A Quiet Rebellion On Gaza Is Growing Among Civil Servants Across The West

As Israel continues to retaliate for Oct. 7 — while receiving huge support from the U.S. and its allies — government officials have felt compelled to act in ways they never thought they would.

In The Hague, a serious young Dutch bureaucrat works on policies that are supposed to deter violations of human rights, from Myanmar’s crackdown on its ethnic minorities to Russians directing slaughter in Ukraine.

But she’s worried: If those efforts seem hypocritical or selective, they could have little impact. Her government claims it wants to promote international law everywhere. All the while, the Netherlands has continued to back Israel’s offensive in Gaza — a campaign accused of hundreds of breaches of international humanitarian law.

In Berlin, a German official is beginning to question why she wasted time studying law. The country’s leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has said that “Israel is a democracy, and therefore there is no doubt it will not violate international law,” the official told HuffPost, visibly distraught on a rainy June evening. If some players can never be wrong, “what do you need a legal system for?”

And in Washington, a veteran civil servant named Stacy Gilbert quit the State Department in May after spending months trying to pressure Israel to let more aid reach Palestinians. In working on humanitarian crises for 20 years, she said she “cannot think of another situation where things have been allowed to become this bad.”

The U.S., Gilbert told HuffPost, has “turned a blind eye to where we have responsibility. That is, our arms sales [to Israel] have continued, and that makes us complicit.”