State Department human rights officer resigns in protest of US' policy on Gaza

By Iclal Turan

WASHINGTON (AA) - A State Department official resigned Wednesday in protest of the Biden administration's support for Israel's war against the Gaza Strip.

Annelle Sheline, 38, who has worked as a foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor for one year, wrote in an article for CNN that she was "unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities," and resigned before the conclusion of her two-year contract.

"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," she wrote.

"Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began," she said.

Sheline said she decided to publicly resign because her colleagues' response was: “Please speak for us.”

She added that across the federal government, employees like her have tried for months to “influence policy, both internally and, when that failed, publicly.”

Noting that the State Department ascertained that Israel is in compliance with international law in its conduct of the war and in providing humanitarian assistance, Sheline wrote: "To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians."

Sheline said she was "haunted" by the final social media post of 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell who died after self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on Feb. 25 in protest of Israel's war against Gaza.

"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," Bushnell wrote in the post.

Sheline said she could no longer continue to do what she was doing.

"I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world," she added.

Asked about the resignation, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller described Sheline as a fellow at the State Department who finished the first year of a fellowship that could have gone for two years.

Miller said that there is a "broad diversity of views inside the State Department" about the US' policy on Gaza.”

"What we try to do in the State Department, what the Secretary (Antony Blinken) has instructed his team to do is to make sure that people have an opportunity to make their views known," said Miller.

"He reads dissent cables when dissent cables are authored on any issue. He meets with employees who have a broad range of views. He listens to their feedback and he takes into account his decision-making. He encourages other senior leaders in the department to do so as well," he added.

Sheline's resignation is the second publicly announced protest resignation from the agency since Oct. 7 after Josh Paul, former director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, publicly announced his resignation Oct. 19.

"I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued - indeed, expanded and expedited - provision of lethal arms to Israel - I have reached the end of that bargain," said Paul, who worked on arms transfers for more than 11 years, in his two-page resignation letter.

Tariq Habash, a political appointee at the Education Department, also resigned in January, citing the Biden administration's approach to the Gaza conflict and its failure to halt what he termed as Israel's "collective punishment tactics."