“I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Lily Greenberg Call wrote in her resignation letter to the Interior Department yesterday, becoming the first Jewish appointee to resign from the Administration over its policies toward Israel. “My Jewish identity is the most important part of who I am, and it is all of the values that I was raised with … and all of my Jewish education, 20 years of it, that led me to this decision, and it’s how I know this is right,” the Washington Post quoted her letter. “What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly un-Jewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors.” She continued: “The answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine, and ethnic cleansing.” She argued that the U.S. policy facilitated “Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation,” and that none of that makes Israel any more secure.
Call’s family had fled “anti-Semitic persecution in Europe,” and her grandparents were unable to go to college, whereas “two generations later, I have the honor of working as an appointee for the President of the United States,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “The weight of this position is not lost on me.” However, Call told Associated Press today, Biden’s policies are “making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, stressing that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence.”
