By Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

Third U.S. Government Official to Resign Over Gaza Genocide

A senior foreign affairs officer has become the third American official to resign over Washington’s support for the Gaza genocide by Israel. Annelle Sheline, an officer with the Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour office at the American State Department, made a public resignation in order to draw attention to the Israeli genocide, the total support offered for it by Joseph Biden, and the unease that this support has caused among her erstwhile government colleagues.

The Gaza genocide has seen well over thirty thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians and about half children, killed since Israel commenced its assault after a Hamas-led Palestinian breakout from the besieged enclave in October 2023. Sheline is the third government official to publicly resign in its aftermath, following the autumn 2023 resignations of Tariq Habash, an education official of Palestinian Christian background, and Josh Paul. Like Sheline, Paul worked at the State Department – the American equivalent of a foreign ministry – as a director, before quitting his job over the regime’s unalloyed support for Israel even as it committed and sanctioned mass atrocities against Palestinians.

Overwhelming Disgust at Israel’s Actions

Sheline’s role involved the promotion of human rights in the Middle East, though not specifically with regard to Israel and Palestine. She explained in an interview with the Qatari state broadcaster Al-Jazeera that the overwhelming disgust by civil society groups in the region at Israel’s actions, combined with the discord between American condemnation of other states’ abuses and support for Israel, had made her job increasingly difficult. Though Sheline had tried to raise internal objections to the government line, co-authoring a cable to this effect and co-signing two more, her efforts bore no fruit and she was in the end compelled to resign.

Sheline had praised Biden’s early advice, at the immediate outset of the Israeli campaign, that Tel Aviv not overreact to the Palestinian raid the way that the United States had done after its own shores were attacked in September 2001, mounting several destructive regional wars that were often aggressively encouraged by Israel. Yet there was no accord between this advice for restraint and Biden’s subsequent embrace of the Israeli attack, which included not only major military and diplomatic support but even personal ridicule of Palestinian testimony and repeating of bloodcurdling Israeli propaganda points.

Naive or Wilfully Blind

She also highlighted that the far-right Israeli government, lavished with such support, had no incentive to moderate its behavior: “Prime minister [Benjamin Mileikowsky] Netanyahu’s political future depends on this violence continuing, and he has no incentive to either get his own hostages back or to end the violence.” The United States was “somewhat naïve or, you know, wilfully blind to the political incentives on Netanyahu’s side.”

Thus Tel Aviv had indulged in a wholesale, months-long massacre: instead of conducting the precision strikes for which they had the wherewithal, the Israeli military has instead tried “to engage in ethnic cleansing to try to remove the population of Gaza…to make life so unlivable there that people cannot survive or are forced to leave and to take over that territory.”

In an open essay explaining her resignation, Sheline claimed that her criticism of the United States’ unquestioning support of Israel was widely shared:

“So many of my colleagues feel betrayed. I write for myself but speak for many others, including Feds United for Peace, a group mobilizing for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza that represents federal workers in their personal capacities across the country, and across 30 federal agencies and departments. After four years of then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to cripple the department, State employees embraced Biden’s pledge to rebuild American diplomacy. For some, US support for Ukraine against Russia’s illegal occupation and bombardment seemed to reestablish America’s moral leadership. Yet the administration continues to enable Israel’s illegal occupation and destruction of Gaza.”

Haunted

According to Sheline, she had initially intended to resign quietly, as she claims several other colleagues did, but was encouraged to speak for other dissidents and draw attention to the crisis by making her resignation public.

Sheline has been “haunted” by the last social media post of Aaron Bushnell, the airforce officer whose public self-immolation in front of Israel’s Washington D.C. embassy in February 2024 helped refocus official attention to Israeli war crimes after months of wilful denial that made a mockery of the United States’ support, much professed by Biden, for international institutions and legality.

“I can no longer continue what I was doing,” Sheline concluded in her essay. “I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world.

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