Institutions need to, and are, splitting apart over U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza and the occupied territories of Palestine as we see more examples of individuals working in them stepping up and taking stands based on their morality.
Tuesday, Democracy Now interviewed Lily Greenberg Call, First Jewish Biden Appointee to Publicly Resign over Gaza.
Greenberg Call was a special assistant to the chief of staff at the Interior Department after being named to the post by President Joe Biden in early 2023, but she quit on May 15 in a four-page letter that slammed Biden’s “disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” Greenberg Call is at least the fifth high-profile resignation from the Biden administration since October 7. She says her resignation was motivated by her Jewish values. “I feel that I am really living in my Jewishness, in the essence of what I was raised with, by standing up for Palestinians and by demanding their freedom,” Greenberg Call tells Democracy Now!,
criticizing Biden and others for pitting Jewish safety against Palestinian rights. “I am so angry at the president that he is using my community as justification for this slaughter, making us the face of the American war machine.”
A few days before, news came out about the Army officer who resigned in protest of ‘unqualified’ U.S. support to Israel. While assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Maj. Harrison Mann said he was enabling policies that violated his conscience.
In a message posted on LinkedIn last week, Mann said:
“The policy that has never been far from my mind for the past six months is the nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians,” Major Mann wrote in the post, which noted that he had emailed his comments to co-workers on April 16. “This unconditional support also encourages reckless escalation that risks wider war.”
