The first Jewish staffer in the Biden administration known to have quit in response to the president’s backing of Israel against Hamas in Gaza released a letter on May 15 describing her decision.
“I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration,” Lily Greenberg Call, a former special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, said in a statement on Wednesday. “He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong.”
Call’s letter cites casualty numbers released by the Hamas terror group that have been widely debunked, accusing the Israel Defense Forces of killing more than “35,000 people in Gaza, including 15,000 children.”
Urging Biden to realize that “there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” she warned, “not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects.”
Call is believed to be at least the fifth staffer at a middle or senior level to resign over disagreements in administration policy on the war in the Gaza Strip, which started after Hamas operatives infiltrated southern Israel on Oct. 7 and proceeded to murder some 1,200 people and kidnap 250 others.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she had worked on the campaigns of both Biden and Kamala Harris, the current vice president, in her 2020 presidential bid.
She served as a CAMERA fellow and participated in the Young Judea gap-year program, and received the Peter Chortek Leadership Award when she attended the San Diego Jewish Academy.
Alex Safian, associate director and research director at CAMERA, told JNS that Call was only a fellow at the nonprofit watchdog for two months.
“She must not have paid attention to what we teach, just as she apparently didn’t pay attention to her world history classes,” Safian said. “When she says that President Biden is ‘making Jews the face of the American war machine’ one has to wonder why she would serve a country that is apparently a ‘war machine,’ whether with a ‘Jewish face.'”
Safian told JNS that “it’s truly amazing that she told the AP her ancestors were killed by ‘state-sponsored violence.’ How obtuse does a person have to be to miss that the ‘state-sponsored violence’ of the Holocaust was only stopped by the ‘state-sponsored violence’ of American and allied soldiers who liberated the death camps and defeated Nazi Germany?”
“Does she not realize it was only the ‘state-sponsored violence’ of the IDF that finally stopped the Hamas genocide of Oct. 7?” Safian added.
