Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan writes in his blog Informed Comment March 28 about the State Department’s finding that Israel is not in violation of international humanitarian law in Gaza. He says the finding is contradicted by the resignation of Dr. Annelle Sheline, who served in the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Cole quotes from Sheline’s oped on March 27 explaining Why I’m resigning from the State Department.
To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.
Cole quotes more detail from Dr. Sheline:
Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.
Cole quotes from State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who said on March 25 regarding Israel and Gaza:
We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance. www.state.gov/...
Cole comments: “Miller’s statement ranks up there with the Kremlin’s denial that its troops committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.“ Cole adds: “The Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has been made a laughingstock and a pariah.”
In her March 27 oped, Dr. Sheline explained her resignation:
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. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.
She added:
Members of civil society have refused to respond to my efforts to contact them. Our office seeks to support journalists in the Middle East; yet when asked by NGOs if the US can help when Palestinian journalists are detained or killed in Gaza, I was disappointed that my government didn’t do more to protect them. Ninety Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed in the last five months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That is the most recorded in any single conflict since the CPJ started collecting data in 1992.
She hopes her resignation will have a positive result:
I can no longer continue what I was doing. I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world. www.cnn.com/...
An interview on Democracy Now with Dr. Annelle Sheline can be seen HERE.