Annelle Sheline, a U.S. State Department human rights officer resigned from her submit Wednesday in protest to the Biden administration’s assist for Israel’s warfare on Gaza.
Sheline, 38, labored as a international affairs officer within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor for a 12 months.
In an article for CNN, she wrote that she was “unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities,” and resigned earlier than 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 mentioned.
Sheline mentioned she determined to publicly resign as a result of her colleagues’ response was: “Please speak for us.”
She added that throughout the federal authorities, staff 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 worldwide regulation in its conduct of the warfare and in offering humanitarian help, 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 mentioned she was “haunted” by the ultimate social media submit of 25-year-old U.S. Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell who died after self-immolating in entrance of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on Feb. 25 in protest of Israel’s warfare in opposition to 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 within the submit.
Sheline mentioned she may now not proceed 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 in regards to the resignation, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller described Sheline as a fellow on the State Department who completed the primary 12 months of a fellowship that might have gone for 2 years.
Miller mentioned that there’s a “broad diversity of views inside the State Department” in regards to the U.S. coverage 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,” mentioned 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 introduced protest resignation from the company since Oct. 7 after Josh Paul, former director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, publicly introduced 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,” mentioned Paul, who labored on arms transfers for greater than 11 years, in his two-page resignation letter.
Tariq Habash, a political appointee on the Education Department, additionally resigned in January, citing the Biden administration’s strategy to the Gaza battle and its failure to halt what he termed as Israel’s “collective punishment tactics.”
Source: www.dailysabah.com