A Quiet Rebellion On Gaza Is Growing Among Civil Servants Across The West
As Israel continues to retaliate for Oct. 7 — while receiving huge support from the U.S. and its allies — government officials have felt compelled to act in ways they never thought they would.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed 05/10/2024
Illustration:Jianan Liu/HuffPost;Photo:Getty Images
In The Hague, a serious young Dutch bureaucrat works on policies that are supposed to deter violations of human rights, from Myanmar’s crackdown on its ethnic minorities to Russians directing slaughter in Ukraine.
But she’s worried: If those efforts seem hypocritical or selective, they could have little impact. Her government claims it wants to promote international law everywhere. All the while, the Netherlands has continued to back Israel’s offensive in Gaza — a campaign accused of hundreds of breaches of international humanitarian law.
In Berlin, a German official is beginning to question why she wasted time studying law. The country’s leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has said that “Israel is a democracy, and therefore there is no doubt it will not violate international law,” the official told HuffPost, visibly distraught on a rainy June evening. If some players can never be wrong, “what do you need a legal system for?”
And in Washington, a veteran civil servant named Stacy Gilbert quit the State Department in May after spending months trying to pressure Israel to let more aid reach Palestinians. In working on humanitarian crises for 20 years, she said she “cannot think of another situation where things have been allowed to become this bad.”
The U.S., Gilbert told HuffPost, has “turned a blind eye to where we have responsibility. That is, our arms sales [to Israel] have continued, and that makes us complicit.”
A few weeks after Gilbert resigned, British diplomat Mark Smith told hundreds of his colleagues the United Kingdom “may be complicit in war crimes” because of its weapons shipments to Israel. He conveyed the warning in an Aug. 16 email announcing his own resignation from the government, which he described as “a message I never wanted to send.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, a rampage inside Israel by the Gaza-based militant group Hamas set off a new war in the Middle East. The conflict immediately implicated the U.S. and its peer countries because of their closeness with Israel and their deep ties to the region, from their vast military bases to economic links worth billions of dollars.
Almost since the latest round of fighting in Gaza began, Western governments have faced a pitched internal rebellion over their role in the war from hundreds of their own officials. Government staffers across the West have mobilized to urge domestic political leaders and fellow citizens to think critically about Israel’s approach and whether support for it is justified.
HuffPost interviewed nearly two dozen current and former officials challenging their governments’ post-Oct. 7 policies in four capitals, tapping an international whisper network. HuffPost is shielding most of their identities.
While limits on political activity by government employees vary from country to country, unauthorized conversations with the press are generally a red line. Sources also feared they would be targeted by pro-Israel activists or by right-wing media outlets in many Western countries, which demonize bureaucrats as standing in the way of populist policies.
Conversations with these officials reveal insular patterns in policymaking around the war in many of the world’s most powerful democracies, and illuminate how the bloodshed in Gaza has forged bonds among concerned government employees across boundaries of citizenship, specialty and rank.
The near-unconditional backing of Israel by Western countries, led by the U.S., is driving unconscionable Palestinian suffering, degrading global protections for civilians, undermining those countries’ other goals and worsening Mideast tensions and anti-Western feeling to a dangerous degree, the skeptics argue.
Facing charges of genocide, Israel says it must defend itself. It argues it takes steps to reduce collateral damage and blames the war’s civilian toll on militants for embedding within Arab communities. Many Western governments echo those points.
The dissenters say they have shared, and continue to share, their advice inside government, only for leaders to discount and exclude inconvenient voices.
At the war’s one-year mark, this opposition movement by Western officials can only claim limited success in influencing policy. But its importance and the stakes of a rethink are arguably higher than ever.
Among observers of the region, a leading concern about Israel’s actions since last October has been that they will spark a regional war, leading to ever-deadlier attacks across a range of countries. That prospect presently looks hard to avoid.
This week, Israel invaded its neighbor Lebanon, ostensibly to weaken the Iran-linked militia Hezbollah but without sharing a clear plan for its mission there, and Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel — escalations by two of the region’s best-armed forces. The U.S. has pledged to support Israel in its Lebanese operation and in striking back at Iran, boosting anxieties that American troops, now being surged to the Middle East, will be caught up in the clashes.
Endorsing the Lebanon invasion in particular, enthusiastic White House officials saw the prospect as an opportunity to weaken Hezbollah and Iranian power broadly, and discounted concerns from intelligence, State Department and Pentagon officials, sources told HuffPost and Politico reported.
“I and many others have warned repeatedly that this is where the administration was taking us,” Harrison Mann, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who left the U.S. Army in June over the Gaza war, told HuffPost this week, referring to “a genocide in Gaza and … nihilistic wars of choice in Lebanon and Iran.”
“For the six months I worked on this war, I was able to see — often in real time — when the administration’s public statements did not match the reality on the ground as reported by its own intelligence agencies,” Mann continued. “My hope was, and remains, that those of us with experience in government have the ability to more credibly challenge the falsehoods spread by the Biden-Harris administration, educate the American public, lawmakers and advocates and contribute to the pressure to end the killing.”
The situation echoes the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in terms of both the potentially tremendous consequences of escalation and the deep misgivings over the direction of policy among many subject-matter experts. The level of internal dissent, particularly in the U.S., is greater now than it has been at any time since that moment in 2003, the objectors — and even officials unaffiliated with them — say.
As the Bush administration devised its Iraq policy, State Department staff and other officials at the time internally predicted the U.S. would cause chaos there and urged a different approach. At least three American diplomats resigned. Eventually, the critics were vindicated. After years of debate and as horrors continue to be unearthed, the Iraq strategy, which destabilized that country and empowered extremist groups like the Islamic State, is widely seen as a cautionary tale.
Today, current and former Western officials say it would be irresponsible to wait for that eventual reflection, and argue a course correction now would save lives and limit the harmful long-term effects of a policy they see as too deferential to Israel’s hawkish government.
They have formed a small but influential subset of the worldwide movement for a different Middle East strategy, arguing the West must reaffirm international and domestic laws governing warfare and prioritize diplomacy, from a cease-fire in Gaza to a just Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
Their actions, ranging from demonstrations and public statements to resignations, are an indisputable part of the story of the post-Oct. 7 war — highlighted in news outlets around the world, discussed at State Department briefings, in Congress and among delegates at the Democratic National Convention and cited by antiwar voices, including senior politicians.
Few in this loosely unified group of frustrated government officials ever saw themselves as activists. Many are longtime bureaucrats who feel overwhelmed when they get too many notifications on the encrypted messaging app Signal, a tool they’d had little use for before. They are fundamentally institutionalists.
Yet the gravity of the situation has compelled them to act in new ways, they told HuffPost.
“If the West kills international law, nobody can revive it,” a European Union official told HuffPost.
Fearing a more brutal world, the officials see Israel’s expanding warfare as potentially fatal for principles they sincerely believe their countries represent. They condemn Hamas, consistently. But their nations are not arming Hamas.
The more Western governments fuel Israeli actions akin to “collective punishment,” the more those same Western governments weaken standards for which they are frequent, if imperfect, champions, like the Geneva Conventions or universal human rights, the argument goes. If those ideals dissipate, so might prospects for holding any country, faction or leader accountable.
The dissenters have rallied at a risky moment. Hard-right forces — many of them ardently pro-Israel — claim career civil servants represent an undemocratic, obstructionist “deep state.” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged to put thousands of bureaucrats into an employment category, known as Schedule F, that will make it easy to boot them for political reasons, and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), has suggested Trump “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “replace them with our people.”
Already, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly condemned U.S. officials who question support for Israel. When some bureaucrats took a day off work to signal their displeasure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said they should be fired, and in December, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) urged investigations of officials who signed a call for a cease-fire.
Their ideological allies are gaining ground in Europe. As of this summer, the government of the Netherlands is dominated by far-right politician Geert Wilders, who has wedded his anti-Muslim narratives to an intense commitment to Israel. Wilders condemned the Dutch army chief for questioning Israel’s killing of civilians and this week appeared to endorse an Israeli confrontation against Iran, calling its leader “a psychopath” on X.
But to some, political tumult in the West in recent years has only underscored the value of government staff standing firm in defense of nonpartisan oaths. Before he became CIA director and a key player in President Joe Biden’s Gaza approach, the former diplomat William Burns wrote in 2019: “The real threat to our democracy is not from an imagined deep state. … Instead, it comes from a weak state of hollowed-out institutions and battered and belittled public servants, no longer able to uphold the ever more fragile guardrails of our democracy or compete on an ever more crowded, complicated, and competitive international landscape.”
One official in the U.S., a well-connected 25-year veteran of the civil service deeply involved in the organization Feds United For Peace, said she and her colleagues are proud of their work to push back on support for Israel.
They wish it wasn’t needed, and that they’d had a greater effect so far on Middle East policy, she told HuffPost. But they see their mobilization as one of lasting importance, she said, with a nod to Trump.
“People have started to understand the power of moral clarity … and of civil servants, respectfully and in appropriate ways, communicating with Americans and people around the world,” the bureaucrat continued. “We’ve exercised that muscle, and it may prove valuable in the future.”
Sounding The Alarm
The Oct. 7 attack immediately spurred public solidarity with Israel from Western governments. But privately, officials in many of those countries warned leaders that their rush to help a longtime ally should also account for Israel’s history of brutality toward Palestinians. The general message: Help, but carefully.
Josh Paul, then a State Department official who worked on weapons transfers, emailed colleagues on Oct. 8 warning about how Israel might use U.S. military equipment in unacceptable ways, he told HuffPost. Unbeknownst to him, one of his colleagues, Dubai-based diplomat Hala Rharrit, was also sending messages in early October urging the administration to ensure its public comments recognized Palestinian suffering, not just that of Israelis. Failing to do so would alienate people across the Middle East, she argued.
Senior U.S. officials separately alerted the White House about possible Israeli war crimes and the strategic cost of unchecked support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans, Reuters recently revealed.
By Oct. 10, the day after Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel” for Gaza, a German official who worked in international development emailed her peers saying she anticipated “a massacre.”
Decision-makers didn’t listen to those alarm bells. Germany quickly counted “among the most hawkish supporters of Israel’s disproportionate military response,” boosting weapons exports to the Israelis, researcher Sajjad Safaei wrote for the Stimson Center think tank. The U.S. flooded Israel with arms and shielded it from calls to halt the fighting. Paul quit the State Department on Oct. 17 in a development first reported by HuffPost, sending shockwaves in the press and among other government workers who were appalled by Western policy but nervous about speaking up.
Biden led Western leaders in overwhelming public sympathy for Israel following the Oct. 7 attack. Privately, their governments were receiving warnings about Israel's retaliation.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images
As world leaders pledged to back Israel despite Israeli leaders’ increasingly hostile rhetoric, like Gallant’s statement that Israel was “fighting human animals and [would] act accordingly,” one European official who had survived a civil war in her youth said the dread left her with “an extreme stomachache.”
“They openly shared the intent of genocide, and everything I felt as a child was boiling up,” the official told HuffPost.
She joined a WhatsApp group with several hundred other European officials.
Seeking “safety in numbers,” they strategized about ways to tell their managers they anticipated “disproportionate violence” in Gaza.
As the Palestinian death count swelled and Israeli evacuation orders forced many Gaza residents from their homes throughout October, Western officials said Israel should respect international law and avoid harming civilians. But they gave no indication that was more than a suggestion.
Within government agencies, concern and cautions grew.
The Netherlands’ embassy in Israel internally reported on Nov. 8 that the Israeli military was using “disproportionate force” in Gaza by following its Dahiya doctrine, which recommends intentionally striking civilian targets. Israeli actions were clear violations of international law, a Dutch military attache claimed. In mid-November, a dozen French ambassadors stationed in the Middle East sent Paris a rare joint missive saying France’s significant influence in the region was plummeting because it was seen as too supportive of Israel.
Around the same time, more than 500 U.S. officials signed a letter urging Biden to limit support for Israel.
Statements and research from the United Nations and independent human rights groups that called Israel’s actions beyond the pale helped bolster their objections. “The institutions we hold dear are clearly saying war crimes are being committed,” the European official said.
Yet while they worried their governments were enabling Israel to act with impunity, Western critics of Israel were unsure how much to push back. They feared being punished or shunned by their colleagues or broader society as they embarked on an unfamiliar degree of advocacy.
To the veteran German official, the subject of Israeli excesses in Gaza felt “untouchable” in a way no other topic had in her 15 years in government. And as staff at the U.S. State Department expressed their concerns, the agency was increasingly sidelined in decision-making on Gaza, HuffPost reported at the time.
In several capitals, governments organized “listening sessions” for staff. They served asimilar function: to make concerned officials feel heard without giving them a chance to sway policy. German, American, Dutch and French officials told HuffPost their impression was that actual policy was made by tiny sets of political leaders in their capitals — circles that were even narrower than the core groups managing other crises from Ukraine to Afghanistan, reflecting the sensitivity of matters relating to Israel.
Limits on self-_expression_ became clear in small ways. Faryda Hussein, who was working as a civil servant at the European Commission, the central bureaucracy of the EU, recalled colleagues telling her to remove the phrase “Against Genocide” from her email signature, a move she found chilling but also darkly hilarious. Was that really an unacceptable message for an EU employee to share?
Though they feared being treated as “Hamas sympathizers,” she and other Brussels bureaucrats publicly demanded changes in policy because “everything we pledged allegiance to is being broken down” in Gaza, they said.
“I have never been so much out of my comfort zone,” Hussein, who remains in the Dutch civil service, told HuffPost. “I wanted to be in the back seat; I didn’t want to be the driver. … Here and there, we advise; as soon as [governments] break traffic rules, we reach for the brake. We’re not here to jump into the driver’s seat.”
Uniting Across Borders
Last December, two former Dutch diplomats who had quit over the Netherlands’ Palestine policy started thinking about uniting the dissenters in a way that could resonate globally. They could put out a statement together, showing a critical mass of Western officials rebuked Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Berber van der Woude and Angélique Eijpe had been inspired by Paul’s resignation and other activism by U.S. officials, like a vigil at the White House. Eijpe reached out to him the way a good civil servant would: via LinkedIn message.
Paul, in turn, contacted current and former American colleagues, seeing the desire for cooperation as “natural.”
“It is very much the same problem that civil servants are facing on both sides of the Atlantic, in that you have government expertise that is being set aside in favor of political decision-making,” he told HuffPost.
Former State Department official Josh Paul joined a pro-ceasefire rally by Biden administration officials, many of whom concealed their identities, in front of the White House on December 13, 2023.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images
A current U.S. official decided to spearhead the American branch of the plan because she felt guilty about the U.S.’ outsize role in keeping the West united behind Israel regardless of its actions.
The U.S. official sensed her European allies “wanted the perspective that the U.S. is not a monolith on this, there is dissent,” she told HuffPost. That could help the movement claim the mantle of the storied post-World War II transatlantic alliance for an antiwar message.
Drafting the statement had its complexities, reflecting different strains of thinking across borders.
“We would have liked more context on how Oct. 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum, … [but] the bulk of the drafters did not think this was tactical at that stage,” said an EU official involved in the deliberations. “There was a tone that U.S. policy in Gaza would strengthen Iran’s policy in the Middle East, which we found a bit awkward because we didn’t want to demonize anyone, Iran or anyone else, as Europeans.”
Still, they added, “what was most important was that it was the first we were doing something with U.S. officials. … We had sent three or four letters [within E.U. institutions] but we noticed the letters didn’t have the impact we were hoping for.”
Stateside, the draft spread from official to official, like “a little bit of samizdat,” said the American official, using a term for literature banned by communist states.
More than 100 Americans signed the proclamation, which was given a striking title: “It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments’ Policies Are Wrong.” They were joined by upwards of 600 colleagues in Europe and Canada. The signatories revealed their identities to the statements’ organizers but not publicly. By Feb. 2, more than 800 serving civil servants had endorsed it.
“We have been hired to serve, inform and advise. … We have internally expressed our concerns that the policies of our governments/institutions do not serve our interests,” the statement read.
“Israel’s military operations have disregarded all important counterterrorism expertise gained since 9/11,” the message argued. By supporting the offensive, Western governments “undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice, and human rights globally and weaken our efforts to rally international support for Ukraine and to counter malign actions by Russia, China and Iran.”
Leaders had “overruled” the signatories’ advice, the statement said. But they could still use leverage over Israel, including by withholding transfers of weapons for its military, in order to secure the release of hostages and develop an Israeli-Palestinian settlement that reduces the chances of another Oct. 7-style attack or Gaza war.
The memo marked a high point for the dissenters, who saw it as more than a collective action. Four months into the war, without an end in sight, it was a reminder that Israel’s Gaza policy had not been wholeheartedly embraced by the governments of the world’s chief democracies, and that its opponents would not be silenced. Its total number of signatories eventually swelled to nearly 1,000.
“We laid out a defense of the civil service and our role and why we were being public,” said the U.S. official who helped organize the message. She recalled GOP lawmakers’ “vitriol” against dissenting American civil servants in the weeks prior to the statement.
Unlike one-off actions by specific bureaucrats at a specific government agency or protests in one particular capital, the statement would enter into the historical record as evidence of broad, unified opposition to Western Middle East policy. It scored headlines that senior officials couldn’t ignore: in The New York Times, on CNN, in the Brussels stalwart EUobserver. And it underscored that the fight over Gaza held broader stakes than domestic political squabbles.
Commenting on the statement to the BBC, a senior British official put it in the context of the International Court of Justice, the “world court” at the U.N., which had said a week earlier that Israel’s campaign could plausibly constitute a genocide.
By discounting high-profile skepticism about Israel’s actions, Western governments were putting international order “in peril,” the official said.
A Red Line Crossed
For critics, that solidarity became more vital as the war approached and then crossed its six-month mark, with promises from the U.S. and others of a deal to halt the fighting still unfulfilled. If organizing hadn’t shifted policy, it had offered a chance for the dissenters to draw strength and ideas from each other, in LinkedIn discussions, in group chats or in person.
Dutch civil servants had since November been holding weekly in-person protests outside the Netherlands’ foreign ministry; attendance grew as the events continued, Eijpe, a former deputy ambassador, told HuffPost.
In February, Paul traveled to The Hague and joined one of the sit-ins. The moment was “a high point” in his advocacy against the Gaza war that also offered a bittersweet reminder about the risks of dissent in the U.S. — the country with the greatest leverage over Israel.
“I cannot imagine American civil servants sitting outside the State Department on a weekly basis without the need to wear masks and without fear of being picked apart by the pro-Israel machinery that is out there both in Congress and in the media,” he later told HuffPost.
Tensions over Gaza were becoming more intense globally. Ever more desperate updates from the ground prompted virulent criticism of Israel, which made some of the country’s defenders even more aggressive. Inside Western bureaucracies, Israel’s destructive policy became, to a degree, normalized, even as its toll rose — a development many inside government found chilling.
People gather in front of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, on Feb. 24, 2024.
Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
In March, the German lawyer who spoke with HuffPost approached her manager to discuss her fear that their government was enabling violations of international law. The two had recently completed a major project that predated Oct. 7; she felt the time was right for a frank conversation.
She said her boss repeatedly denied Israel’s campaign was breaching global standards — rejecting months of assessments from U.N. experts and rights groups — and told the staffer she should continue protesting on her personal time and could quit if she felt too complicit.
Then her manager made a subtle threat, the lawyer recalled: “At least we can talk about this without you calling me a genocide supporter and me calling you an antisemite.”
Given its history, Germany is hypersensitive to any hint it tolerates animosity towards Jews — and the manager’s suggestion of leveling a charge of antisemitism could easily mean the end of the lawyer’s career. She was visibly shaken when she recalled the conversation to HuffPost months later.
Spring brought some hope for a step that had been recommended by dozens of lawmakers, current and former officials and foreign policy experts: limiting Israel’s flow of weaponry from the West, particularly from the U.S., its main source of military equipment.
Biden repeatedly suggested he might withhold arms from Israel if it invaded the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians were sheltering, calling it a “red line.” In February, his administration instituted a new policy requiring the State Department to report on whether Israel was respecting U.S. and international law — raising the prospect of a finding that would require Washington to halt some weapons shipments. And after an April 1 strike in Gaza killed seven aid workers with the American charity World Central Kitchen, Biden admonished Netanyahu, saying in a statement that U.S. policy could change if Israel did not take “immediate action” to alter its operations.
Reflecting ongoing hope of a rethink in Washington and beyond, by May 7, attorneys in the governments of the U.S. and the EU had signed a new letter organized by the international coalition of dissatisfied bureaucrats.
The message addressed lawyers at the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, urging them to provide “candid advice” to Biden and his cabinet that acknowledged “strong evidence that American weapons are being used to commit a genocide and war crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
“This is an instance where an attorney’s role in advising a client can be the difference between life and death — especially for the 1 million children in Gaza who make up approximately half of the population,” the message continued.
Yet the Rafah invasion occurred. It displaced hundreds of thousands of families and shattered the slapdash humanitarian aid network that had evolved in the town during the war. It made ceasefire diplomacy harder and prompted fresh protests by civil servants and anti-war groups. Still there was no meaningful change in Western support for Israel.
The Last Line Of Defense
Was the organizing for naught?
A lunch in The Hague on a sunny afternoon in early June suggested otherwise.
Eijpe, who quit the Netherlands’ foreign ministry over Gaza last November, invited HuffPost and several current and former officials who oppose the war. Over falafel, colorful dips and salads in her narrow, high-ceilinged townhouse, they swapped horror stories, strategic analysis and empathy.
Many of the attendees (all women, in what Eijpe described as a woman-led movement) referenced their oaths to the Dutch Constitution and highlighted its Article 90, which commits the Netherlands to promoting the development of international law.
“We’re the last line of defense when it comes to the Constitution and international law,” one current bureaucrat said, drawing hums of agreement from around the room. “A democracy,” she added, “can destroy itself.”
Another person there drew gasps when she said one of her colleagues told her he knew she had sympathy for Gaza because “you would stand with your Muslim brothers.”
Nelleke Kruijs-Voorberge, a petite woman who traveled to the city for the gathering from rural eastern Holland and the oldest in the group, recalled when she and her husband, a fellow Dutch diplomat, had opened the Netherlands’ de facto embassy to the Palestinian Authority in Jericho after Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements in 1994.
“We were called rabid pro-Palestinians!” she exclaimed. “There was no solidarity then.”
Just learning that there is a WhatsApp group full of Dutch officials questioning the Gaza policy had moved her to tears, Kruijs-Voorberge continued. She paused for a beat, then added in a quieter voice: “It would have helped.”
Dutch civil servants and a growing number of allies have held weekly sit-ins outside their foreign ministry for months.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
Nearly one year after it invaded Gaza, Israel is invading Lebanon with American weapons and without meaningful Western reproach.
Already, officials who have tried to change their governments’ policies have for months struggled with whether it’s best to attempt to do so from within or to leave and no longer risk their own culpability. The dilemma is becoming more potent as the toll of the policies they’re implicated in, and the dangers of their current course, grow.
Over months, across many capitals, HuffPost has heard competing opinions about when staying to effect change becomes complicity.
“I want to show you can do this and have a good career,” said a Dutch official in her mid-30s. Colleagues have told her that by calling out government policy as indefensible, she is hurting her peers. But she says she’s focused not on them but on their bosses: the most senior bureaucrats, who are closest to political leaders.
A French diplomat with more than a decade of experience who spoke to HuffPost was more disillusioned. The person doubts they can continue at the foreign ministry, given Paris’ acceptance of the Israeli strategy, so they are inching towards ending their government career, after years of developing deep regional experience and relationships.
Describing “a feeling of powerlessness” as governments seemed deaf to dissent, an EU official described himself as “demotivated” and said that the broader internal protest had been defused.
“Instead of triggering a debate over international humanitarian law, human rights, fundamental freedoms, and putting in the inconsistency from Gaza, we triggered a reaction from the system to silence us and just to be in total denial,” the official recently told HuffPost.
The most significant wave of public resignations has been in the U.S. — where resigning is especially complicated, given factors like health insurance being tied to employment.
Starting with Paul, 12 officials have publicly quit, citing Gaza. That number is not meager but neither is it dramatic, and the group notably has not included top personnel directly involved in policy or questions like U.S. adherence to international human rights standards.
“I’m most frustrated with the senior people who know better and keep quiet,” argued a U.S. official involved in Feds United for Peace, citing as an example U.S. Agency for International Development chief Samantha Power, who famously wrote a book probing the U.S.’s failure to prevent atrocities abroad.
“Maybe they have stopped really stupid things I don’t know about, … [but] had Power gone to the mat and threatened to resign and said, ‘I’ll make the administration’s life miserable,’ it would make a hell of a lot more difference than anything a career civil servant can do, God love ’em,” the official continued.
After 25 years of working on foreign policy matters, including at moments of extreme controversy under past presidents, the official has never felt as “queasy” as over the past year.
Timing and the particular nature of the current political moment is key to how some officials respond.
Gilbert, who also spent more than two decades in government service, told HuffPost it “never even occurred” to her to resign during the Trump presidency, even as the then-president torpedoed policies supporting refugees that she’d worked on.
“I felt like — and I think the common sentiment was that — we needed to work together to mitigate the worst consequences of these very misguided policies,” she said.
Now, she continued, “I still grapple with that: I didn’t resign under Trump, I resigned under the Biden administration — under Secretary [of State Tony] Blinken, who has from the beginning said all the right things about civilian casualties and humanitarian assistance.”
Yet there are increasing signs the U.S. and Western allies may close the gap between their stated values and their policy on Israel.
Germany, Canada and Britain have halted some arms shipments to Israel; London, which publicly acknowledged the step, unlike Berlin, explicitly noted the risk those weapons would be used to break international law. In May, three European nations — Spain, Ireland and Norway — jointly announced their recognition of a state of Palestine as a way to nudge along negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, including talks with Hamas to end the Gaza war. On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron said countries should stop sending Israel weapons that can be used in Gaza to bolster diplomacy.
In the U.S., the inspectors general at the State Department and Pentagon are concluding probes into American weapons transfers to Israel and acknowledged pressure from Feds United for Peace for such investigations. On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers have become notably more willing to question Israel, responding to public pressure but also organized opposition to current policy from hundreds of congressional staff.
Additionally, the Biden administration has unveiled an unprecedented power to punish Israelis who terrorize Palestinians in the occupied West Bank with tacit support from their government, and has slowly used it to expand sanctions – moves that observers say boost the chances that European powers will impose similar penalties.
The E.U. official called the developments “a drop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done.”
Still, for those seeking progress, even small steps are something.
On Gilbert’s last day at the State Department, she ran through her checklist and made sure she had enough time to get everything done before leaving her decades-long professional home for the last time. What she didn’t make time for was how many colleagues would come up to thank and hug her for resigning and speaking up, she told HuffPost in July.
“These are people who love what they do, who believe in what they’re doing,” she said, her voice breaking.
No longer facing government restrictions but still deeply familiar with aid work, Gilbert can speak out for them — because “they need someone on the outside to call BS” on U.S. policies.
“It is not fair to them [inside government], it is not fair to the humanitarian organizations we are supporting and it is a moral imperative that we do this for the people who are suffering the most.”