Biden officials who resigned over Gaza call on US presidential candidates not to hire Israel enablers
A dozen resignees from the former administration of US President Joe Biden have published a letter calling on all candidates for the 2028 presidential election not to hire any ex-officials who enabled Israel to carry out what the United Nations and Holocaust scholars have concluded is a genocide in Gaza.
Biden pledged unconditional support for Israel, played down the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, and did not use his unique leverage to enforce a ceasefire as early as May 2024.
More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured, and the Gaza Strip has been left in ruins, following Israel's war on the enclave since the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel.
The letter's signatories come from several government sectors, but mostly from the State Department, intelligence agencies, and the military. They include Arab Americans and Jewish Americans.
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"The most basic level of accountability, the most minimal level of consequences, is to ensure that those who have wreaked so much harm from within the highest levels of our Government cannot return to it," the letter said.
"The senior officials who turned a blind eye to the facts, lied to the American public, actively repressed internal dissent, and enabled America’s material support for Israel’s genocide have no business holding positions of influence in any future administration.
"They should not be welcomed in any institution from which they may exert influence over the formulation of foreign policy, or the education of America’s next generation of leaders."
This comes as several high-level members of the Biden administration - who were among the most visible defenders of Israel's actions - have admitted the former president should have taken action to stop the unfettered killings by Israel.
Former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller sparked outrage in June of last year after saying he believed “without a doubt" that Israel had committed war crimes.
Speaking on a Sky News podcast, Miller said he did not believe Israel was carrying out a genocide, but that it was failing itself as a democracy by not holding soldiers accountable for their actions in Gaza.
He added that there were "disagreements all along the way" on how to handle Israel's assault, which was, at its peak, killing up to 300 Palestinians a day in the besieged enclave.
When asked if he believed Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Miller replied: “I don’t believe it’s genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.”
Two months after Miller made those comments, former US national security advisor Jake Sullivan was lambasted as a hypocrite online when he said in an interview he would support Congress voting to withhold military aid to Israel over its decision to abandon the March 2025 ceasefire.
“The situation as it stands today, following the breakdown of the ceasefire in March, means that a vote to withhold weapons from Israel is a totally credible position. That is a position I would support,” Sullivan told The Bulwark podcast.
During his time at the White House, Sullivan personally lobbied Democratic members of Congress against voting to block arms transfers to Israel, even as international pressure - including from US allies - mounted to do so.
And earlier this month, speaking in South Korea, Biden's vice president and later presidential candidate herself, Kamala Harris, admitted to "horrific conduct" by Israel that left the administration "fallen short [of its] moral obligation to human rights and international law".
"We should have acted sooner and more forcefully," she said.
'Acknowledge the complicity of the US'
The letter from the resignees calls on the contenders for the 2028 race - who are expected to emerge in the coming months - to "acknowledge the complicity of the United States government in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and its broader human rights abuses directed against the Palestinian people, through the provision of arms, funding, and diplomatic support, and through the repression of debate internationally and at home".
The letter did not single out Democrats, given that criticism of the US-Israel relationship has deeply penetrated right-wing circles over the last year-and-a-half in particular, and polls have shown that Israel's favourability in the US is at an all-time low.
Speaking to the US broadcaster MSNBC in his last television interview as president in January 2025, Biden revealed that during his visit to Israel, just ten days after the 7 October 2023 attacks, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to "indiscriminately bomb civilian areas".
"I told them we were going to help, I said, 'But Bibi, you can't be carpet bombing these communities.' And he said to me, 'Well, you did it... You carpet-bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war'."
Yet as the bodies piled up in Gaza during Israel's onslaught on the enclave, Biden committed almost $30bn to Israel in separate bills authorised by Congress. No other country backing Israel comes close to this figure.
The Biden administration refused to leverage the billions of dollars it was spending on Israel to secure a ceasefire.
And in the end, in the words of Biden's own team, it was President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy who personally pressured Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that had been on the table, according to Qatari mediators, for more than a year.
Israel broke that ceasefire less than two months later.
It was not until October 2025 that the Trump administration managed to lock in a formal ceasefire agreement after backchannel communications with Hamas.
But since then, Israel has killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, and 19 children this month alone.
Bishara Bahbah, a Democrat-turned-Trump supporter during the Biden administration who later became key to shuttling messages between Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and Hamas officials in Qatar, told Middle East Eye this week that his attempts to ensure that the Gaza ceasefire stays a priority for the White House have been "rebuffed" in recent weeks.
Asked how that made him feel, he responded: "Like shit."
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