State Department Official Resigns Over Biden’s Support for Gaza Slaughter

 

Annelle Sheline has become the third US official to publicly resign over Biden's unconditional support for Israel since October 7

by Dave DeCamp March 27, 2024 at 3:30 pm ET 

CategoriesNewsTagsGaza

Annelle Sheline, who served as a foreign affairs officer in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, has resigned from her post after a year due to President Biden’s unconditional support for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

“For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office,” Sheline wrote in an op-ed for CNN announcing her resignation.

“However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State,” she wrote.

Sheline said she did not initially intend to make her resignation public but did so after being encouraged by colleagues in the State Department. “When I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, ‘Please speak for us,'” she wrote.

In the op-ed, Sheline cited Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US airman who died after lighting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest of US support for the Israeli massacre of Palestinians. “I am haunted by the final social media post of Aaron Bushnell,” Sheline wrote.

Bushnell’s final social media post said: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Sheline is the third US official to publicly resign over Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, which has killed over 32,000 Palestinians, including over 13,000 children. Josh Paul, who worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, quit in October and criticized the US’s “blind support” for Israel.

Tariq Habash, a Palestinian-American who worked in the Education Department, resigned in January. In response to Sheline’s resignation, Habash told Al Jazeera that it wasn’t “surprising that [Sheline] felt like the only way that she can make an impact is by leaving, because in almost six months we’ve seen no substantive change in policy, and our influence at the international stage seems to be disintegrating by the day.”

Sheline said that she and other federal employees had tried to influence policy both internally and publicly but that it failed. “My colleagues and I watched in horror as this administration delivered thousands of precision-guided munitions, bombs, small arms and other lethal aid to Israel and authorized thousands more, even bypassing Congress to do so,” she said.

Before joining the State Department, Sheline had worked as a researcher for the Quincy Institute, where she was critical of President Biden’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and US support for its brutal war in Yemen. Now, the Biden administration is conducting a new bombing campaign against the Houthis that’s not supported by the Saudis, and the US is blocking a Yemen peace deal with new sanctions.

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/03/27/state-department-official-resigns-over-bidens-support-for-gaza-slaughter/