A career State Department official resigned from her post on Tuesday, saying she could no longer work for the Biden administration after it released a report concluding that Israel was not preventing the flow of aid to Gaza.
Stacy Gilbert, who served as a senior civilian-military advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), sent an email to staff saying she was resigning because she felt the State Department had made the wrong assessment, The Washington Post reported, citing officials who read the note.
The report was filed in response to President Joe Biden issuing a national security memorandum (NSM-20) in early February on whether the administration finds credible Israel’s assurances that its use of US weapons do not violate either American or international law.
The report said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israel on several occasions had used American-supplied weapons “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but said it could not make a definitive assessment - enough to prevent the suspension of arms transfers.
Reading the report makes me feel like I’m from a different planet.
It clearly spells out Israel blocking aid to Gaza. It describes what we all would call blocking aid. If someone did what Israel does, to you, you would call it blocking. Israel blocks aid and the report makes it plain.
Just because they have a different definition of “blocking aid” doesn’t mean the report cleared Israel. I don’t get it. Can you really just say whatever you want, end it with “but it’s not what it sounds like” and that’s the takeaway everyone gets?
It’s one thing for a document to have arbitrary restrictions on what it can say. That happens. It’s another for people to take it so literally.
Edit: I don’t even know what definitions they were working with, I just got a “it’s not technically…” vibe. But I do know that the report describes blocking aid.
The purpose of not actually calling it what it is is because most people won’t read it. It let’s the media “accurately” say the thing they want them to say.