March 29, 2024 (EIRNS)—In an interview yesterday with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department, described the process by which she decided to make her resignation public, to express her disagreement with the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Gaza. She had tried to operate through the internal dissent channel and discussion forums at State, but ultimately decided there was little she could do to change a policy that allowed for using “starvation as a weapon of war.” Although she had planned to resign quietly, colleagues with whom Sheline discussed it urged her to “speak for us, be our voice,” which Sheline did in her March 28 op-ed for CNN. She reported she knows of many at State who are considering resigning because what the U.S. government is doing is in “contravention to the mission that they are trying to uphold at the State Department.”
Sheline agreed there had been something of a shift in Biden’s public posture regarding Israel, but ultimately, “it made no difference to the lives of people being bombed in Gaza.” Biden has made a political calculus of maintaining “extreme support for Israel”—but Israel is in violation of U.S. law. “The law is clear,” she said, and when the U.S. flouts that, it affects its moral standing abroad. The Biden administration’s insistence that Israel is engaged in “self-defense,” is not defensible, Sheline said. Using starvation as a weapon, bombing buildings, residences, hospitals—this is conduct outside the bounds of self-defense. These are war crimes and genocide.
