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lily greenberg call
'Uphold the Law': 9 Arrested at White House Demanding Arms Embargo on Israel
"Keep your word," one protest organizer urged the Biden administration. "Enact an arms embargo to impose a cease-fire and end our complicity in Israel's horrific war crimes in Gaza."
Nov 13, 2024
Nine people were arrested Tuesday while blocking an entrance to the White House in Washington, D.C. to demand the Biden administration "uphold U.S. laws, which require an arms embargo on Israel" given the key Mideast ally's well-documented human rights violations during its 13-month assault on Gaza.
Demonstrators led by the Democrats for Human Rights coalition sat in a roadway in front of a White House gate with banners reading "Israel Uses Starvation as a Weapon" and "Uphold the Law: Arms Embargo Now."
Three women who resigned from the Biden administration over its support for Israel's obliteration of Gaza— Lily Greenberg Call, Stacy Gilbert, and Anna Del Castillo—joined the demonstration, as did 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram.
"Police are arresting us now," organizer Kai Newkirk, who co-chairs the Arizona Democratic Party Progressive Council, said on social media Tuesday evening.
Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave the far-right Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 30 days to show that it had taken "urgent and sustained actions" to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or face a possible suspension of armed aid.
"As [President Joe] Biden's 30-day deadline for Israel to stop violating our laws in Gaza expires, we are sitting in and peacefully blocking the gate at the White House," Newkirk said before his arrest. "U.S. law requires an arms embargo. As Democrats for Human Rights, we call upon Biden to uphold the law: arms embargo now!"
The U.S. State Department sparked worldwide anger Tuesday with its determination that Israel is not violating humanitarian law, even as its forces have killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, wounded more than 103,000 others, and displaced, starved, or sickened millions more while blocking desperately needed humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
"We will not be moved," vowed Newkirk, who added that the Biden administration's deadline "cannot come and go with no action to mark it and hold him accountable.
"Uphold the law," he said. "Keep your word. Enact an arms embargo to impose a cease-fire and end our complicity in Israel's horrific war crimes in Gaza."
Domestic legislation including the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws prohibit U.S. aid to human rights violators. However, the U.S. government has given aid to many human rights violators since those laws were enacted, including most of the world's dictatorships and the perpetrators of genocidal violence in Indonesia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Kurdistan, and—according to many experts—Gaza.
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack, the U.S. has approved tens of billions of dollars in military assistance for Israel, even as the International Court of Justice in The Hague reviews South Africa-led allegations of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
"Humanitarian leaders have stated that conditions in Gaza have only grown worse over the 30 days, with World Food Program Director Cindy McCain saying famine has now set in," Newkirk said.
Human rights and humanitarian relief groups accuse Israel of causing " apocalyptic" conditions in northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians including many women and children have been killed or wounded in recent weeks and many others face imminent famine under a plan to starve and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the area in order to facilitate Israeli occupation and possible recolonization.
On Tuesday, a coalition of eight international humanitarian organizations published an
analysis detailing how Israel has not fully complied with any of the Biden administration's 19 specific demands in its 30-day warning.
The report's authors asserted that the publication underscores "Israel's failure to comply with U.S. demands and international obligations."
"Israel should be held accountable for the end result of failing to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical, and other supplies to reach people in need," the report argues.
The First Jewish Biden Appointee to Resign Over Gaza Speaks Out
“It’s very devastating that the leadership of the administration is not only not listening to their colleagues, but to the majority of the American people, who want a cease-fire, who are horrified by what’s happening in Gaza.”
May 26, 2024
Israel’s assault on Gaza has provoked protests around the globe, including in the United States. While attention lately has focused on college campuses, another protest movement has emerged: dissenters within the U.S. government, who offer a behind-the-scenes critique of U.S. policies that are devastating Gaza. Despite this wave of informed dissent, U.S. President Joe Biden, while calling for a cease-fire, continues to provide arms and diplomatic cover to Israel.
“There’s widespread sentiment within all levels of the administration and all agencies that the president’s continued support for Israel’s assault on Gaza is disastrous,” Lily Greenberg Call said on the Democracy Now! news hour. She was a special assistant to the chief of staff at the Interior Department and a Biden political appointee, but resigned her position on May 15, citing, in her four-page resignation letter, “President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
“It’s disastrous for American foreign policy, for sentiment towards Americans abroad. It’s disastrous here at home. And it’s very devastating that the leadership of the administration is not only not listening to their colleagues, but to the majority of the American people, who want a cease-fire, who are horrified by what’s happening in Gaza.”
“I feel that I am really living in my Jewishness, in the essence of what I was raised with, by standing up for Palestinians and by demanding their freedom.”
Greenberg Call is the latest Biden administration official to resign over Gaza, and also the first Jewish appointee to do so. Her decision to leave was deeply influenced by her Judaism. She resigned on May 15, the day Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, when, 76 years ago, close to 1 million Palestinians were driven from their homes, and tens of thousands were massacred, as Jewish militias engaged in ethnic cleansing during the creation of the state of Israel.
Greenberg Call wrote in her resignation letter: “Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe. I reject the premise that one people’s salvation must come at another’s destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen—and this cannot be done from within the Biden administration.”
She continued on Democracy Now!: “I was raised with a fairy tale about the Nakba… with this idea that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land. If there’s no Palestinian society, if there’s nothing to be destroyed, then there’s nothing to mourn. As a Jewish person, it was particularly important for me to acknowledge the significance of the Nakba, and the Nakba that has never really ended, that continues to this day.”
Lily Greenberg Call was not always critical of Israel. In 2019, as a college student at UC Berkeley, she was president of Bears for Israel, affiliated with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“There was no daylight between being Jewish and support for the state of Israel in the community I was raised in,” Lily Greenberg Call said. She continued, explaining her political transformation:
As I got a little older, over the past eight years or so, two things started to happen. First, my world started to expand. I was able to get to know Palestinians, Palestinian Americans. I worked with some Syrian Palestinian refugees in Greece. I saw for myself some of the injustices that Palestinians face in Israel-Palestine—the checkpoints, the system of apartheid… At the same time, the coalition of people that I was advocating for Israel with through AIPAC started to move to the right, as Trump came to power, as the Israeli government shifted to the right. I started to see these people who I had spent years doing pro-Israel advocacy with, in particular, the evangelical Christians, support Trump and support right-wing fascists here in the United States and people who were aligning themselves with white supremacists and antisemites.
“Pikuach nefesh in Judaism means ‘saving a life,’” she continued. “This idea of b’tselem elohim, that every person is made in the image of God… I feel that I am really living in my Jewishness, in the essence of what I was raised with, by standing up for Palestinians and by demanding their freedom.”
Lily Greenberg Call joins others who have resigned, like former State Department officials Josh Paul, who oversaw weapons transfers to other nations, including Israel; Hala Rharrit, the first diplomat to resign over Gaza, who served as the key Arabic language spokesperson for State; and Annelle Sheline, who worked on human rights issues in the Middle East, and who, after resigning, attended a federal worker “Feds United for Peace” rally in front of the White House. Sheline told Democracy Now!, “When I started to tell colleagues that I was planning to resign over Gaza, so many people’s response was, ‘Please speak out. Please speak for us.’”
President Biden and his inner circle are increasingly isolated in their unflinching support for Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Unlike Palestinians in Gaza, though, Biden has a way out: Permanent cease-fire, now.
1st Jewish Biden Appointee to Resign Over Gaza Quits on Nakba Day
"I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amid President Biden's disastrous, continued support for Israel's genocide in Gaza," Interior assistant Lily Greenberg Call wrote.
May 15, 2024
Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Department of the Interior, became the first Jewish political appointee to resign her post in protest of U.S. President Joe Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Call announced her resignation on Wednesday, which is also the 76th anniversary of the Nakba—or the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 as part of the process of creating the current state of Israel.
"Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe," Call wrote in her letter. "I reject the premise that one people's salvation must come at another's destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen—and this cannot be done from within the Biden administration."
"What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly un-Jewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors."
In her letter, addressed to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Call said that she had worked for both Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign in 2019 and Biden's in 2020 and was "thrilled" to accept a position at DOI.
"I joined the Biden administration because I believe in fighting for a better America, for a future where Americans can thrive: one with economic prosperity, a healthy planet, and equal rights for all people," she wrote.
However, that changed with Biden's financial, military, and political backing of Israel's war on Gaza.
"I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amid President Biden's disastrous, continued support for Israel's genocide in Gaza," she wrote.
Call spoke of her Jewish immigrant heritage and how her family story—moving from grandparents without college degrees to a granddaughter with a presidential appointment—represented the American dream.
"And yet, I have asked myself many times over the last eight months: What is the point of having power if you will not use it to stop crimes against humanity?" she wrote.
"President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands."
Call also spoke of how her Jewish faith and lifelong experience in the Jewish community informed her decision.
"What I have learned from my Jewish tradition is that every life is precious. That we are obligated to stand up for those facing violence and oppression, and to question authority in the face of injustice," she said.
In a separate interview with The Associated Press, she criticized Biden for "making Jews the face of the American war machine," adding that this was "deeply wrong."
For example, the AP wrote:
Call pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said, "Were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jew in the world who was safe" and at an event at Washington's Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that triggered the war were driven by an "ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people."
Call's own views on Israel have altered dramatically in the last few years. As The Washington Post reported:
Greenberg Call, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2019, was president of Bears for Israel, an affiliate group of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and said she grew up going to student events hosted by the group. In a piece for Teen Vogue two years ago, she said she began to question AIPAC and its mission of ensuring unconditional American support for Israel as she got to know more Palestinians and after AIPAC endorsed Republican candidates who supported Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Call told the Post that it had been a struggle to make the decision she did because of her deep roots in the Jewish community, but that Jewish values were ultimately what led her to go through with it.
"What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly un-Jewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors," she said.
Call wrote in the letter that while she knew people who lost family in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel that killed around 1,100 people and was "terrified" by rising antisemitism, she was "certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine, and ethnic cleansing."
Call outlined the horrors of Israel's war on Gaza: more than 35,000 people and 15,000 children killed, attacks on hospitals, mass graves, the destruction of every university in Gaza, and the targeting of journalists.
"These are all violations of international law, none of which would be possible without American weapons, and none of which have been condemned by President Biden," she wrote.
She continued:
The president has the power to call for a lasting cease-fire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The United States has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable. Quite the opposite, we have enabled and legitimized Israel's actions with vetoes of United Nations resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable. President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands.
Call's resignation comes one day after Biden announced another $1 billion weapons shipment to Israel, even as it continues an assault on Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah. Biden had previously called a ground offensive on Rafah a "red line" that Israel should not cross, yet critics point out that Israel's current operations in Rafah should certainly qualify.
"There's been many moments in the last eight months that I have thought about it," Call told Middle East Eye of her decision to resign, "and I think everything that has happened in the last few weeks in particular, made me feel like the time is right."
Her letter also comes days after polling indicated that around 13% of 2020 Biden voters in six key swing states would not vote for him in 2024 because of his Gaza policy.
"I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous," Call told AP. "Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects."
Call is at least the fifth Biden official to resign over his Gaza policy and the second political appointee, according to AP. While she is the first known Jewish Biden staffer to resign, Army Maj. Harrison Mann also cited his Jewish background when announcing his resignation decision on Monday.
"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—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of 'never again' and the inadequacy of 'just following orders' were oft repeated," he wrote.
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