Elliott Abrams: Uncivil Servants: Foreign Policy Bureaucrats Target Israel Government employees take up petitions—sometimes anonymously—against the Jewish state.
The Biden administration faces a wave of internal dissent against its support of Israel. On Nov. 14, more than 500 staff members and political appointees from about 40 government agencies sent a joint letter to President Biden criticizing his administration’s policy on the Gaza war, according to the New York Times.
It was the latest of several protest letters. The Times reported that the administration has received similar messages, including three internal memos addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a letter “signed” by more than 1,000 employees of the Agency for International Development. The State Department requires that employees sign their names to dissent cables, but the other two letters have no signatures. The Times reported that these government employees wrote anonymously out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.”
The internal memos, two of which were sent during the first week of the war, called on Mr. Biden to press for an immediate cease-fire. One State Department memo, Axios reported, accused the president of “spreading misinformation.” Signed by 100 State Department and Agency for International Development employees, the memo said members of the White House and National Security Council showed a “clear disregard for the lives of Palestinians.”
Mr. Blinken responded to government employees’ protests in an email, according to Reuters. Mr. Blinken said the administration was organizing forums and “candid conversations” to hear employees’ feedback and ideas. “We’re listening,” he wrote. “What you share is informing our policy and our messages.” It would seem that the fear of losing one’s government job, or of angry mobs threatening the safety of the “signers,” was overblown.
The proper reaction would have been to squash the mutiny. Those who called for a cease-fire in week one were essentially saying Israel had no duty or right to protect itself after Hamas’s brutal attack on its civilians. Mr. Blinken should have told these government workers that he and the president reject their views as entirely wrong and contrary to U.S. national interests. Instead of encouraging the dissenters to offer more “feedback and ideas,” he should be wondering if he can count on such people to offer any sound advice on foreign policy—or even to implement a policy that he sets.
This wave of protests is anomalous. Between 2011 and 2021, according to the United Nations, more than 300,000 Syrian civilians died due to the conflict there. The highest death counts were between 2012 and 2015. Frederic Hof, the Obama administration’s special adviser on Syria policy, wrote in 2017 that “during 70 months of chaos in Syria, the United States had protected not one Syrian civilian from the homicidal rampages of Bashar al-Assad and his remorseless regime.” Yet in 2016 only 50 State Department officers protested Barack Obama’s Syria policy in a non-anonymous signed letter.
Mr. Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 abandoned thousands of Afghans who risked their lives for the U.S. and created tens of thousands of refugees. Internal protests were minimal then too; a classified “dissent channel message” opposing the Biden policy was signed—again, with real names—by only 23 State Department employees working at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Why the widespread protest only when Israel is involved? The most likely explanation is that many government employees hold the foreign-policy view once articulated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who dismissed Israel as “the millstone around our necks.” Those who share Dulles’s perspective see Israel as a burden and an obstacle rather than as the key ally in the Middle East and the only country in the region with a reliably pro-American population.
It’s impossible to escape the thought that anti-Semitism also plays a role. How is it possible that we saw only tiny protests against the mass murder of Syrians or the abandonment of Afghans, but more than 1,000 federal employees are now protesting Israel’s right to defend itself? Mr. Blinken ought to recognize that prejudice against Jews may be a problem in his own building.
Instead of coddling the staff with listening sessions, he should have reminded them who sets the policy—and even challenged those protesting to re-examine their hostile attitudes toward the Jewish state.
The problem of having staff members who think they know best and should determine policy is an old one. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his history of the Kennedy administration that career military, intelligence and diplomatic officials often come to see American foreign policy as “their institutional, if not their personal, property, to be solicitously protected against interference from the White House and other misguided amateurs.” In his memoirs, Harry S. Truman noted that too many bureaucrats “look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants.”
Mr. Blinken should have had the rebellious staffers read Truman’s words: “The civil servant, the general or admiral, the foreign service officer has no authority to make policy. They act only as servants of the government, and therefore they must remain in line with the government policy that is established by those who have been chosen by the people to set that policy.”
Civil servants need to remember their place in the American system of government.
Mr. Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Comments are closed.
