WASHINGTON: A United States State Department official, who promoted human rights on behalf of the US government, has become the latest staffer to leave her post in opposition to President Joe Biden’s ‘horrific’ support for Israel’s war against Gaza.
Annelle Sheline, who was a Middle East analyst, announced her resignation in an interview with the Washington Post on Thursday, as the official death toll in Gaza reached 32,490 since October 7, and the World Food Programme has warned that famine in the enclave is imminent.
Ms. Sheline’s resignation from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour is the most significant public departure from the department since last October, when Josh Paul, a senior official in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, announced he was calling it quits.
“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. 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,” Sheline, who worked as a foreign affairs officer, said.
“Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.”
“I was not planning initially to go public,” she told CNN’s Jim Sciutto Thursday. “I was only at the State Department for a brief time. But when I started to tell people that I was planning to resign quietly, they said, you know, please reconsider, please, please go public if you’d be willing to. So I decided I would.”
“I do think that public pressure is why we’re starting to see the administration shifting here,” she added. Tariq Habash, a Palestinian-American policy adviser in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, quit in January for similar reasons.
The resignations came as the Biden administration has faced pressure from many Democrats to call for a permanent cease-fire and restrict how Israel uses US weapons and other military assistance in Gaza.
The soaring death toll in Gaza prompted a group calling itself Feds United for Peace to organize a walkout of workers from across two dozen federal agencies in January.
The following month, a 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest the Gaza war.
For months, Biden administration officials have sought to address the dissent. Secretary of State Antony Blinken participated in “listening sessions” with Arab American, Muslim and Jewish staffers shortly after the war broke out.
Other senior State Department and White House officials have since held similar meetings with staff members, and Blinken has sent two department-wide emails to update concerned staffers after his trips to the Middle East.
Asked about Sheline’s resignation, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Wednesday that “there is a broad diversity of views inside the State Department about our policy with respect to Gaza” and that Blinken takes them into account when making decisions.
He told reporters that Sheline left the department after concluding “the first year of a fellowship that could have gone for two years.” She “did not exercise her option to return for a second year as a fellow,” according to Miller.
“I think everyone can make decisions for themselves about what they’re going to do,” he added. “One of the things I would note, even in the first story that I read about this, the individual in question herself noted that she attends meetings where there are people who have the exact opposite view of hers and express them openly, and that’s what we encourage people to do, and ultimately they have to make decisions about their future employment status.”
