Another State Department official, the highest ranking so far, has resigned in the months succeeding the beginning of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
Andrew Miller, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, told coworkers Friday that he would be resigning from his post, citing family obligations, according to the Washington Post. While not specifying the policy on Israel and Gaza as the motivating factor for leaving, the report suggested that he was a supporter of Palestinian statehood.
“Andrew brought deep experience and sharp perspective to the table every day,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told the outlet. “Everyone here is sorry to see him go, but we wish him well in his next endeavors.”
Andrew Miller marks the latest in a tranche of officials resigning due to Middle Eastern policy in recent months.
The first high-profile resignation came from Josh Paul, who worked in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs from 2011 until his October 2023 resignation. Paul posted his decision to leave the State Department on LinkedIn, in which he disagreed with the Biden administration’s decision to support Israel’s military operation after it was attacked by Hamas.
“In my 11 years, I have made more moral compromises than I can recall, each heavy, but each with my promise to myself in mind and intact. I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued, indeed, expanded and expedited, provision of lethal arms to Israel — I have reached the end of that bargain,” Paul wrote in the post.
He also claimed that Israel’s response to the terrorist attacks would lead “to more and deeper suffering,” using terms such as “occupation” to describe the situation in Israel.
“But I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people — and is not in the long term American interest,” he wrote.
The next public resignation came in March 2024, when Annelle Sheline, a foreign affairs officer at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, announced her resignation in an opinion piece for CNN.
Sheline alleged Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with its war against Hamas, and said she could not continue to serve in an administration that she claimed enabled such actions.
“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. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State,” Sheline wrote.
“Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began,” she added.
In the following months, Hala Rharrit, former Arabic language spokesperson for the State Department, and Stacy Gilbert, who worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, announced their resignations.
Rharrit told CNN her resignation was not over one particular move, but that she was critical of the Biden administration’s stance on the war.
“I’m fundamentally concerned that we’re on the wrong side of history, and we are hurting our interests,” she told the outlet.
Gilbert said she resigned over a Biden administration report to Congress which claimed that Israel was not blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. She contended that Israel was blocking aid.
“There is so clearly a right and wrong, and what is in that report is wrong,” Gilbert told Reuters.
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The Biden administration has supported Israel throughout the war in Gaza, but in recent months the administration has been more critical of its military operation and has placed a renewed emphasis on humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The war in Gaza began after Hamas committed multiple terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.