Sunday, October 27, 2024

“We Have Lost All Credibility”: Hala Rharrit on Quitting State Dept. & Ending U.S. Complicity in Gaza

"... as Americans, ultimately, it is our bombs, it is our tax dollars that is creating this catastrophe... So, unfortunately, we’ve lost credibility not in terms of just our U.S. policy with regard to the Middle East, but also on Russia-Ukraine. We don’t have a leg to stand on. As a spokesperson before the conflict, I did well over a hundred interviews, including on Russia-Ukraine, for example. We can no longer talk about that with any credibility, because the answer is: Why do you care about a Ukrainian child, but you don’t care about a child in Gaza? What is the difference? And the racism, the blunt, absolutely blunt, racism of this administration has been laid bare..."


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.”

Please go here for the original interview and transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/23/hala_rharrit_gaza_us_policy

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