A career State Department official resigned from her post on Tuesday, saying she could no longer work for the Biden administration after it released a report concluding that Israel was not preventing the flow of aid to Gaza.
Stacy Gilbert, who served as a senior civilian-military advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), sent an email to staff saying she was resigning because she felt the State Department had made the wrong assessment, The Washington Post reported, citing officials who read the note.
The report was filed in response to President Joe Biden issuing a national security memorandum (NSM-20) in early February on whether the administration finds credible Israel’s assurances that its use of US weapons do not violate either American or international law.
The report said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israel on several occasions had used American-supplied weapons “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but said it could not make a definitive assessment - enough to prevent the suspension of arms transfers.
Here’s the political calculus for Democrats:
This appears to be a very unusual election. Normally Democrats lead with young voters, and Republicans lead with older voters. But this year, Biden has gained ground with older voters even while losing ground with young voters.
So the first thing to consider is that Biden is trying harder to appeal to older voters than usual for Democrats, and older voters are more likely to support Israel.
Furthermore, older voters are much more likely to vote, which is good news for Biden. This also means that Biden has less reason to maximize turnout than previous Democrats.
The obvious question is why doesn’t Biden try to win over young and older voters? I’m sure he would like to, but supporting Palestine isn’t the way to do it. Surprisingly, young voters actually don’t care that much about Gaza. Furthermore, according to that article “young voters who wanted Biden to pressure Israel to stop attacking Gaza would vote for him at about the same rate as those who didn’t.” So supporting Palestine might just be downside risk with older voters.
Putting all this together, and the political calculus favors appealing to older voters on Israel, and trying to find some other issue to win back young voters.