Marco Rubio Silences Every Last Little Criticism of Israel at State Department
Rubio wants to dismantle the only internal sounding board for critics of Israel — and the only place those criticisms might’ve had any teeth. The post Marco Rubio Silences Every Last Little Criticism of Israel at State Department appeared first on The Intercept.
When Secretary Marco Rubio proposed a sweeping reorganization of the State Department on Tuesday, he singled out a human rights office that he said had become a platform for “left-wing activists” to pursue “arms embargoes” on Israel: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
Rubio is proposing to rename the bureau, downsize it, and shunt it under another section of the State Department. The bureau’s duties include writing an annual human rights report — which has been critical of Israel — and enforcing a law banning aid to military units that violate human rights that has rankled Israeli leaders.
On one level, the accusation that the bureau was a hotbed of anti-Israel activism baffled critics of the State Department’s handling of the Gaza war. Their push to block weapon sales to Israel went nowhere under Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
Even some of the most skeptical voices on Israel on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have never pushed for a full-on arms embargo. Instead, they have unsuccessfully attempted to block the sales of specific offensive weapons that have already caused widespread civilian casualties.
On another level, advocates say, Rubio’s statement offers a worrisome sign that the Trump administration is crippling one of the few forums where critics of Israel can even have their arguments heard — albeit routinely ignored by the department’s top ranks.
“This ‘anti-Israel’ stuff is so deeply incorrect,” said Charles Blaha, who served as director of the human rights bureau’s office of security and human rights from 2016 until his 2023 retirement. “The tendency in the Department is exactly the opposite. The Department is pro-Israel to the point of overlooking gross violations of human rights. The Department closes its eyes to it.”
Long Fight in Vain
Days after the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas and the start of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian civilians, longtime State Department staffer Josh Paul left his post in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in protest of continued arms shipments to Israel.
Paul called Hamas’s attack on Israel a “monstrosity” before adding that “the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people.”
His high-profile departure presaged months of internal disputes within the State Department over whether to keep supplying Israel with offensive weapons, including 2,000-pound bombs that caused devastation in Gaza’s densely populated urban areas.
Critics of Israel have almost always been on the losing side, even when the Biden administration was publicly voicing sympathy for Palestinian civilians.
Only once, as the Biden administration faced criticism from the Democratic Party’s left wing in the run-up to the 2024 election, did the administration halt a single arms sale of 2,000-pound bombs. The decision had little operational effect, but Republican critics nonetheless claimed that it amounted to a “partial arms embargo.”
Inside the State Department, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor was seen as one of the few bureaucratic factions pushing Blinken and Biden to take a tougher approach to Israel.
The human rights bureau, Paul said in a Wednesday interview, “certainly had a role in arguing for that suspension” of 2,000-pound bomb transfers. But there was nothing inappropriate about that given the way Israel shrugged off Biden administration calls for restraint, he said.
“These are tools of foreign policy, so it is absolutely appropriate, when a partner is acting in a way that is contrary to U.S. interests, that is contrary to U.S. and international law, that arms transfers should be suspended as a point of leverage,” he said.
The State Department said this week that the bureau will be renamed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Religious Freedom — dropping the emphasis on “labor” — and moved under a new coordinator for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, merging it with another bureau.
Paul said that on its own, slotting the bureau under the coordinator would not necessarily forecast a weakening of influence, but the move had to be placed in a broader context.
“I think it’s really going to depend a lot on who is in that role, and of course the broader intent of the secretary and the State Department,” he said.
Rubio, in a Substack post on Tuesday, explained why he was pursuing the reorganization.
“The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes,” he said.
Blaha, the former bureau director, rejected that characterization. He said the bureau’s role in the State Department as a sounding board for human rights advocates had to be weighed against the power of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs — the State Department’s Middle East office — which both argued in favor of unqualified support for Israel.
“The human rights bureau is the place that activists most frequently interact with, with regards to Israel. The Israel desk doesn’t really want to have anything to do with that, in my experience” he said. “How is the State Department going to interact with civil society?”
Drawing on sources such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the bureau was responsible for writing annual reports that have been critical of Israel. The last report produced under the Biden administration stated that there were “credible reports” that Israel had committed “arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings,” “enforced disappearance” and “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment by government officials.”
The State Department is planning to scale down those congressionally mandated human rights reports, NPR reported last week.
The Future of Vetting?
Blaha’s former office was at the center of an even more pointed debate under the Biden administration about whether to block aid to specific Israeli military units accused of crimes — as opposed to the larger question of arm sales to Israel as a whole.
The future of that office under Rubio’s proposed reorganization of the State Department is unclear. Its name does not appear on a high-level chart about the new proposed structure. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
Under legislation named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who championed it in the late 1990s, the State Department and Defense Department are forbidden from providing aid to foreign security units that have been credibly accused of “gross” human rights violations.
The office of security and human rights was responsible for vetting specific units for U.S. aid.
To its namesake’s chagrin, Leahy law has never been applied to Israel. Months into the war on Gaza, however, a special Israel-vetting forum recommended cutting off aid to several Israeli military and police units — a recommendation Blinken ultimately ignored.
Reports indicating that Blinken might sanction one unit led to an outcry last year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rubio, then serving as a senator, said that it would “stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.” Blinken never followed through.
In December, Palestinian families supported by the nonprofit organization Democracy for the Arab World Now sued the State Department, seeking to force it to uphold the Leahy law as it relates to Israel.
“The department’s own reports say that Israeli units are committing gross violations of human rights, but the department has never found a single Israeli unit ineligible, and that is what the law requires,” said Blaha, who is advising the group.
Even if Rubio succeeds in renaming and downsizing the human rights bureau, advocates said, the State Department will still be responsible for upholding the vetting law.
“The Leahy law is the law. The administration is required to enforce it,” said Tim Rieser, a foreign policy adviser to Leahy who helped draft the legislation. “The State Department is the only logical agency to enforce the Leahy Law.”
Rieser said the law should not be applied only to Israeli security units: It also likely applies to the administration’s payments to El Salvador to hold immigrants illegally deported to the notorious CECOT prison.
“It should,” Rieser said, “because subjecting prisoners to cruel, inhumane, and shockingly degrading treatment; denying them access to their families, lawyers, and any meaningful due process; with no idea if they will ever be released is a gross violation of human rights.”
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