A Jew resigns from Biden’s government over Gaza
JVL Introduction
Lily Greenberg Call, ardent campaigner for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in 2019 and a political appointee thereafter at the United States Department of the Interior, has had enough and has resigned.
She is Jewish and, like many Jewish Americans, is descended from people who were fortunate enough to escape in advance of the Holocaust.
She fears rising antisemitism and longs for Jewish safety but is crystal clear that Palestinian and Jewish safety are not in opposition to one another.
“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.”
In an interview with Democracy Now, Call describes her background:
“I went to Jewish day school. I have like 20 years of Jewish education. I did, you know, traditional Jewish text study in high school. And a lot of the values that I learned in that, I internalized some really beautiful values… So, I feel that I am really living in my Jewishness, in the essence of what I was raised with, by standing up for Palestinians and by demanding their freedom.”
RK (h/t MB)
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Tue 28 May 2024. Read the original here.
Biden was my boss. I resigned because as a Jew I cannot endorse the Gaza catastrophe
The president has weaponized the idea of Jewish safety to justify the atrocity in Gaza. I could no longer stand by
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Thank you Lily for your courage in speaking the truth and in resigning your post.
What a moving and compassionate article. Showing compassionate for Palastinians and Jews and the simple truth, nobody is safe until everyone is safe.
Kudos to Lily for her stance BUT it took her a LONG time to say enough.. plus once again oct7th seems to be painted as random violence by Palestine, her speech says in the following months Palestinians endured horrendous acts of violence from Israel, she seems to ignore why Oct7th happened.. it was an act of desperate RETALIATION after years of escalating violence, Pogroms of Palestinian villages & a 16 year blockade of Gaza by Israel which limited all the necessities of life into what is in effect a ghetto or an open air prison which endures bombing & bullets on a DAILY basis..
She does NOT paint October 7th as ‘random violence by Palestine’. She simply says she was shocked and horrified by what happened, which surely we all ought to be. She doesn’t contextualise by talking about the years of occupied repression, but actually does something more profound – referencing back to the Nakba. And she uses her own background of family escape from European antisemitism as the original source of her empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza. I found it to be one of the best Jewish testimonies of support for the Palestinians that I have read.
She is so right in everything she says!