I might not have done this before I had tenure.”

Grinnell has avoided the tumult other campuses have experienced since Oct. 7, but it hasn’t been unscathed. The campus newspaper, the Scarlet & Black, has chronicled tensions surrounding student protests, including a late October walkout over Israel’s actions in Gaza and a “die-in” at a Nov. 11 alumni dinner.

Emotions were still simmering by the time Paul arrived in January.

During his days at Grinnell, Paul watched how a college in the middle of the country was grappling with the conflict, a real-life illustration of polls showing a generational divide in how Israel’s actions are viewed. At night, he was up late, working with national organizers to build a central hub for the dozens of pro-Palestinian political action committees that have sprung up in recent months.

The idea is to create, eventually, a counterweight to the powerhouse American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a key enforcer of the taboo around questioning the special relationship with Israel. Animated by the war, Politico reported, AIPAC officials expect to spend $100 million in 2024 in an effort to defeat “candidates they deem insufficiently supportive of Israel.”

The magnitude of the challenge isn’t lost on Paul.

“No one has ever lost an election for saying, ‘Israel should destroy Gaza and I back them to the hilt,’” he said. “People have lost elections for saying, ‘They should do a better job on human rights.’”

Mindful of how polarizing the issue is, Paul said he has taken pains to keep his tone neutral, his criticisms rooted in facts. He bristles against descriptions of his next project as “anti-AIPAC,” preferring to call it “pro a more balanced American policy movement.”

The winning argument, Paul said, is about interests, not identities — the idea that “what Israel is doing right now is deeply harmful to America, it is undermining our relationships in the Middle East, and it is undermining our ability to lead on the global scale.”

In recent weeks, Paul said, he’s seen an evolution in the willingness of policy and academic institutions to hear what he has to say. Speaking requests have poured in from Georgetown, Yale, Amherst, Rutgers, Ohio State and other schools.

Paul also has experienced how difficult it is to stay above the fray. Last month, while still at Grinnell, he was named a fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a privately funded think tank created by Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered in 2018 during a visit to Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul.

Pro-Israel commentators pounced, hitting Paul with an online smear campaign that accused the think tank, without evidence, of being antisemitic and linked to militant Islamists. “No surprise there that Israel haters unite,” one commenter wrote on X. “He obviously meets your criteria of loving Hamas/Iran and hating Jews,” wrote another.

It was a small dose of the challenges that awaited him after his time at Grinnell.

Paul’s course on conflict resolution ended with the mock peace talks, a tricky undertaking given the climate. One student opted not to play either Hamas or Israel. Other students assumed their roles with enthusiasm and kept talking through the thorniest parts. By the end of class, Paul was visibly relieved the exercise had gone smoothly.

“What an absolute pleasure it’s been to be out here,” he said as the students burst into applause.

Paul said his goodbyes and headed home to pack, his phone buzzing before he made it out of the building. It was time to get back to Washington.