A U.S. Army officer, who’s also Jewish, has resigned over U.S. policy towards the Israel/Gaza war. Maj. Harrison Mann, who was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, actually resigned back in November 2023, but did not go public until yesterday in an interview with CBS News. He cited the United States’ “nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel,” which he said has “enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”
“I understand if people are angry that I chose to speak about this, but I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice,” Mann told CBS correspondent Jim Axelrod. Mann told “CBS Mornings” that U.S. weapons have enabled Israel’s operations in Gaza, suggesting Israel has indiscriminately targeted Palestinian civilians since it began responding to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and ongoing capture of Jewish hostages.
“I don’t know how you kill 35,000 civilians by accident,” Mann said.
The grandson of Jews who fled the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe, Mann said he doesn’t agree that the cry of “Never Again” that galvanized Jews after the Holocaust warrants Israel’s current response. “They’re not responding in a way that is productive for the security of the state of Israel or Jews worldwide,” Mann said. “I’m confident saying it’s certainly some measure of ethnic cleansing. I do not think it is in the spirit of ‘Never Again.’”
“If you are somebody who is really motivated by the concern to protect Jewish life,” Mann said, “you should be fighting for [Israel] to wind down the war, to conduct it in a way that does not turn basically the whole world against them. That is not good for the near- or long-term security of Israel.”
Mann decided to make his resignation public after the Biden administration released an assessment in May that found instances when Israel’s conduct was inconsistent with “international humanitarian law,” but the administration concluded that U.S. aid would not be interrupted. “I was struck by the weakness of that justification,” Mann said.
