US State Department official Josh Paul resigned in October 2023, being morally opposed to the Biden administration’s provision of arms to Israel. Paul has received considerable attention for his principled resignation, and has now launched a new lobby group called “A New Policy.” But is departing the public service necessarily an act of public virtue? 

When Josh Paul announced the establishment of his new lobby group in November 2024, it was the culmination of twelve months spent articulating his “disagreement with the Biden Administration’s decision to rush lethal military assistance to Israel in the context of its war on Gaza” (in the words of Paul’s LinkedIn bio).  

Paul had been a director of public affairs and outreach activities in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (part of the State Department’s Office of Congressional and Public Affairs). On 18 October 2023, the former official posted an open letter online, in which he announced his resignation after eleven years of service.  

In his letter, Paul assured readers that the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs “can still do an immense amount of good in the world: there is still, sadly, a great need for American security assistance — a need for American arms and defence cooperation to defend against the multiple military perils that democracy, democracies, and humanity itself, face on this earth.” Paul wrote that, when he had commenced his role in the State Department, “I knew it was not without its moral complexity and moral compromises, and I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do.”  

But in October 2023 he could no longer reconcile his moral principles with the compromises required to serve the state: “I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued — indeed, expanded and expedited — provision of lethal arms to Israel, I have reached the end of that bargain.” Paul could no longer subordinate his personal moral principles to the compromises required of him in serving his government.  

Not well known outside the State Department prior to October 2023, Paul quickly became prominent online following his resignation. It was covered at length by The Washington Post, The New Yorker and The Guardian. Paul explained the reasons for his decision in interviews with CNN, The Nation, and other outlets. Over the following months, the integrity of his decision was lauded by thousands of followers on LinkedIn, and Paul spoke in many forums about his recent experience in the State Department, and why he could no longer serve it. The launch of A New Policy in October 2024 has also attracted considerable attention, in outlets from Reuters to Ynet, and from The Hill to HuffPost. 

Paul leads the new lobby group “alongside fellow resignee Tariq Habash,” who left his post in the US Department of Education in January this year. Interviewed on CNN at the time, Habash said that “The refusal by the president to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire is untenable with the belief by millions of Americans across this country.” A New Policy aims to be a “powerful new voice for a hopeful future,” and is “dedicated to transforming American foreign policy toward Israel/Palestine to reflect American values and foundational principles of liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights; advancing American interests abroad; and protecting American freedoms at home.” 

Principled resignation—quitting due to irresolvable dilemmas of personal principle and professional duty—is of course neither historically new nor specific to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In his 2009 book, How Do I Save My Honor? William F. Felice explored cases of principled resignation during the presidency of George W. Bush when events following the 2003 invasion of Iraq prompted certain government officials to decide that the actions of their government had “violated basic norms of morality and justice.” For Felice, a fundamental question then arose: “If the individual’s voice is ignored inside the government, does this person have an ethical duty to resign?” 

In the context of the present Israel-Hamas war, these complexities of personal principle and public service have been seen in other recent resignations–such as those of U.S. Army Major Harrison Mann and British Foreign Office official Mark Smith, both of whom resigned because they judged arms sales to Israel to have rendered their governments complicit in war crimes or ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In the United Nations, the resignation of Craig Mokhiber (Director of the UN’s New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) was motivated by Mokhiber’s judgement of the UN’s failure to prevent a “text-book case of genocide.” 

In all cases, those resigning have attracted attention apparently because the decision to step away from public service is considered to be an unambiguous statement of moral principle, and one which highlights the ambiguities of morality and politics with which especially the government of the United States has been charged, for its military support of Israel over the past twelve months.  

And yet, the idea that the spheres of personal morality and public service must be in harmony is of course itself a matter of personal conviction. It is one thing to believe that one’s service to the state can be animated by personal integrity. It is another thing to insist that one should only serve the state for as long as government policy accords with one’s personal standards of right and wrong.  

While the principled resignations mentioned above may be notable for having brought to the attention of the public a variety of moral objections in a variety of institutional settings, the case of Josh Paul is instructive because he has now proceeded beyond principled objection, aiming to make a practical difference through A New Policy. As a lobbyist, Paul will be able to draw on a freedom from compromise that he could not enjoy in the State Department, after having come to the conclusion that “I couldn’t shift anything.”  

The practical question for Josh Paul and his New Policy colleagues will be whether freedom from serving the state is enough to sustain effective forms of citizenry action, which pass beyond the ardour of ethical advocacy, and beyond the particular interests of private lobbying, to produce the large and lasting changes that Paul wants to see in his country’s policy toward Israel and Palestine.  

Principled resignations such as that of Josh Paul also raise questions about the prospects for change within the institutional structures of foreign policy that are left behind by those who can no longer compromise their principles. When Paul wrote in his 2023 resignation letter that he had “reached the end of that bargain,” he was spelling out his contentious vision of public service; that the state only deserves its officials’ service if the state’s conduct in international politics accords with each public servant’s personal moral standards. This is a high-minded vision of public service, which clearly appeals to Paul’s thousands of admirers. And yet, as Coral Bell once wrote, “[a]nyone who expects international politics to operate as a system of justice is in for some sad disillusionments.”  

Principled resignations, such as that of Josh Paul, prompt us to consider whether disillusionment with public service is a sound basis for the development of alternative modes of political action outside the state. It is one thing to sympathise with the moral dilemmas faced by public officials, but quite another to see those dilemmas as sources of non-state solutions. 

Benedict Moleta is a PhD student in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University, writing on the work of Coral Bell. His master’s thesis  (2020, University of Sydney) was on relations between the European Union and Palestine, focussing on the position and prospects of Hamas. Contact via ANU. 

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.