More than 400 staffers and political appointees across 40 government agencies sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Tuesday objecting to his administration’s support for Israel and demanding that he push for an immediate cease-fire between the embattled Jewish state and Hamas.
“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a cease-fire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the letter, first obtained by the New York Times, reads.
The message also cited a poll showing that 80 percent of Democrats, and a majority of independents and Republicans, somewhat or strongly agree with the sentiment. “The overwhelming majority of Americans support a cease-fire.” Many of the signatories are in their 20s and 30s, reflecting a generational divide over U.S. policy toward Israel. “Americans do not want the U.S. military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East,” the letter concluded.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have argued that a cease-fire would only empower Hamas to increase its capabilities and carry out additional terror attacks like the one the group perpetrated on October 7, when its fighters slaughtered 1,400 Israelis, many of them women and children. The administration has instead called for short-term humanitarian pauses in fighting to allow the inflow of aid and the evacuation of civilians from Northern Gaza.
The letter comes one day after the Israeli Defense Forces released evidence that Hamas was using a children’s hospital in Gaza as a military base.
The note also coincided with at least three internal cables sent across the State Department “dissent channel,” an internal forum employees can use to privately voice concerns about American policy. Two were sent during the first week of the war, and the third was sent more recently, according to the Times.
The most recent cable, organized by Sylvia Yacoub, an officer with the Bureau of Middle East Affairs, chided the White House’s “seemingly full endorsement” of Israel’s military response. The letter was signed by 100 State Department and USAID members and warned Biden that his actions made him “complicit with genocide” in Gaza.
On social-media, Yacoub publicly called out Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris in scorching personal attacks. “You are providing significantly more military assistance to the government that is indiscriminately attacking innocent Gazans….you are complicit in genocide @POTUS,” the officer wrote last Thursday on X. “Embarrassingly out of touch @VP,” Yacoub tweeted tagging Harris after the vice-president met with the British prime minister Rishi Sunak to discuss the conflict.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Yacoub’s portfolio with the State Department includes gender, human rights, as well as “DEI and Racial Equity.” After Axios publicized the posts, Yacoub turned her X account private.
The rift between the White House and State Department led one official to question the professional conduct of signatories. “In two decades, I’ve never seen State Department management make such a fuss about employees’ purported emotions and feelings, to the extent that dissent is essentially being encouraged,” a source in the Near East Bureau told Axios. “There’s a chasm between the White House/NSC and State on this conflict. I’m not surprised that Yacoub is tweeting the way she is, as shocking as it is.”
Blinken had previously met with signatories and responded to growing pushback in an email on Monday. “I know that for many of you, the suffering caused by this crisis is taking a profound personal toll,” the letter, reported by the Times, reported. “[S]ome people in the department may disagree with approaches we are taking or have views on what we can do better,” Blinken noted, adding, “We’re listening: What you share is informing our policy and our messages.”