Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss / July 23, 2024
The Biden administration is suppressing widespread dissent over its Gaza policy within its ranks, enforcing a “culture of silence,” say some who resigned.
Joe Biden has gotten endless praise from Democrats for his record of accomplishment in one term in office.
But Biden’s record will be forever stained by his support for the Israeli onslaught on Gaza that has leveled cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians, using American munitions.
In a remarkable sign of resistance, 12 Biden administration officials have publicly resigned rather than carry out his policy. On July 4, they issued a letter of “service in dissent” that called U.S. policy “morally reprehensible” and a “failure.”
The letter– which has gotten little media coverage– said that Biden’s choices “threaten U.S. interests throughout the region.” It identified those as political and economic interests as well as the damage to U.S. “credibility.”
Last week nine of the signatories spoke on a webinar for the Middle East thinktank DAWN. I will summarize major points.
Alexander Smith, a former US AID official who resigned in May, said that by defending Israeli conduct, the U.S. had destroyed “the framework of human rights” law set up after World War II.
“It’s shocking and really distressing to see the US making the decision now to basically burn down the framework of international human rights that has been built after World War Two,” he said.
The U.S. was never an active participant in international law, Smith said. “But we didn’t actively try to destroy that system and block that system. We didn’t try to formally say that these people are people and these people are not people, until now.”
Smith said the U.S. conduct is at complete odds with its actions in the Ukraine. US AID has “peppy” videos about its work helping Ukrainians. When Russians bombed a hospital, the U.S. expressed outrage. But Israel has bombed 36 hospitals in Gaza with full U.S. backing.
Stacy Gilbert, a longtime State Department official, resigned after the administration issued a State Department/Department of Defense report in May (an NSM-20) saying that Israel was not blocking humanitarian aid– even as Gaza was experiencing famine.
“I thought this administration was not going to use alternate facts,” Gilbert said. “To see that written in a joint report to Congress, a fact that was so obviously demonstrably false was shocking to me. When that report came out on May 10, that’s when I let it be known that I would resign.”
Gilbert said she “was in a unique position having worked out on that report to say, ‘That is not true, everybody knows it’s not true.’”
So many Biden staff object to the Gaza policy that there is now a “culture of silence” inside the administration, said Maryam Hassanein, a former Interior Department aide who resigned earlier this month:
“One of the main issues is this pervasive culture of silence during a time of significant crisis—specifically, the genocide that’s occurring. At least within my agency, there was an expectation that the crisis, driven by Israeli actions and US funding and enabling, was not to be explicitly discussed.”
Lily Greenberg Call, a former Interior official, echoed this point. “There was a huge culture of silence and a fear of bringing this up because it wasn’t, to quote, ‘relevant to our work,’” she said.
Hassanein said the administration held “listening sessions” last year to air staff concerns, but these left many people feeling that they were being ignored.
Hassanein continued that there is “a significant amount of dissent within the administration.” Many people have quietly left the administration. Others are working inside to organize sickouts and vigils.
Smith said he resigned last spring after his scheduled talk on the effect of starvation on maternal and child health in Gaza was abruptly canceled. It was not a political talk, but a lecture stating “facts” about the effects on pregnant women and children “when you starve a population.”
“That presentation was very suddenly revoked from the conference agenda… at the very last minute,” Smith said. “It was very distressing” to experience that even as the Biden administration is outspoken about conditions in the Ukraine. “To me human rights are universal.”
The State Department is suppressing efforts to warn American officials they could be prosecuted for their role in a genocide, said Josh Paul, a former high official at State.
Paul said that when the U.S. was supplying weapons to the Saudi attack on Yemen, “a legal memo was sent up the chain and not approved,” warning of legal liability for individuals as a result of their complicity in those attacks. That only happened because “a very brave lawyer” drafted the memo.
“That person no longer works for the State Department in part because of that,” Paul said. And in the Gaza war, no such individual is drafting such warnings.
No one is allowed to even discuss the damage to the U.S. national interest, says Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official.
“I don’t know if there’s any way for us to regain credibility as an advocate for the rule of law and for human rights,” Sheline said.
There is an urgent need to discuss changing policy, but the government won’t allow it, she said. “For years, any serious discussion of rethinking US policy has been actively suppressed or subject to self-censorship, both inside and outside the government. This was absolutely something I observed at State before October 7.”
“The Biden administration is not only actively facilitating genocide, but it is doing irreparable harm to national security,” Sheline said.
For instance, the “pursuit of great power competition was very much a key objective” for the White House– besting China and Russia globally. But that goal was set aside when it comes to supporting Israel.
The panelists listed many U.S. laws the Biden administration is breaking,
Tariq Habash said he had to quit the Education Department because of the “near daily dehumanization of Palestinian lives and watching our weapons that we provided unconditionally cause the deaths and destruction of so many people and civilian infrastructure.”
That was Habash’s red line, because he is Palestinian, but he said he had common ground with other federal employees. They see that U.S. policy has “undermined America’s status across the world, and … actually made Americans here at home less safe.”
Harrison Mann, a former Defense intelligence officer, echoed the idea that Biden policy endangers Americans.
“We’ve turned both global and, especially, regional opinion against the United States in a way that we haven’t seen, maybe, since the invasion of Iraq. That is breeding hatred that is undoubtedly going to cause terror in the future. I think it’s only a matter of time until we reap what we sow there.”
The world knows that Israel cannot sustain the intensity and scale of its attack without the “endless flow” of weapons from the U.S., and the war has made everyone worse off. Mann said:
Israel has made itself a global pariah, and it has dragged the US down with it. I think the US has permanently lost the ability to use a values-based argument to rally global partners.
Philip Weiss is senior editor of Mondoweiss.net and founded the site in 2005-2006
