More than 500 alumni of Biden’s presidential campaign signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in November, and congressional aides and USAid employees sent their own petitions this fall.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI – US President Joe Biden’s administration is grappling with a growing dissent over the president’s Gaza policy. A Department of Education official has publicly resigned and a letter signed by more than a dozen Biden campaign staffers have called for a ceasefire and the conditioning of aid to Israel, The Guardian newspaper said in a report on Saturday.
“It’s pretty extraordinary levels of dissent,” said Josh Paul, a career official working on arms sales at the State Department who resigned in protest in October, of the mounting signs of discontent. “I am hearing in recent weeks from people who are thinking more seriously about resigning,” the report said.
Tariq Habash, the Department of Education official, said he has heard from many more officials than he had anticipated who are contemplating their own exits. “It speaks to the continued shift and concerns about our current policies,” he said. “I hope it resonates with the president and the people who are making policy decisions on this issue that is affecting millions of lives.”
Habash, who is Palestinian American, is the first political appointee from the Biden administration to bring his resignation to the media and publish an open letter. “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives,” he wrote in announcing his resignation from his position as adviser to its policy planning office. In the letter, he objected to the president not pressuring Israel “to halt the abusive and ongoing collective punishment tactics” that have led to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He also took issue with administration leaders’ repetition of “unverified claims that systemically dehumanize Palestinians”.
A day before Habash quit, 17 current campaign staffers anonymously called for a ceasefire and conditioning military aid to Israel. Their letter urged Biden to take “concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this conflict”.
“We know we’re not alone in this, and there is a very big coalition asking for the same thing,” an organiser of the letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was quoted by The Guardian said:
These are just the latest internal criticisms of Biden. Last month, a group of administration officials hid their faces with masks and scarves and staged a vigil in front of the White House in support of a ceasefire.
More than 500 alumni of Biden’s presidential campaign signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in November, and congressional aides and USAid employees sent their own petitions this fall.
Current State Department officials who do not want to risk their jobs by speaking out have increasingly taken advantage of sanctioned routes to criticising the president, by filing dissent memos to the secretary of state.
Of Habash’s resignation, the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that “people have the right to voice their opinion”. She and the State Department directed questions to the Department of Education, whose spokesperson wished Habash the “best in his future endeavors”.
Biden’s advisers sought to diffuse internal dissatisfaction with a series of listening sessions at the White House and the State Department in October and November. “It’s a sign of strength that an administration not only hears but welcomes dissent from within,” The Guardian report quoted Emily Horne, a former spokesperson for the Biden White House.
Since the first days after Hamas’s 7 October attacks, the administration has shifted some of its rhetoric. Biden is now talking more about the humanitarian catastrophe than he was during the initial days of Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza and has repeatedly urged Israel to take steps to protect civilians. But the acute situation in Gaza caused by Israel’s ongoing operations, which have killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, along with risks of famine and severely restricted medical care, have overshadowed any purported shifts in US policy.
Paul, the senior State Department career official who resigned in protest in October, said he’s in contact with several people currently in government who are thinking about leaving over Biden’s handling of Israel. “If there was universal healthcare, there would be more people willing to resign,” he said, in reference to many government employees’ reliance on their jobs for medical care, the report said. –- With inputs from Agencies
