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.
