As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel.
We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”
Polite conversation not your strong suit? I don’t have an axe to grind here, dude, just making small talk.
And yet as an OIF vet I feel weirdly targeted.
Then offer your opinion about how a military operation looks to you. I was literally at a charity even for veterans and overheard a group of people talking who I don’t usually hear from. And they didn’t know I was listening, so they were transparently honest about how it looks to them. It startled me because it was a wildly different framing than I was familiar with. So when the person asked what exactly is going on beneath the surface, I offered an anecdote that was timely and relevant.
Don’t take everything so personally.
Sure, you take it objectively when everyone wants to pre-emptively lump you in with a bunch of traitors.
Israel is a rogue state going for the record on how many war crimes can they commit against a resistance movement they spawned with previous war crimes.
Damn, dude, take a deep breath. I didn’t lump you in with anything, infer you’re lumped in with anything, or disparage veterans in any way, shape, form, or fashion. I didn’t even know you existed until this very conversation. Talk about wildly disproportionate blowback.
Go tell the person who asked what’s actually going on, not me. I don’t agree with the people I overheard, I’m just the messenger and responded to that person’s question because they sounded curious.
Except you very much did.
Some people just look for things to be offended about…
Best of luck, chief.