By Gozde Bayar
More than 800 officials in the US, the UK and the EU released a public letter of dissent against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza, The New York Times reported on Friday.
According to current and former officials spearheading or supporting the initiative, the letter marks the first time that officials from ally nations across the Atlantic have united to publicly criticize their governments over the war.
The officials argue that they are speaking up because they, as civil servants, consider that it is their duty to help improve policy and to work in their nations’ interests, and that they are speaking up because they believe their governments need to change direction on the war.
“Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice and human rights globally,” The New York Times quoted the letter as saying.
There is a “plausible risk” that their governments’ policies are contributing to “grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide,” it added.
According to the newspaper, the document protected the identities of signers as they fear reprisal, said one organizer, an official who has worked in the State Department for more than 20 years.
But about 800 current officials have given approval to the letter as it has quietly circulated among employees at the national level in multiple countries, the official was quoted as saying.
The effort reveals the extent to which pro-Israel policies among American, British and European leaders have stirred dissent among civil servants, including many who engage in foreign policies of their governments.
Noting that some 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 EU institutions, followed by the Netherlands and the US.
- ‘Unprecedented tensions’
National-level officials from eight other member nations of NATO, as well as Sweden and Switzerland, have approved the letter, another person familiar with the letter was quoted as saying. Most of those supporters work in the foreign ministries of those nations.
“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 after Washington’s support of Israel’s military campaign.
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.
Earlier, US officials released a few similar letters and dissenting messages. In November, over 500 US employees sent a letter to President Joe Biden criticizing his policies on the war without revealing their names.
Across the Atlantic, dissent among European officials has also broken through in the months since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
As for the EU, hundreds of officials have signed at least two separate letters of dissent to the bloc’s leadership. Unlike the US, the EU does not maintain “dissent channels” for officials to formally register their disagreement with policy.
Berber van der Woude, a former official from the Dutch Foreign Ministry, 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.
Woude, an expert in conflict and peacekeeping expert, resigned in 2022 to protest her government’s policy. She has since been a prominent pro-Palestinian voice in the Netherlands.
“Being a civil servant doesn’t absolve you from your responsibility to keep on thinking,” she said, adding: “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.”