More than 800 officials from the US, the UK and the European Union have released a public letter of dissent against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza.
According to the current and former officials spearheading or supporting the initiative, the letter marks the first time that officials from ally nations across the Atlantic have united to publicly criticise their governments over the war.
They said it is their duty as civil servants to help improve policy and to work in their nations’ interests, and that they are speaking up because they believe their governments need to change direction on the war.
“Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice and human rights globally,” The New York Times quoted the letter as saying.
There is a “plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide”, the officials said in the document.
The Israeli military launched a bombing and ground campaign in Gaza after Hamas fighters invaded Israel on October 7 and killed about 1,200 people while abducting about 240.
More than 27,000 people in Gaza have been killed and nearly two million have been displaced since Israel’s offensive began, according to the health ministry in Gaza and United Nations officials.
The document protected the identities of signatories as they fear reprisal, said one organiser, an official who has worked in the State Department for more than 20 years. But about 800 current officials have given approval to the letter as it has quietly circulated among employees at the national level in multiple countries, the official was quoted as saying.
The effort reveals the extent to which pro-Israel policies among American, British and European leaders have stirred dissent among civil servants, including many who carry out the foreign policies of their governments.
According to the report, about 80 of the signatories are from American agencies, with the biggest group being from the State Department. The governing authority most represented among the signers is the collective European Union institutions, followed by the Netherlands and the US.
National-level officials from eight other member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, as well as Sweden and Switzerland, have approved the letter. Most of those supporters work in the foreign ministries of those nations.
“The political decision-making of Western governments and institutions” over the war “has created unprecedented tensions with the expertise and duty that apolitical civil servants bring to bear”, said Josh Paul, who worked in the State Department bureau that oversees arms transfers but who resigned in October over the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s military campaign. Paul said he knew the organisers of the letter.
“One-sided support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, and a blindness to Palestinian humanity, is both a moral failure and, for the harm it does to Western interests around the globe, a policy failure,” he added.
The 27 EU countries, and their joint institutions, have taken diverging stances on the war, but the majority of governments are largely pro-Israel. Only a handful of EU nations – prominently Ireland, Spain and Belgium – have consistently called on their partners and the EU to moderate support for Israel, push for a ceasefire, and focus on Gazans’ suffering.
War updates – Pages 12-13
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