Annelle Sheline resigns from US State Dept. over Gaza genocide support
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Dr. Annelle Sheline is resigning from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
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Dr. Annelle Sheline, former State Dept. official in the US (X/MatthewBehrens)
The US State Department witnessed yet another resignation on Wednesday as a result of US President Joe Biden’s “horrific policy” toward "Israel", which is enabling “a genocide in Gaza.”
Dr. Annelle Sheline's resignation from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor marks the most notable departure from the department since Josh Paul, a senior official in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, called it quits.
Paul, at the time, who had worked for more than a decade in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs under four different administrations, reported that he had experienced unprecedented resistance from the State Department against considering the humanitarian consequences of arms sales.
In a CNN op-ed announcing her decision, the former foreign affairs officer wrote: “For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible."
She added, “Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.”
Read next: From Rachel Corrie to Aaron Bushnell: sacrificing for Palestine
“People are shocked & appalled by what the US government is doing.” Annelle Sheline has resigned from the US State Department in protest over the administration’s ongoing support for Israel & the war in Gaza. “I know that I speak for many people” in the department, she tells me. pic.twitter.com/UTX30HWPme
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) March 28, 2024
She relayed to CNN host Jim Sciutto on Thursday that she wasn't initially going to go public, "but when I started to tell people that I was planning to resign quietly, they said, you know, please reconsider, please, please go public if you’d be willing to. So I decided I would.”
“I do think that public pressure is why we’re starting to see the administration shifting here,” she noted.
In response, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that she departed after concluding “the first year of a fellowship that could have gone for two years” but “did not exercise her option to return for a second year as a fellow."
“One of the things I would note, even in the first story that I read about this, the individual in question herself noted that she attends meetings where there are people who have the exact opposite view of hers and express them openly, and that’s what we encourage people to do, and ultimately they have to make decisions about their future employment status.”
Read more: White House employees to stage walkout over Biden 'Israel' policies
The New York Post reported that Michael Freund, the former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called out Sheline on X for not criticizing the Palestinian Resistance.
“Good riddance to her," he reportedly said, adding, “In her column she did not utter a single word of criticism for Hamas for the October 7 massacre or for the kidnapping and torture of Israeli children and Holocaust survivors,” he added. “The State Department will be better off without her.”
The last resignation after Paul and before Sheline was Tariq Habash, a senior Department official in the Biden administration, the first Palestinian-American political appointee at the Department of Education.
"As a Palestinian-American — in fact, the only Palestinian-American political appointee at the Department of Education — I bring a critical and underrepresented perspective to the ongoing work on equity and justice," Habash said in his resignation letter.
