Hala Rharrit on Quitting State Dept. & Ending U.S. Complicity in Gaza
www.democracynow.org
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.”

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.”

  • @KeeponstalinOP
    1•4 hours ago

    I appreciate that you genuinely care about sources and have an intellectual curiosity to engage with them.

    Only thing I have to add is about the settlements and Oslo Accords. I think the Sinai disengagement can be seen in a peaceful light with Egypt, however I cannot say that extends to peace with Palestine.

    Declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:

    This can be seen as an extension of the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 in respect to Settler Colonialism.

    Israel may have dismantled some settlements after Oslo, but it is far eclipsed by the new settlements created after Oslo and has risen ever since.

    In fact, as the Oslo Accords slowly broke down, Israel tripled its settlement building. Between 1993 and 2000, the Israeli population in the West Bank reached its fastest pace of growth ever, according to Dror Etkes, an Israeli peace campaigner.

    (AJ source previously linked) (The Haaretz source talks more about Rabin and Oslo)

    I would argue that Egypt agreed to the peace proposal in order to normalize relations economically and regain it’s territory, at the expense of the Palestinian people.

    Excerpt from Ilan Pappe's findings about the Israel - Egypt peace settlement

    Likud’s initial foreign-policy gambit surprised the world at large, as it responded favourably to another peace effort by Anwar Sadat. Begin’s first Likud government included some veterans from the old administration, such as Moshe Dayan. He and Ezer Weizmann, now a dove, pushed Begin into signing a bilateral peace agreement with Egypt in 1979. This agreement had won the support of the Israeli public after a dramatic surprise visit by Anwar Sadat to Israel in November 1977, a psychological ploy that weakened their siege mentality and intransigence. Sadat came to Jerusalem, disappointed with previous international efforts to solve the conflict, such as an attempt to convene an international peace conference, which had ended in failure. Incidentally, this last peace initiative could have helped the PLO, as the Soviet Union had insisted that its status, the problem of refugees and the occupied parts of Palestine, were to be central aspects of the negotiations. Jimmy Carter, the first American president to locate the Palestine question at the centre of the ‘peace process’, had fully endorsed this prioritization. It was forestalled by the Sadat initiative, which had been prearranged by senior Israeli and Egyptian politicians long before Sadat’s historic visit. The Egyptian president knew he would receive the whole of the Sinai Peninsula in return for normalization of his country’s relations with Israel.

    The Egyptian president had promised the Palestinians that he would link the bilateral agreement to a settlement of the Palestine question, but never succeeded in doing so. Likud returned the Sinai so that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be sidelined in the peace agenda. Both sides concurred on a new term, ‘autonomy’, as a strategic goal for settling the problem of the occupied territories, which in essence meant the status quo in those areas. For Egyptian civil society, left and right, secularists and Islamists alike, it was tantamount to betraying the Palestinian cause. They had the power to turn the peace with Israel into a ‘cold’ state of affairs, where much of the past hostility and enmity remained intact.

    • A History of Modern Palestine pg 259
    • @CarroladeEnglish
      0•3 hours ago

      I don’t argue against the ethnic cleansing being deliberate, I’m well familiar with Plan Dalet. The primary crux of my argument is that this is very much a case of two sides trying to ethnically cleanse each other, with one succeeding and the other failing. The one that failed is rightfully upset, but it should not be seen in some more-innocent-than-the-other light. Recall, this all began because I said hamas and Hezbollah are themselves Jihadist, genocidal movements. Perhaps that’s been overshadowed in the modern day by mere survival, since actual ultimate victory has become so distant, but I don’t ignore those roots.

      Liberation, reconquest/Jihad, ethnic cleansing, call it whatever you like, but if it is directed against a people living on land they were born to, it’s too late. The invaders became innocents at that point, due to being different individuals after the chronological passing of time. Descendents are not guilty for the sins of their fathers or countrymen, you cannot simply lump them all together as “colonizers” and subject to destruction, that is not right. If an individual colonized nothing, only their forebears or countrymen did, that individual is not a colonizer. The saddest thing about Oct 7th was how so many of the dead were pro-Palestinian progressives, fighting for the rights and dignity of Palestinians.

      Now, that isn’t to say we shouldn’t continue to fight for human rights. But to say hamas or Hezbollah are even remotely on the “right” instead of co-equal and complicit with the IDF and Netanyahu in the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people is wrong-headed in my eyes.

      edit: Consider, after Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu, a right-wing, ex-military strongman won the following election by a single percentage point. Do you recall the environment in Israel at the time, the regular suicide bombings in Tel Aviv? That is not how you achieve peace, it’s how you achieve war.

      • @KeeponstalinOP
        1•23 minutes ago

        The primary crux of my argument is that this is very much a case of two sides trying to ethnically cleanse each other, with one succeeding and the other failing.

        This is not true. Zero of the resistance groups, Hamas or otherwise, have ever had the goal of eradicating all Israelis. The destruction of Israel means the end of Israel as a Settler Colonialist Ethnostate, of the Occupation, of the Apartheid, of the Genocide. It means the creation of a new State where Palestinians have equal rights to Israelis. Palestinians are not inherently primitive and antisemitic, which is the underlying sentiment baked into that idea equating the two. Zionist is an inherently Supremacist ideology and dehumanizes Palestinians in order to justify the Ethnic Cleansing and Settler Colonialism. The Book about Transfer I referenced earlier has extensive documentation that show this.

        That entire argument is based on a false premise and is completely at odds with the history as I pointed out earlier. It ignores the reality of Partition, the plans for ethnic cleansing and settlements, the creation of the PLO, Hamas, and other resistance groups, and the details of the peace process including the Oslo Accords.

        Now, that isn’t to say we shouldn’t continue to fight for human rights. But to say hamas or Hezbollah are even remotely on the “right” instead of co-equal and complicit with the IDF and Netanyahu in the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people is wrong-headed in my eyes.

        Then you don’t understand the difference between Colonialism and resistance to Colonialism. The Vietcong were not co-equal with the French, nor were the IRA to the British, or the ANC in South Africa.

        Consider, after Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu, a right-wing, ex-military strongman won the following election by a single percentage point. Do you recall the environment in Israel at the time, the regular suicide bombings in Tel Aviv? That is not how you achieve peace, it’s how you achieve war.

        Do you recall that Zionism is a Settler Colonialist Ethnostate and the environment that has created for Palestinians for generations? Settlements and Occupation are antithetical to peace, that has been the entire point. This has been discussed extensively by Historians like Avi Schlaim and Ilan Pappe, which I already linked. Official Israeli Declassified Documents and Official Knesset Meeting Minutes make all this very clear. None of this is hidden knowledge, multiple Israeli historians have discussed this extensively in their works.