Another US official has resigned, unable to reconcile himself with the “nearly unqualified support” that the US has provided to Israel amid its war on Hamas.
Major Harrison Mann posted a resignation letter on the professional networking site LinkedIn on Monday, revealing the reasons behind his decision to quit the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) back in November, 2023.
The ex-official wrote that Washington’s policy on Gaza had “enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians [in Gaza]."
“At some point…you’re either advancing a policy that enables [the] mass starvation of children, or you’re not,” he wrote. “I know that I did, in my small way, wittingly advance that policy,” he wrote.
Screenshot of LinkedIn post by Major Harrison Mann.
© Photo : Harrison Mann
Mann, who had served as an executive officer at the DIA’s Middle East and Africa Center, referenced his own European Jewish ancestry, and claimed he had been “haunted” by the “unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing.”
“The past months have presented us with the most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable…and I have been unable to ignore the connection between those images and my duties here. This caused me incredible shame and guilt,” he wrote.
According to Mann, few of his former colleagues had spoken out about the developments in Gaza. He noted that that “I now realize the obvious - if I was afraid to voice my concerns, you were too.”
Mann filed the resignation on November 1, 2023. The departure takes effect on June 3, as per US media reports.
Mann’s departure is hardly the first. In March, Annelle Sheline resigned from her job as a foreign affairs officer in the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, saying her job had become “impossible” as the Biden administration continues to “send a steady stream of weapons to Israel.” Sheline said in an interview that she had tried to raise concerns internally with dissent cables and at staff forums, but came to the conclusion that the Biden administration’s Israel policy made her efforts pointless.
“Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began. Members of civil society have refused to respond to my efforts to contact them,” Sheline wrote in an open letter.
Earlier, Josh Paul, who was a senior State Department official involved in arms transfers to foreign governments, resigned from his role 10 days after Hamas first launched its attack on Israel.
“I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support for both that response, and for the status quo of the occupation will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people—and is not in the long-term American interest,” Paul wrote at the time.
Despite instances of dissent among its own government employees and protests by US citizens, the Biden administration has persisted in supporting Israel in its war against Hamas, paying no more than lip service to the Palestinians' plight.