Lily Greenberg Call worked tirelessly as a campaign staffer for both Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden in 2019.
As a result of her loyalty and commitment to the policies of the Biden administration, she was appointed as special assistant to chief of staff after the 2020 election.
Yesterday, with a blistering rebuke of her former boss, Call resigned from her position in protest over US policy in the ongoing Israeli-Gaza War. Call openly criticized what she calls the president’s use of Jewish people to justify US policy in the conflict.
“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said.
Call posted her resignation letter on X, expressing her pride in being a Jewish American and serving the President of the United States after two generations in America.
“However I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this Administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
Call said she was educated in the US and Israel and has Palestinian friends, speaks Arabic and Hebrew, and lost loved ones during Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.
The Israeli ground offensive in the Gaza Strip started in November 2023, a few weeks after a surprise attack on October 7 last year by Hamas which killed 1,200 Israeli soldiers and citizens.
So far, the estimated death toll of Gaza residents by Israeli air strikes and invasion is over 35,000, with the majority of these victims being women and children.
“I am terrified by rising antisemitism around the world,” Call wrote in her X post. “And yet I am certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine and ethnic cleansing.”
Read also: Morocco-Born American Diplomat Says No to Biden’s Gaza Policy
She went as far as to compare what she calls “state-sponsored violence” in Israel’s war on Gaza war to the death of her ancestors during the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s until the end of World War II.
Call’s resignation came a day after President Biden sent $1 billion in mostly tank shells and mortars to Israel. Biden had publicly announced that a proposed Rafah invasion was his ‘red line’ and that he would stop a shipment of 3, 500 bombs to Israel.
As far back as November of last year, congressional and White House staffers have publicly shown defiance and dissent of US policy towards the Israel Gaza war.
Call joins an expanding list of government officials resigning in protest of US policy in this ongoing conflict.
Army Maj. Harrison Mann publicly resigned from the US Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Hala Rharrit, State Department spokesperson for the Middle East and North Africa region since August of 2022, also recently announced her resignation with a statement on LinkedIn.
“I resigned after 18 years of distinguished service in opposition to the United States’ Gaza policy,” wrote Rharrit on April 24. “Diplomacy, not arms. Be a force for peace and unity.”
Rharrit resigned following an administration decision to provide Israel with $21 Billion in military equipment and aid.
The State Department website describes her as being “passionate about diplomacy and breaking down barriers through communication and mutual understanding.”
‘Could be not stay silent’
Annelle Sheline, who worked in the State Department’s Human Right Division, resigned publicly in March.
“I could not stay silent,” said Sheline. She expressed her strident belief in the human rights cause.
“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,” whe wrote in her resignation. “Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State,”
Tariq Habash, is the first reported administration staff member of Palestinian origin to resign over US policy towards Gaza. Habash told the Associated Press that he and other Middle Eastern, Muslim and Jewish staffers had “done everything imaginable” to convey their objections and disapproval of the current policies towards the conflict.
State Department veteran Josh Paul was the first State Department official to step down in October of last year.
Paul served 11 years as director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the agency responsible for monitoring and transferring military equipment to US allies such as Israel. He was among the first voices to draw attention to the Biden administration’s accelerated arms transfers to Israel.
“We cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it,” he said. “And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse.”
