I Turned Down a Career in U.S. Intelligence. I Support Breaking the Silence.

On August 7, 2024, the United States National Security Agency offered me a job as a Cryptologic Intelligence Analyst at Fort Meade, Maryland. The position was classified at GG-12, step four, with an annual salary of $109,119. It was a conditional employment offer, subject to the usual security-clearance and hiring procedures.

I declined it approximately four and a half hours later.

I had not suddenly lost interest in intelligence analysis, nor had I developed some general objection to American national security. I am an American historian, a hyperpolyglot, well-versed in geopolitics, and my loyalty to the United States is steadfast. But I had a serious objection to the possibility that my professional responsibilities might involve defending the military interests of the modern State of Israel.

I wrote to the recruiter that evening:

“While my loyalty to the United States of America and to the idea of protecting our citizens and nearly all of our allies is absolutely steadfast, for personal reasons I am unable to properly serve in a position that could potentially require me to defend the military interests of the State of Israel.”

Two days later, the recruiter acknowledged my decision and discontinued my processing.

That was that. No dramatic resignation, no classified documents, no theatrical confrontation in a government office. I had been offered an intelligence career, considered what it might require of me, and decided I could not accept it. I can share the details and quote from the correspondence because that email chain is not classified information.

I have been thinking about the decision I made a few years ago while reading the work of Breaking the Silence, the Israeli organization founded in 2004 by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces and whose members have vocally surged into prominence in recent years.

Breaking the Silence began with soldiers who had served in Hebron during the Second Intifada. Its founders, including Yehuda Shaul, sought to document what Israeli military service in the occupied Palestinian territories actually involved. Their initial exhibition presented photographs and testimony concerning military practices in Hebron. The organization subsequently expanded into an extensive archive of soldiers’ accounts from the West Bank and Gaza.

Its witnesses are Israelis. Many served in combat units, some held command positions, and others participated in intelligence gathering, surveillance, or military operations. They describe what they saw, what they were instructed to do, and, in some cases, what they themselves did.

Their testimony is frequently appalling.

In October 2026, Der Spiegel published interviews with Israelis who had served in Gaza following the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. Breaking the Silence helped facilitate contact with some of them. The article’s title quoted one soldier’s description of the rules governing military conduct: “The Rule Was: ‘Shoot Everyone You See.’”

That is a remarkable statement to encounter from someone describing service in a modern military force.

Also in October, Haaretz reported testimony concerning Israeli intelligence personnel and changes in targeting policy during the Gaza war. Nadav Weiman, Breaking the Silence’s executive director and a former IDF sniper, criticized the authorization of civilian casualties in attacks on relatively low-ranking targets. The reporting described decisions in which the anticipated deaths of civilians were treated as acceptable consequences of killing particular military targets.

In September, Le Monde examined testimony concerning what soldiers described as a factory of targets, permissive collateral-damage thresholds, and rules of engagement that contributed to civilian deaths.

These are accounts from people who participated in the military system being examined. Their testimony does not become automatically correct because they wore Israeli uniforms, any more than an official military denial becomes correct because it comes from a government spokesperson. But eyewitness accounts, operational descriptions, contemporaneous records, and corroborating testimony are precisely the materials from which serious historical investigations are constructed.

I specialize in modern European history, including the Holocaust, colonialism, and the ways institutions construct and defend accounts of their own conduct. Historians have spent generations examining the records of military organizations whose public explanations bore an uncomfortable relationship to what their personnel were actually doing.

We know perfectly well that governments can describe military operations in language that obscures the experiences of civilians subjected to them. We also know that soldiers are capable of describing their own participation in events that their commanders would prefer to characterize differently.

Breaking the Silence has spent more than twenty years collecting such accounts.

The organization has faced sustained political hostility in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have criticized it, and successive governments have attempted to restrict its activities or discourage foreign support. Its use of anonymous testimony has also generated disputes over verification. Breaking the Silence says it cross-checks accounts and protects witnesses’ identities because speaking publicly about military conduct can expose them to retaliation.

Some of my most important research has centered on both the importance and the limits of witness testimony in examining the scope and scale of atrocities, how to manage the mass trauma that comes of them, what to do about them after they occur, and how to prevent them again. The testimonies that come from Breaking the Silence deserve rigorous examination. So do the military practices they describe. Attacking an organization for collecting evidence does not prove or disprove whether the conduct described in that evidence occurred. 

My work as a historian and writer, and as a person with my own biography with intelligence work, is far more interested in the relationship between the organization’s work and the concept of national loyalty.

Breaking the Silence’s founders did not arrive at their objections from some distant country, unfamiliar with Israeli military service. They had served. They understood the institution from within, including the ordinary routines through which extraordinary exercises of power can become normalized.

Some of its witnesses have chosen to identify themselves publicly. Others have provided confidential accounts. Their decisions carry different personal and professional consequences, but they share a willingness to make military conduct available for examination beyond the institution’s own preferred narrative.

My circumstances were different. Although I had thought for decades that an intelligence career might be something I’d thrive in and had completed years in high school of independent study of Russian language and literature with a teacher who had formerly done military intelligence work, I had never served in the FBI, CIA, or NSA. I possessed no classified information concerning American intelligence cooperation with Israel, and my conditional offer did not identify a particular assignment involving Israeli military operations. I refused because the possibility of such involvement was unacceptable to me.

I am not suggesting that declining an employment offer is equivalent to serving in a military organization and subsequently testifying about its conduct, nor am I interested in constructing some ridiculous competition over whose conscience deserves the larger medal. And I’m not out to make a villain of the culture or civilian population of any nation, including Israel.

I am interested in the choices people make when institutional expectations encounter their own moral judgment.

Breaking the Silence’s soldiers know what it means to discover that an institution’s official account of its conduct does not adequately describe what happens under its authority. Their decision to testify comes from an unwillingness to let military service become an obligation to conceal or excuse what they witnessed. My decision came before service, when I considered whether I could honestly accept responsibilities whose possible consequences already troubled me. In both circumstances, conscience required an individual decision that the institution itself could not make on our behalf.

In my own case, the decision cost me an opportunity I had every reason to regard as very significant. I was being offered a well-paid, professionally elite analytical position within one of the United States’ principal intelligence agencies. I was qualified enough to receive the conditional offer, and I could have continued the process.

I chose not to. 

Breaking the Silence’s witnesses made different decisions at different points in their lives. Their experiences led them to document military practices that Israelis and the wider world deserve to examine. I support their right to do so, and I value their work.

They are also doing something much more demanding than expressing general opposition to a war. They are supplying the details of military life that allow journalists, historians, investigators, and ordinary Israelis to examine how particular policies operated in practice. They do this because the occupation and military operations conducted in their country’s name should be subject to public scrutiny, including scrutiny informed by the people who carried them out. In doing so, they are subjecting themselves to possible harassment and worse.

I recognize that obligation because my own refusal began with the conviction that I could not surrender responsibility for my professional conduct to an employer, however prestigious or powerful.

There is nothing inherently disloyal about questioning the military conduct of one’s country or its allies. In fact, the proposition that patriotism requires silence about potential wrongdoing is a rather dangerous one, particularly when the institution demanding silence possesses weapons, detention facilities, intelligence capabilities, and authority over civilian populations.

I have written on this very blog before about the reprehensible historical pattern of antisemitism in which Jews have been scapegoated or blamed. Israelis are not collectively responsible for every action undertaken by the IDF. Jewish civilians of Israel and Jewish people in the diaspora are certainly not collectively responsible for any decision of the Israeli government or military without their consent. Palestinians are not collectively responsible for Hamas’s atrocities. 

These should be elementary distinctions, although public debate has developed a remarkable talent for forgetting them. The resulting hate crimes and patterns of discrimination need to be recognized.

The Hamas massacres and hostage-taking of October 7 were horrific crimes. Their victims deserve remembrance and justice. That does not excuse unlawful attacks on Palestinian civilians, the destruction of civilian homes without military necessity, or the failure to investigate credible allegations of abuse that have occurred since then in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Israeli soldiers who come forward to describe such conduct should be heard.

My August 2024 decision to decline a career in U.S. intelligence because of the potential of the position requiring me to aid the Israeli military was made before many of the testimonies now appearing in the international press were published. I cannot retroactively claim that those reports informed my refusal. They did not. But I can read them now, examine their evidence, and recognize in the people who supplied them a willingness to confront the responsibilities of institutions to which they were connected.

My refusal is preserved in an ordinary, unclassified email exchange. Breaking the Silence preserves a far larger and more consequential archive of military testimony. Both records concern choices made by identifiable human beings who were unwilling to leave questions of conscience entirely to institutional authority.

I remain a writer dedicated to improving historical literacy, including for the Holocaust and its severity, and a civil rights enforcement specialist fighting against hatred everywhere, including against antisemitism. I remain loyal to the United States. I remain convinced that intelligence work can serve legitimate and necessary purposes. And I remain unwilling to participate professionally in defending Israeli military interests.

Breaking the Silence’s Israeli veterans have their own experiences, responsibilities, and conclusions. They do not need an American historian to confer moral legitimacy upon their testimony, so I will not try. What they deserve is to have that testimony examined, and I am glad they refused to remain silent.