WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal
government workers from the State Department to NASA are circulating
open letters demanding that President Joe Biden pursue a cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas.
Congressional staffers are picking up microphones in front of the
Capitol, speaking out to condemn what they say is the silence of
lawmakers about the toll on Palestinian civilians.
As
the deaths soar in Gaza, Biden and Congress are facing unusually public
challenges from the inside over their support for Israel’s offensive.
Hundreds of staffers in the administration and on Capitol Hill are
signing on to open letters, speaking to reporters and holding vigils,
all in an effort to shift U.S. policy toward more urgent action to stem
Palestinian casualties.
What to know today about the Israel-Hamas war:
- The World Health Organization says 31 “very sick” premature babies have been evacuated from Gaza’s largest hospital and safely transported to another in the south.
- Israel has signaled that it plans to expand its operations to southern Gaza, where it had told hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge early in the war.
- Israel’s military said Yemen-based Houthi rebels had seized a cargo ship in the southern Red Sea sailing from Turkey to India but said no Israelis were aboard and that it wasn’t an Israeli ship.
- Israel,
the United States and the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar have been
negotiating a hostage release for weeks. “We are hopeful that we can get
a significant number of hostages freed in the coming days,” Israel’s
ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, told ABC’s “This Week.”
“Most of our bosses on Capitol Hill are not listening to the people
they represent,” one of the congressional staffers told the crowd at a
protest this month. Wearing medical masks that obscured their faces, the
roughly 100 congressional aides heaped flowers in front of Congress to
honor the civilians killed in the conflict.
The objections coming
from federal employees over the United States’ military and other
backing for Israel’s Gaza campaign is partly an outgrowth of the changes
happening more broadly across American society. As the United States
becomes more diverse, so does the federal workforce, including more
appointees of Muslim and Arab heritage. And surveys show public opinion
shifting regarding U.S. ally Israel, with more people expressing unhappiness over the hard-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
After
weeks of seeing images of bloodied children and fleeing families in
Gaza, a significant number of Americans, including from Biden’s Democratic Party,
disagree with his support of Israel’s military campaign. A poll by The
Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in early
November found 40% of the U.S. public believed Israel’s response in Gaza had gone too far. The war has roiled college campuses and set off nationwide protests.
As of late this past week, one open letter had been endorsed by 650
staffers of diverse religious backgrounds from more than 30 federal
agencies, organizers said. The agencies range from the Executive Office
of the President to the Census Bureau and include the State Department,
U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.
A Biden political appointee who helped organize the multiagency open
letter said the president’s rejection of appeals to push Netanyahu for a
long-term cease-fire had left some federal staffers feeling “dismissed,
in a way.”
“That’s why people are using all sorts of dissent
cables and open letters. Because we’ve already gone through the channels
of trying to do it internally,” this person said.
The letter
condemns both the Hamas killings of about 1,200 people in Israel in the
militants’ Oct. 7 incursion and the Israeli military campaign, which has
killed more than 11,500 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the
Palestinian Health Ministry. The letter calls for the U.S. to push for a
cease-fire and a release of hostages held by Hamas and of Palestinians
that the signers say are unjustly detained by Israel, as well as greater
action overall on behalf of Gaza’s civilians.
The organizers of
the executive branch and congressional protests all spoke to the AP on
condition of anonymity, citing fear of professional and other
repercussions. The federal employees speaking up in opposition to the
U.S. policy appear to be seeking a balance, raising their objections in a
way that doesn’t deprive them of a seat at the table and risk their
careers.
Some current and former officials and staffers said it’s
the public nature of some of the challenges from federal employees that
is unusual. It worries some, as a potential threat to government
function and to cohesion within agencies.
The State Department has an honored tradition of allowing formal,
structured statements of dissent to U.S. policy. It dates to 1970, when
U.S. diplomats resisted President Richard Nixon’s demands to fire
foreign service officers and other State Department employees who signed
an internal letter protesting the U.S. carpet-bombing of Cambodia.
Ever
since, foreign service officers and civil servants have used what is
known as the dissent channel at moments of intense policy debate. That
includes criticism of the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of
the war in Iraq, the Obama administration’s policies in Syria, the
Trump administration’s immigration restrictions on mainly Muslim
countries and the Biden administration’s handling of the 2021 U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But dissent cables, which are signed, are classified and not for public release.
In
State Department tradition, at least, if “for whatever reason a
criticism or complaint were not taken into account or were not believed
to be sufficient to change policy, well, then, it was time to move on.
It was done,’' said Thomas Shannon, a retired career foreign service
officer who served in senior positions at the State Department. “It was
time to salute, and execute.”
Shannon was briefly interim
secretary of state in the Trump administration. There, he fended off a
recommendation from White House spokesman Sean Spicer that State
Department staffers who signed a dissent cable against President Donald
Trump’s so-called Muslim ban should quit.
Growing diversity of the State Department’s workforce is a positive,
Shannon said. But “in the foreign service as in military service,
discipline is real and it’s important,” he said, citing the need for
consistent, cohesive foreign policy.
“I guess I’m just saying I’m not a fan of open letters,” Shannon said.
State
Department officials say several expressions of dissent have made their
way through the formal channels to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
One State Department official, 11-year veteran Josh Paul, quit late last month to protest the administration’s rush to provide arms to Israel.
Blinken
addressed internal opposition to the administration’s handling of the
Gaza crisis in a departmentwide email to staffers this past Monday.
“We’re listening: what you share is informing our policy and our
messages,” he wrote.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the dissent was
welcome. “One of the strengths of this department is that we do have
people with different opinions,” he said.
Unlike the dissent
cables, the multiagency open letter and another endorsed by more than
1,000 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development have
been made public. They also are anonymous, with no names of signers
publicly attached to them.
The USAID letter with 1,000 staffers
backing it, which was given to The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and
others, calls for an immediate cease-fire. But one longtime USAID
staffer said it distressed some of the agency’s staffers, including some
who are Jewish, by not addressing the Hamas killings of civilians in
Israel. The delivery of the letter to news organizations also seemed
outside the agency’s tradition of handling matters internally in a
consultative way, the staffer said, speaking on condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivity of the matter.
In comparison, an
internal State Department memorial for all civilians killed since Oct.
7, organized by Muslim, Christian and Jewish employee organizations,
brought more solace, and seemed to bring colleagues of diverse outlooks
and backgrounds closer together, that USAID staffer said.
The
organizers of the multiagency open letter said they acted out of
frustration after other efforts, particularly a tense meeting between
White House officials and Muslim and Arab political appointees, seemed
to have no effect.
Staying silent, or resigning, would shirk
their responsibility to the public, the staffer said. “If we just leave,
there’s never going to be any change.”
___
Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva and AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.