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.”
It’s not about oil, it’s the use of their military bases for staging and transit.
We have something like 15 bases in MENA. There’s absolutely no reason to transit through Israel and we do not do so. DOHA, Kuwait is the largest transit point for the US Military as a whole. Bahrain has the largest naval base and Saudi Arabia has the largest air force base.
Israel has an outpost that’s not used logistically at all, and could easily be put in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq. All allies, and some of them with actual US military bases.