Second State Dept. Official Resigns over US Gaza policy

State department official’s resignation highlights rifts over US Gaza policy

Annelle Sheline says ‘I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,’ claiming Biden is flouting US law over Israel

The Guardian

by Julian Borger

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Wed 27 Mar 2024 18.03 EDT

Last modified on Wed 27 Mar 2024 18.48 EDT

A human rights official has resigned from the US state department over Gaza saying the Biden administration is flouting US law by continuing to arm Israel, and is hushing up evidence that the US had seen on Israeli human rights abuses.

Annelle Sheline, said she had hoped to have an influence on policy by staying at her post in the Near Eastern section of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, taking part in discussions, signing dissent cables and raising her concerns with her supervisor. But she had lost confidence she could do anything that would affect the flow of US arms to Israel.

“The fundamental reason was – I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,” Sheline told the Guardian. “I have a young daughter. She’s not yet two, but if some day in the future, she is learning about this and knows that I was at the state department and she asked me [about it] – I want to be able to tell her that I did what I could.”

Sheline is only the second state department official to resign over US policy on the Gaza war (another official left the education department over the issue), but she said that many of her colleagues had told her they would resign if they could afford to lose their job, and had urged her to speak out about her reasons for quitting, rather than to leave quietly.

Annelle Sheline. Photograph: Annelle Sheline

The 38-year-old, who studied the foreign policy of Arab governments for her doctorate, said the state department was aware of plenty of evidence that Israel was violating international law in its conduct of the Gaza war, and that the Biden administration was violating US law by continuing to supply weapons.

She pointed in particular to the Leahy laws, which forbid assistance to foreign military units implicated in atrocities, and section 620 (I) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which states that no assistance should be given to any government which “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”.

On Monday, the state department said it had received assurances from Israel officials and “not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law”. But Sheline said: “The law is clear here and we do have evidence. But the specifics are just not being followed.”

The state department has said it is reviewing evidence of civilian harm under a mechanism established by the Biden administration last year, weeks before the Gaza war broke out, but Sheline said the results of those investigations would only be made public when the White House wanted them to be.

 “There are a lot of people working on this at State but at the end of the day, the public policy does have to be something that the White House signs off on,” Sheline said. “Until the White House is ready to take a different line, some of the other things happening in State are just not going to come out.” She said she believed administration policy was being driven by domestic political considerations, but argued that domestic politics were shifting on the issue, pointing to the significant “uncommitted” protest vote in the Democratic presidential primary election, and suggested that the Biden administration had misjudged the mood.

“I do think the president’s view of Israel is deeply influenced by a generational divide,” she said. “I think it’s taken this administration a long time to realise that the previous political calculus on this, in terms of big donors, in terms of the Israel lobby, … is seeing a shift.”

On Wednesday, Gallup published a new poll showing a significant drop in American public support for Israel’s conduct of the war, from 50% in November to 36% now, with 55% disapproving of Israel’s actions.

Sheline credited this shift for helping lead to the US abstention on a UN security council resolution on Monday, allowing it to pass after the US vetoed three earlier draft texts over the nearly six months since the war started.

“I am glad to see that slight shift, but it hasn’t really made any difference to the people in Gaza yet,” Sheline said. “So it’s really too little, too late.

“Not only are these policies devastating the people of Gaza, but I think they’re also devastating the US image in the world,” she argued. “This administration came in promising to rebuild American diplomacy and America’s moral leadership after the Trump administration, but so many of these issues that the administration said were so important – including human rights – seem to be less important to this administration than the US-Israel relationship.”

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Also fr yesterday's Guardian:

Biden administration’s Gaza strategy panned as ‘mess’ amid clashing goals

Strain of aiming to influence Israel’s actions without leverage and also avoiding starvation is showing, say analysts (full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/26/biden-gaza-strategy-criticised-israel

The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticised as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the state department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was non-binding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself....

 I​​srael announced on Monday it would stop working with the UN relief agency Unrwa, the main aid agency serving Gaza. Unrwa said its aid convoys had been blocked since 21 March.

On the same day, the state department spokesman, Matthew Miller, insisted that the US currently had no reason to dispute Israeli assurances that it was complying with humanitarian law in Gaza.

 

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The following warning was published as an op-ed in late Feb. in US Today. It was written by 7 experts  and directors of global food charities in February, so things are only worse now.

The crisis in Gaza will soon reach a tipping point, where emergency food aid won't be enough. Averting mass death becomes harder as starvation gains momentum.

Sean Callahan, Jan Egeland, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, Jeremy Konyndyk, Abby Maxman, Michelle Nunn, Janti Soeripto and Charles Owubah

Opinion contributors/ USA Today: 2/24

President Joe Biden recently said that in Gaza, “there are a lot of innocent people who are starving.”

In fact, letting people in Gaza suffer and die from hunger and preventable disease is a political choice.

It is not too late to change this story if urgent actions are taken to achieve a cease-fire and the release of the hostages, and to allow a sufficient flow of aid into Gaza.

Only an immediate stop to the fighting, a massive increase in humanitarian assistance and the return of basic services can keep the number of deaths caused by hunger and disease from eclipsing the already shocking number of those killed to date.

 

 “If the situation continues,” one colleague writes, “we will see one of the biggest disasters we have faced as humanitarians. It will be due to hunger, disease, and the very polluted and dangerous environment in Gaza, resulting from the residuals of the thousands of bombs, the white phosphorus, the raw sewage floating all over the place, and the unsafe water being consumed as people don’t have other choices.”

 

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global authority that monitors food insecurity and acute malnutrition, reports that the entire population of Gaza – more than 2 million people – is experiencing hunger at crisis levels or worse: “There is a risk of Famine and it is increasing each day that the current situation of intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persists or worsens. … This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.”[Note: this piece was written over a month ago, and things have only gotten worse since then with UNRWA not allowed to work within Gaza anymore, and the US having defunded it for a minimum of one year in a bi-partisan vote extending Biden's ban]

The speed of the deterioration in Gaza is unprecedented in recent history. Nearly 3 in 4 Palestinians in Gaza are drinking from contaminated sources. Communicable diseases are on the rise. ....

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Please consider signing a petition for Biden to enforce the UN Ceasefire and expedite as much humanitarian aid as possible before it is too late. If things continue as they are going, not only will untold numbers of civilians slowly waste away and die, but the US will not be the same again in the eyes of the world and its own eyes.