On Feb. 20, over 100 people attended a webinar hosted by The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy featuring former government officials who resigned in protest.

For over 75 years, there has been an ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. However, since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, public awareness and discourse surrounding the conflict has increased dramatically. Students, professionals and lawmakers have banded together to voice their opposition to the continued U.S. support and funding of Israel.

Last year, Annelle Sheline, former foreign affairs officer at the Department of State, Harrison Mann, former senior officer in the Middle East Department of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Alexander Smith, a former contractor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), resigned from their positions in protest of the unwavering U.S. support of Israel.

Each former government official explained their motives for resigning and their critical views of the country’s support of Israel.

Sheline announced her resignation in March 2024. In her resignation letter, Sheline said, “Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began.”

She elaborated on this statement explaining that many NGOs would turn to the Department of State when journalists were detained or killed in Gaza. When these organizations voiced their concerns, the department failed to address them.

“Our office seeks to support journalists in the Middle East; yet when asked by NGOs if the U.S. can help when Palestinian journalists are detained or killed in Gaza, I was disappointed that my government didn’t do more to protect them,” Sheline said.

Smith had a similar experience. He was planning to present an abstract with colleagues titled, “An Intersectional Gender Lens in Gaza: Ethnicity, Religion, Legal Status and Maternal/Child Health Outcomes.” The day before his presentation, he got word that it would be canceled.

When asked whether the presentation aimed to assign blame to the U.S. government, Smith said, “In my presentation, I was sticking only to public health data, to the facts I was presenting about what the baseline was before the conflict.”

Smith believed that the government should be doing more to help Palestinian civilians, his presentation was based solely on facts about women’s and children’s health, and USAID was explicit in their reason for the cancellation, it was simply “too sensitive” of a topic.

“I think USAID does great work, they do very valuable work, and what we’ve seen over the last few days is that their work is surely missed when it is gone,” Smith said.

All of the whistleblowers shared the belief that the U.S. government was fully aware of the extent of the destruction in Gaza and was simply turning a blind eye to it.

After describing how the effects of starvation and displacement affect women and children in war-torn countries, Smith said, “I can’t work for an agency where some people are considered people, and some emergencies are considered worthy of our response based on the race of the people involved.”

Mann’s primary mission while working for the DIA was to assist the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), in identifying the location of Hamas leadership and their Israeli hostages.

 “We knew exactly what was going to happen, we knew Israel was going to do something terrible to Gaza and most of us thought it was going to last three or four weeks,” Mann said.

However, the idea that this attack would be short-lived did not last long. “After the first two or so weeks it was clear that this was on a whole different scale,” Mann said

“We could all sense from the outside that there was no voice in the U.S. telling them to stop,”

Mann said, explaining that his position made him privy to knowledge about the U.S. government’s intentions to support Israel unconditionally.

“Everybody knew what was going on, nobody was putting into writing though what was actually happening, which was that Israel was deliberately, or at that time with even the most generous estimate, we could say it was a sort of wanted disregard for human life,” Mann said.

Throughout the webinar, the speakers continued to emphasize why they resigned in protest, citing that the U.S. government was entirely aware of the scale of destruction and atrocities occurring in Gaza, and yet there was no change in policy.

“We got one horrific event after another that showed us that no matter what happened we weren’t going to change course on this policy,” Mann said.

“People who work in government tend to endorse a kind of culture of loyalty, and these people exhibited a higher kind of loyalty to a set of principles, and this is characteristic of whistleblowers in general,” Christian Appy, UMass Professor of History and the Director of The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy said.

Following the resignations, all three have taken various new paths.

Smith has submitted a research proposal to explore crimes of deprivation in international law to Oxford and is considering a PhD. Similarly, Mann is working at Win Without War, an organization promoting more peaceful U.S. foreign policy. Sheline is now a research fellow in the Middle East section of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

“I think seeking to educate [UMass students] on the history of the region and particularly Palestinian people is certainly a good place to start,” Appy said, “I think students should also understand that you don’t have to know everything to take a strong political stance.”

“No one knows everything, and you can know enough to want to add your voice on issues of great importance,” Appy said.

Amelia Travaglia can be reached at [email protected]