More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their government’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza.
This came as number of Palestinian-Americans refused to attend a roundtable meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday in protest against the Biden administration's ongoing support for Israel's offensive in the strip.
The signers say they have raised concerns through internal channels but have been ignored.
“Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice, and human rights globally,” the letter says. It adds that “there is a plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes, and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
The Israeli military launched a bombing and ground campaign in Gaza after the Hamas Oct. 7 attack.
The document does not include the names of signers because they fear reprisal, said one organizer, an official who has worked in the State Department for more than two decades.
About 80 of the signers are from American agencies, with the biggest group being from the State Department, one organizer said. The governing authority most represented among the signers is the collective European Union institutions, followed by the Netherlands and the United States.
National-level officials from eight other member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as Sweden and Switzerland, have approved the letter, said another person familiar with the letter. Most of those supporters work in the foreign ministries of those nations.
Support for atrocities
“The political decision-making of Western governments and institutions” over the war “has created unprecedented tensions with the expertise and duty that apolitical civil servants bring to bear,” said Josh Paul, who worked in the State Department bureau that oversees arms transfers but who resigned in October over the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s military campaign. Mr. Paul said he knew the organizers of the letter.
“One-sided support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, and a blindness to Palestinian humanity, is both a moral failure and, for the harm it does to Western interests around the globe, a policy failure,” he said.
US officials released a few similar letters and dissenting messages last fall. In November, more than 500 employees of about 40 US government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his policies on the war.
More than 1,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development released an open letter along the same lines. And dozens of State Department officials have sent at least three internal dissent cables to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
European objections
In the European Union, which maintains a joint diplomatic corps known as the European External Action Service, as well as agencies dealing with humanitarian aid and development, hundreds of officials have signed at least two separate letters of dissent to the bloc’s leadership.
Only a handful of E.U. nations — prominently Ireland, Spain, and Belgium — have consistently called on their partners and the union to push for a cease-fire and focus on Gazans’ suffering.
Berber van der Woude, a former Dutch diplomat, said she wanted to speak out on behalf of the active civil servants who had signed the letter anonymously because they feared retribution for dissenting.
“Being a civil servant doesn’t absolve you from your responsibility to keep on thinking,” she said. “When the system produces perverse decisions or actions, we have a responsibility to stop it. It’s not as simple as ‘shut up and do what you’re told’; we’re also paid to think.”
A letter to Blinken
Several members of the Palestinian-American community refused to meet with Blinken in Washington on Thursday to discuss the situation in Gaza.
“We do not know what more Secretary Blinken or President Biden need to hear or see to compel them to end their complicity in this genocide,” several of those who rejected the invitation said in a press statement distributed by the non-profit Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU). “They show us every day whose lives they value and whose lives they consider disposable. We will not be attending this discussion which can only amount to a box-ticking exercise. Our families, our community and all Palestinians deserve better.”
“There is one thing that we, our community and countless others around the US and the world, including American unions representing nearly 8 million workers and at least 47 US cities, have been asking of this administration: to demand a permanent ceasefire to save Palestinians lives,” they wrote. “A meeting of this nature at this moment in time is insulting and performative.”
One of the invitees to the roundtable, Dr. Tariq Haddad, said in a letter to Blinken that he initially intended to go to the meeting.
However, “after a lot of soul-searching I have decided that I cannot in good conscience meet with you today knowing this administration’s policies have been responsible for the death of over 80 of my family members including dozens of children,” Haddad wrote in the letter.
“How does one meet for what I was told would be 3 minutes, with a person you hold responsible for not just the killing of your child, but rather the murder of over 80 of your family members?” he asked in his letter.
“My family are subsisting on animal feed, Secretary Blinken, because of your policies,” he said.
