Until last week, President Biden was my boss.
Last week, I resigned from my post at the United States Department of the Interior, becoming the first Jewish politically appointed administration official to publicly resign in protest – and in mourning – of President Biden’s endorsement of genocide in Gaza, where more than 35,000 Palestinians have been murdered. This was an incredibly difficult decision, but one that was necessary – and one that felt even more urgent, as the president of the United States has persistently corrupted the idea of Jewish safety, weaponizing my community as a shield to dodge accountability for his role in this atrocity.
I worked hard to elect this administration, first as an organizer for Vice-President Kamala Harris during the 2019 Democratic primary, then for the Biden-Harris ticket in the general election in the swing state of Arizona. I once saw the Biden-Harris administration as a beacon, blinking brilliantly as a hopeful symbol of democracy in the encroaching dark. But now, watching the United States’s complicity in the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I am only reminded that in times of great horror, many with great power choose to do nothing.
Like many Jewish Americans, I am descended from those who fled Europe and survived violent persecution. My pregnant great-grandmother escaped pogroms by hiding in the belly of a horse-drawn carriage, then crossing an ocean alone, looking for safety in a new land. My inheritance is the weighted absence of those who should be here today: entire lineages of family, who could not escape the coming Shoah, snuffed out and disappeared into memory. I feel the weight of this history every day.
After the nightmare of 7 October, I spent days checking in with loved ones and tending the trauma felt by my community. I remember the days that followed as being clouded over with mourning for loved ones missing or taken hostage, and overwhelming devastation as the confirmed death list ticked higher and higher. And still, I found myself holding my breath, anticipating Israel’s counter to the tragedy.
In the many months since, I have watched as Palestinians struggle to survive the indiscriminate bombing that has plagued their home – a bombing bought and paid for by the United States. Children livestreaming on social media have been forced to step into the shoes of absent journalists, many murdered in this conflict, which has become the deadliest for journalists on record. I’ve seen countless videos of families fleeing falling bombs, children wailing at the loss of their mothers and refugees now cowering in Rafah.
Around the world, over Memorial Day weekend here in America, people watched on social media in horror as the IDF dropped 60 2000-pound bombs on a displaced persons camp in Rafah, burning tents and the refugees sheltering inside.
This does not make anyone safer – neither Palestinians nor Jews. I know what it means to fear the rising surge of antisemitism. I am terrified – I feel it every day. But I am certain that Jews are not better protected by a war effort, endorsed by the United States and waged in the name of Jewish safety, that furthers a genocide of a whole people collectively framed as “our enemy”. In fact, making Jews the face of an unrelenting, genocidal campaign only puts us at risk even more.
Palestinian and Jewish safety are not oppositional. In fact, they are deeply intertwined. President Biden does not recognize this. He refuses to call for a lasting and permanent ceasefire, end the blank check offered to Israel, secure a diplomatic release of the Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, end the siege on Gaza and work to abolish the apartheid system stretched across the Holy Land. That is why, at this moment, my former boss is the person who makes me feel most unsafe as an American Jew.
In this moment, I am comforted by the work of organizers demanding to be heard. I have been inspired by the safe communities created by coalitions of Jewish and Palestinian activists working hand in hand in this moment, along with the chorus of voices – including students, union workers, swing state voters, teachers, artists, faith leaders, writers, servicemembers and, yes, more than 500 members of President Biden’s own administration – who have condemned the genocide. Each of these voices has spoken in accordance with my Jewish faith, which teaches me that the virtue of pikuach nefesh means that saving a life is the greatest mitzvah one can do.
There are lessons to be learned from our faith and history, as we watch the same dehumanization that fell upon my community now land upon another. Each day, I see photos of those displaced in Gaza, and I am reminded of my own family’s memory of loved ones killed in the Shoah – which, in turn, reminds me of the Nakba: the tragedy that occurred in 1948 when Palestinian society was destroyed and an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homeland for the formation of today’s modern Israel. Shoah and Nakba mean the same thing in Hebrew and Arabic: catastrophe.
I resigned on Wednesday, 15 May – the 76th anniversary of the Nakba – because I could no longer serve at the pleasure of a president who refuses to stop another catastrophe.
Lily Greenberg Call was a special assistant to the chief of staff at the US Department of the Interior
