The State Department official resigned on Wednesday and subsequently went on a media tour, slamming President Biden’s “horrible policies” toward Israel and accusing the administration of enabling “genocide in Gaza.”
Annel Cherine’s resignation from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is the most significant departure from the department since Josh Paul, a senior political-military official, announced he was leaving the bureau last October. . .
“For the past year, I have worked for an office dedicated to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and important work of that office. “As a representative of a government that is directly trying to enable what it said was possible, such a task has become almost impossible,” Cherine, who worked as a diplomat, said in the article. CNN editorial announced his resignation.
“Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the State Department.”
Sherine has also given interviews to the Washington Post, CNN, CNN International, and Democracy Now! After leaving the board.
“Initially, I wasn’t planning on making it public,” she told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Thursday. “I was in the State Department for only a short period of time. But when I started telling people that I was going to quietly resign, they said, look, please reconsider, please go public if you want. So I decided to do it.”
“I think the government is starting to change here because of public pressure,” she added.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that Cherine left the department after completing “the first year of what was supposed to be a two-year fellowship.”
According to Miller, she “did not exercise her option to return for a second year as a fellow.”
“I think everyone can make their own decisions about what they do,” he added. “One of the things I would like to note is that in the first article I read on this subject, the person in question himself attended a meeting where there were people who had diametrically opposed views to his own and were openly expressing them.” That’s what they said they were attending. We encourage people to do that, but ultimately they have to make a decision about their future employment status.”
Michael Freund, a pro-Israel activist and former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accused Cherine of not being more critical of Hamas, the terrorist group that sparked the conflict by slaughtering 1,200 people in the Jewish state last October. denounced.
“Get rid of her” Freund I wrote to X.
“In her column, she did not criticize Hamas one word for the October 7 massacre or for kidnapping and torturing Israeli children and Holocaust survivors,” he added. “The State Department would be better off without her.”
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claims at least 32,552 people have been killed in Palestinian-controlled territory since the start of the war.
The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and terrorist deaths.
