Education department official resigns over Biden’s policies on Israel and Gaza

A top adviser at the Department of Education has resigned over President Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. He is the second official to do so as the government faces divisions over US support for the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

The adviser, Tariq Habash, the only Palestinian-American political appointee for the department, announced Wednesday that he could no longer serve an administration that had “endangered millions of innocent lives.”

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Habash said he came to the decision after feeling “no empathy and no recognition of my own humanity by the president.”

“I think it’s important to help people,” said Mr. Habash, who was born in the United States but is the descendant of Palestinian Christians who were expelled from Jaffa in 1948, when the Israeli state was established. “I thought the president did too.”

In his January 3 letter of resignationAddressed to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Mr. Habash said he could no longer serve a government that had “endangered millions of innocent lives.”

“It should go without saying that all violence against innocent people is horrific. I mourn every loss, Israeli and Palestinian,” Mr. Habash wrote in the letter. “But I cannot represent a government that does not value all human life equally.”

Mr. Habash was a consultant in the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, where he worked on higher education policy issues such as student loans, college access and affordability.

He was the second official to publicly resign over the government’s policies on the war, which began after Hamas led an Oct. 7 raid on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people.

In October, shortly after Israel began its bombing campaign, a top State Department official resigned over the United States’ decision to send arms and ammunition to Israel as it laid siege to Gaza residents, in what he called called ‘blind support on one side’.

Other staff have written anonymous open letters calling on the government to support a ceasefire. And in the weeks after the war began, top administration officials spent weeks meeting with various groups inside and outside the White House as the administration navigated dissent over the war.

When asked about the resignation, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “people have the right to express their opinions” and that the administration understood it was an “emotional time.”

She referred further questions to the Ministry of Education, which said: “We wish him the best in his future endeavours.”

The conflict has caused a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, killing more than 20,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Half of the population of approximately 2.2 million people is at risk of starvation. say the United Nations in a recent report.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly advocated Israel’s right to defend itself, and the United States has shown strong support for Israel by fending off calls for a ceasefire at the United Nations and approving the sale of thousands of tank shells .

But in an unusually blunt assessment last month, as conditions in Gaza deteriorated, the president said Israel was receiving support from Europe and much of the world, as well as the United States, but “they are starting to lose that support because of the arbitrary bombing that is taking place.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll last month found that voters broadly disapproved of Biden’s handling of the war, with younger Americans far more critical than older voters of both Israel’s behavior and the US’s response government on the conflict.