Two executive branch officials have resigned from their positions within the Biden administration due to the White House’s collaboration with Israel in its bombing and starvation campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.
The officials who resigned are Alexander Smith, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a senior adviser within that agency on gender, maternal health, child health and nutrition; and Stacy Gilbert, a State Department official within the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
The resignations come as Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians since October, with thousands more presumed to be buried under the rubble.
Smith, who has worked in his role for four years, was told that he either had to resign or be dismissed from his position after he had prepared a presentation on maternal health and child mortality for Palestinians that was abruptly canceled last week by higher-ups at USAID.
“I cannot do my job in an environment in which specific people cannot be acknowledged as fully human, or where gender and human rights principles apply to some, but not to others, depending on their race,” Smith said in his resignation letter.
Gilbert’s decision to resign was due to her agency’s false determination that Israel wasn’t purposely manufacturing a famine by blocking food and other desperately-needed aid from entering Gaza, as well as the administration’s downplaying of the atrocities committed by Israeli forces.
Gilbert, who has 20 years of experience in global crises and conflicts, explained her decision to quit the State Department to HuffPost, saying:
Because I try very hard to understand what international humanitarian law is about, it also gives me credibility in saying what is happening in Gaza is not according to international humanitarian law.
Nine officials have resigned from the Biden administration since Israel began its bloody siege of Gaza in October. More resignations are likely to come, said Josh Paul, the first official to have publicly resigned from the administration over the White House’s participation in the genocide.
“I’m aware that there are other resignations pending in the near future from officials with similar concerns in their own areas of work,” said Paul, who had served as the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
Paul added that at least two dozen officials have resigned in protest without making a public declaration of their resignations.
Among those who have resigned so far is Lily Greenberg Call, the former special assistant to the Interior Department’s chief of staff and the first Jewish person within the administration to quit because of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Said Call in her resignation announcement:
My whole life has been spent in Jewish community in the U.S. and Israel. People in my community lost loved ones during Hamas’s attack on October 7th; beloveds killed, displaced, and taken as hostages. I am terrified by rising antisemitism around the world. And yet I am certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine, and ethnic cleansing.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.