60 Minutes and the State Department Officials Who Resigned in Protest of ‘Pro-Israel’ Policy

A few weeks ago, the CBS program 60 Minutes carried a segment about Israel’s “exploding pagers” caper, expressing admiration for the spectacular way Mossad and IDF managed both to manufacture, and then to trick Hezbollah into distributing to its operatives, the pagers that caused dozens of deaths and almost four thousand wounded — many severely — among Hezbollah fighters. As if to provide “balance,” a few weeks later, 60 Minutes ran a segment unfavorable to Israel, on three officials in the American State Department who had resigned in protest at what they deemed to be too pro-Israel a policy at Foggy Bottom; they were presented as principled upholders of the laws of war, which apparently means opposing the delivery of weapons to the IDF. More on these three State Department dissenters can be found here: “CBS 60 Minutes Platforms Anti-Israel Voices in Skewed Segment,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, January 13, 2025:

On January 12, 2025, CBS News’ hit investigative program 60 Minutes aired a 13-minute segment on three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned from their posts in response to American support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities.

While the departure of State Department employees in protest of American foreign policy is newsworthy, this segment presents its audience with an imbalanced report by omitting certain salient facts about its interviewees, obscuring important information about Israel’s conduct during the war, and injecting subtle notes of bias throughout the presentation.

Josh Paul & Hala Rharrit: Anti-Israel Voices Within the State Department

The bulk of the report is based on interviews with three State Department officials who resigned over American support for Israel’s war against Hamas: Josh Paul, Hala Rharrit, and Andrew Miller.

While their resignations were portrayed as the result of moral outrage at Israel’s war conduct, 60 Minutes withheld that two of these interviewees have a history of anti-Israel activism and associations with anti-Israel organizations.

Josh Paul, who served as a director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, was the first State Department official to resign post-October 7, a mere 10 days after the Hamas atrocities and before Israel undertook a full ground operation in the Gaza Strip.

In his resignation letter, Paul condemned both Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response, criticized America’s “one-sided” support for Israel, compared the Hamas kidnapping of Israeli children from kibbutzim with Israel’s detainment of Palestinians involved in violence, and implicitly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.”

Since leaving the State Department, Paul has joined DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), an advocacy organization that promotes boycotts of Israel, opposes the Abraham Accords, and supports international sanctions against the Jewish state.

Deeply antagonistic to the Jewish state, Josh Paul promptly found a most congenial home at DAWN upon resigning from the State Department. He resigned in the immediate wake of the October 7 atrocities, when 6,000 Hamas operatives, accompanied by a few hundred Gazan civilians coming along with Hamas to join in the fun, smashed into Israel and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 251, and at a time when the IDF’s ground war in Gaza had scarcely begun. He was denouncing Israel from the get-go. DAWN, where he now works, is a pro-Palestinian anti-Israel group, that promotes the BDS movement, opposes the Abraham Accords, and works to encourage international sanctions on Israel for supposedly engaging in “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” In other words, it’s viciously anti-Israel group that was quick to snap up Josh Paul, who can now denounce Israel to his heart’s content.

DAWN’s executive director is Sarah Leah Whitson, an anti-Israel activist who dabbles in antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories and who was credited with cultivating Human Rights Watch’s shift to an anti-Israel paradigm. Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and who has openly voiced support for Hamas, serves on DAWN’s board of directors.

Before she was chosen to head DAWN, Whitson was the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division from 2004 to 2020, overseeing the unhinged anti-Israel reports issued by the HRW, which at the time was run by the equally anti-Israel Kenneth Roth.

It is also interesting to note that while in his position, Paul was responsible for facilitating the transfer of arms to Saudi Arabia during its bloody fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Even though he opposed this action, and spoke against it in official memos, he did not resign his role in the State Department. It was only Israel’s response to the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust that caused Paul to leave his position.

The interviewer from 60 Minutes never mentioned Josh Paul’s new job at DAWN, and what DAWN’s policies are. Had viewers learned that Paul was now working for a pro-Palestinian anti-israel group, his supposedly high-minded resignation might be seen in a different light.