A Jewish-American Army Major has resigned from his post in protest at US support for Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinians that has starved and killed ‘tens of thousands of civilians’.
Major Harrison Mann told CBS that Israel’s response to the October 7 attack has ‘turned the whole world against it’ and imperiled the security of both Jews and Israel.
The Defense Intelligence Agency analyst offered his resignation in November as casualties mounted in Gaza following Israel’s invasion, and spoke out on Tuesday as he formally stepped down after 13 years.
‘I’m confident saying it’s certainly some measure of ethnic cleansing,’ said Mann whose grandparents fled the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe.
‘I don’t know how you kill 35,000 civilians by accident.’
Mann who served in the DIA’s Middle East bureau slammed Joe Biden’s ‘nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel’, and said his own contribution had caused him ‘incredible shame and guilt’.
‘At some point — whatever the justification — you’re either advancing a policy that enables the mass starvation of children, or you’re not,’ he wrote in his resignation letter.
‘And I want to clarify that as the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing.’
Six US government officials are known to have resigned in protest at US support for the war but dozens of State Department agents have signed ‘dissent cables’ signaling their anger at US policy.
Figures for number killed in Gaza are supplied by the Hamas-controlled health ministry and have not been independently verified.
But Israel has refused to give a figure for the number of civilians killed, claiming that 15,000 of the dead were Hamas fighters.
The House voted on Tuesday to pass a bill that would institute sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it threatened arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leaders for war crimes.
Neither Israel or the US are among the 122 countries that recognize the ICC and Biden denounced the court’s move as ‘outrageous’ insisting there is ‘no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.’
More than one million people have now fled the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the UN said on Monday as Israeli forces push into the last Hamas stronghold.
Biden warned Israel last month that an all-out attack on the city was a red line for the White House and could halt the supply of offensive weapons.
‘If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons,’ the President told CNN on May 9.
Israel insists it is conducting a limited operation in the city as both Netanyahu and Hamas rejected the latest US proposal for a ceasefire and release of Israeli hostages.
The White House said on Tuesday that Biden’s Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, will travel to the region this week in a bid to revive the plan.
Mann published his resignation letter last month after the White House promised that the US would continue to arm Israel, despite a State Department report concluding that the country had violated international humanitarian law.
‘The past months have presented us with the most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable,’ he wrote.
‘And I have been unable to ignore the connection between those images and my duties here.
‘This unconditional support also encourages reckless escalation that risks wider war.’
‘I was struck by the weakness of that justification,’ he said on Tuesday
‘They’re not responding in a way that is productive for the security of the state of Israel or Jews worldwide.
‘I do not think it is in the spirit of ‘never again’.
‘If you are somebody who is really motivated by the concern to protect Jewish life, you should be fighting for [Israel] to wind down the war, to conduct it in a way that does not turn basically the whole world against them.
‘That is not good for the near or long-term security of Israel.’
The DIA said in a statement: ‘Employee resignations are a routine occurrence at DIA as they are at other employers, and employees resign their positions for any number of reasons and motivation.’