Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports on contradictory messaging from the U.S. State Department about Israel.
Diplomats in the Biden State Department privately expressed alarm over a $1 million taxpayer-funded grant meant to bankroll investigations into alleged Israeli human rights violations, contradicting the agency’s public defense of the funding initiative. Now, the State Department won’t say whether it went through with the grant.
A State Department official criticized colleagues in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) for trying to paint the funding initiative, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon in March 2022, as a mundane oversight program, when in fact the grant was meant to undermine one of the United States’ closest allies. While the agency’s funding notice said the grant would be awarded by the end of 2022, the State Department declined to disclose whether it went through with the initiative, citing “internal deliberations processes.”
“The issue isn’t that DRL funds programs in European countries or other countries we are allied with—the issue is that DRL is funding a program to collect evidence of human rights abuses and atrocities in a country that is our ally,” wrote the official, whose name was redacted, pushing back against claims by the DRL Bureau that similar types of grants are issued elsewhere. “And the [notice] specifically says it may include documentation of violation of land property rights! (I mean, come on!) Who wrote this thing??”
While the State Department said the grant would “strengthen accountability and human rights in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza,” congressional critics accused the Biden administration of funding international efforts to delegitimize Israel and boost the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. State Department officials, at the time, publicly defended the grant, but internal correspondence obtained by the Free Beacon shows that at least some diplomats viewed it as a thinly veiled attempt to erode Israel’s legitimacy on the international stage.
